Agios Sergios is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 10 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 10 metres, on the plain of the eastern Mesaoria, near the shores of Ammochostos Bay. On its land lie the ruins of ancient Salamis, the largest ancient city of Cyprus, and the two surviving arches of its aqueduct, which the villagers called the “Kamares”.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,790 inhabitants, of whom 1,789 were Greeks.

Name

The village takes its name from Saint Sergius, to whom its church is dedicated, together with Saint Bacchus. The sixteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes it “San Sergio” and “San Sergi”. The official gazetteer of Cyprus has the form “Agios Sergios”.²

Founding and first records

The philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who travelled in Cyprus in the nineteenth century, noted that the village was built next to Salamis and with its stones. The same can be seen in its church, where many architectural pieces from the ancient city are built into the walls.³

The first written record of the village concerns the year 1310. Bustron writes that the Lady of Tyre, the widow of Amalric, Lord of Tyre, before leaving for exile in Armenia, did not wish to enter Ammochostos but stayed “in the village of San Sergio outside the city, near Constantia”, that is, at the ruins of Salamis. She boarded the ship from the old harbour of Salamis.⁴

Archaeological sites

Ancient Salamis spreads over the land of Agios Sergios, on the shore of Ammochostos Bay, north of the mouth of the Pediaios. A large part of it is covered by sand dunes and by a forest planted in the twentieth century, the state forest of Salamis. From the nineteenth century the ruins were dug by looters and collectors. The first systematic excavation was carried out in 1890 by the British Cyprus Exploration Fund, which sent the finds to the British Museum, among them a marble capital with bulls’ heads and the clay statues of the sanctuary at the site of Toumba.⁵

From 1952 to 1974 the Department of Antiquities excavated the city, led by the Cypriot archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis, and from 1964 a mission of the University of Lyon also worked there. The gymnasium with its baths, the theatre, the agora with the temple of Zeus and the great Christian basilicas of Agios Epifanios and Kampanopetra were uncovered. From 1962 Karageorghis also excavated the cemeteries, west of the city.⁶

In these cemeteries are the so-called Royal Tombs, built tombs of the ancient Greek period, where distinguished dead were buried together with chariots and sacrificed horses. In Tomb 79 thrones and a bed overlaid with ivory, bronze cauldrons and iron spits were found. Near them about a hundred rock-cut family tombs of ordinary citizens were excavated at the site of Kellarka, as well as the great Tumulus 77, where the remains of a large pyre with life-size clay statues of people were found. Karageorghis interpreted it, with reservation, as a cenotaph, that is, a monument without a body, for the last king of Salamis, Nicocreon, and his family. Above many tombs small pyres with offerings were found, wheat, almonds and grapes, which Karageorghis likened to the kollyva still offered to the dead in Cyprus.⁷

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 the excavations stopped, and the archaeologists lost the excavation houses, their records and the finds kept there. From 1998 to 2013 a university in Turkey excavated in the city without the permission of the Republic of Cyprus, and used the houses of the earlier excavations. In 2011 it removed five marble statues from the Roman baths.⁸

A little further south, on the land of neighbouring Egkomi, lie the Bronze Age city that preceded Salamis and the monastery of the Apostle Barnabas.⁹

Antiquity

Salamis was founded in the eleventh century BC, a few kilometres from Egkomi, which it gradually replaced. The rich eleventh-century BC tomb found by the French mission contained vessels with shapes from the Aegean and Crete. Ancient Greek writers said it was founded by Teucer, son of Telamon of Salamis in the Saronic Gulf and brother of Ajax, who after the Trojan War sailed to Cyprus and gave the new city the name of his homeland. The kings of Salamis regarded themselves as his descendants.¹⁰

Salamis was the capital of the largest ancient Greek kingdom of Cyprus, which covered a large part of the Mesaoria and the Karpasia. On an amphora from Tomb 3 of its cemeteries the word “e-la-i-wo”, that is, “of olive oil”, is written in the Cypriot syllabary, a sign that the inhabitants already spoke Greek at that time. Its best-known king, Evagoras I, an ally of Athens in the early fourth century BC, was the first Cypriot king to write the Greek alphabet on his coins beside the syllabary.¹¹

Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period

The kingdom of Salamis ended in 311/310 BC, when Ptolemy I forced Nicocreon to take his own life. The city remained the most important in eastern Cyprus, and its gymnasium took its first form in the time of the Ptolemies. Statue bases with honorary inscriptions were found in it, among them one for the gymnasiarch, and in 1974 a slab dedicated to the “god” King Ptolemy.¹²

Roman period

In Roman times Salamis was the largest city of the island, although the capital was Paphos. It was largely rebuilt after the earthquakes of AD 76/77. The theatre, built in the time of Augustus, held according to Karageorghis about 15,000 spectators. According to the Acts of the Apostles, around AD 45 the apostles Barnabas and Paul landed at Salamis and preached in its synagogues. According to tradition Barnabas came from the city and was buried there.¹³

