Akanthou (locally Akaththou) is a large Greek community of the occupied part of the district of Ammochostos. It lies 33 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an altitude of 200 metres, on the northern slope of the Pentadaktylos, about 4 kilometres from the sea. From 1908 it was a municipality, the only one in the Karpasia, and its administrative area, one of the largest in the district, stretched from the crest of the range to the coast. In the 1960 census it had 1,507 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot linguist Simos Menardos, the name comes from «ακανθών», that is a place with many thorns. Folk tradition explains it otherwise: the nymph Anthousa, pursued by the Saracens, hid in a thorn bush, and from «αγκαθιά» (thorn bush) and «Ανθούσα» came «Ακανθού». The tradition thus remembers the Arab raids that laid the coast waste in the medieval Greek period.

The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas writes the name «Ακάνθου». In the Italian and French documents of the Frankish and Venetian periods it appears as “Acatho”, “Acathou” and “Acatu”, forms that render the local pronunciation «Ακαθθού». The Italian scholar Tommaso Porcacchi in 1576 calls the cape of the area “Aphrodision or, from the village, Acathu”.

The Italian traveller Giovanni Mariti noted in 1760 that the place was formerly called the “Shore of the Argives” (Acte Argivorum). Since Homer calls the Greeks both Argives and