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

The earthquakes of 332 and 342 destroyed Salamis. It was rebuilt on a smaller scale, with the help of the emperor Constantius II, took the name Constantia and became the metropolis of Cyprus, the seat of the archbishop. Its best-known bishop, Epiphanius, built the basilica that bears his name, the largest Christian church in Cyprus at that time. The city drew water from the spring of Kefalovrysos at Kythrea, through the aqueduct that crossed the village’s land. On one of its arches Sakellarios read an inscription saying that it was repaired in the time of Archbishop Plutarch, and inscriptions from the reign of Heraclius record a rebuilding of it in the seventh century.¹⁴

With the Arab raids of 647/648 and 653/654 Constantia was burnt and gradually abandoned; its inhabitants moved over time to the site where Ammochostos grew up.¹⁵

Frankish and Venetian rule

In the fourteenth century the village had a tower. According to the fifteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas, in the war with the Genoese, who had taken Ammochostos in 1373, the knight Pierre de Cassi blocked the roads to the city with his men and settled in the tower of Agios Sergios, where the main entrance to Ammochostos was. A villager betrayed them, and the Genoese surrounded the tower with fire at night and took them prisoner. Bustron tells the same story.¹⁶

The village lay on the road to Ammochostos and is therefore mentioned in other wars too. In 1425, when the Mamluks landed in Cyprus, the army of the kingdom, searching for the invaders, passed through Agios Sergios. In 1570, at the beginning of the Ottoman attack, the defenders of Ammochostos defeated five hundred Ottoman horsemen at Agios Sergios, as the Cypriot Dominican monk Angelo Calepio, who lived through the siege, writes.¹⁷

Turkish rule

In the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agios Sergios is recorded as a village with a mixed population and 68 households holding property, among the most in the Ammochostos district. Most fields were cotton fields and fields of madder, the plant from which a red dye was made, and there were also wheat fields, melon fields and a garden with a water-wheel. The households had almost 400 sheep, oxen and cows, horses, 43 beehives and a mill, but very few trees. A grocer’s shop and a coffee shop are also recorded in the village.¹⁸

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of the village is dedicated to Saints Sergius and Bacchus, dates from the fourteenth–fifteenth century and is an Ancient Monument. It has two aisles, each ending in an apse, and many ancient pieces from Salamis are built into its walls. Inside the church Sakellarios saw a large ancient Greek krater of red granite, which had been brought from Salamis and was used for the Great Blessing of the Waters. It bore the inscription:¹⁹

… τόνδε κρατῆρα ἀνέθηκα …

that is, “… I dedicated this krater …”. Around the church was the old cemetery, which closed in 1904, when the new one was created south-west of the village.²⁰

In the northern part of the old village stands the sixteenth-century church of Agia Paraskevi. The village also had the eighteenth-century chapel of the Archangel Michael, one kilometre to the south-east, and the chapel of Agios Sozomenos in the cemetery. The chapel of Agia Aikaterini, known as the “Prison of Agia Aikaterini”, in the cemeteries of Salamis, is listed by the 2009 catalogue under Egkomi.

Economy and society

The cotton and madder of the 1832/33 survey long remained the village’s main products: according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Frangoudis, who visited the village in the nineteenth century, wrote in 1885 that Agios Sergios produced cotton and madder of excellent quality. Before 1974 the villagers grew mainly wheat, barley and fodder crops, and on the irrigated fields citrus and vegetables, and they kept many sheep and goats. Quite a few worked in Ammochostos, which was growing fast.²¹ The Agios Sergios Co-operative Credit Society was founded in 1923 and the Agios Sergios Co-operative Grocery in 1947. According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, the village had two flour mills, three cheese dairies and two cinemas.²²

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village’s elementary school was built in 1887 at the expense of the community and the Church.²³ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 275 pupils and 9 teachers.

Population

The population of Agios Sergios grew steadily. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Agios Sergios had 520 inhabitants in 1881, 635 in 1891, 769 in 1901, 856 in 1911 and 1,108 in 1921.²⁴ In 1931 it had 1,247 inhabitants, 1,169 Christians and 78 Muslims, and in 1946 1,663, of whom 1,581 were Orthodox and 82 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,790 inhabitants, 1,789 Greeks and one Turk, and in 1973 2,047 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 894 inhabitants of Agios Sergios signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 6 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle. The EOKA fighter Christos Samaras from Liopetri was active in Agios Sergios, as in other villages of the district.²⁵

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Agios Sergios was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Most of the inhabitants became refugees. According to the Republic of Cyprus, as recorded by the European Commission of Human Rights, the last Greek inhabitants of the village were expelled between 27 and 30 June 1975, together with inhabitants of other villages, mainly of the Karpasia.²⁶ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent their return.

Five inhabitants of Agios Sergios, two civilians and three soldiers, were recorded as missing. One went missing in the village itself and the others in the area of Aspri Moutti–Dikomo, on the Keryneia–Panagra road, at Egkomi and at Voni. The remains of two have been located and identified, while three are still missing. One soldier from the village was killed in the Ammochostos area. In Agios Sergios itself 9 dead are recorded, all of them civilians.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agia Paraskevi into a mosque and removed all its crosses. In the Greek Orthodox cemetery the crosses are scattered, the larger tombs have been damaged and the chapel of Agios Sozomenos is in very poor condition. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus was conserved in 2020 by the bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage.²⁷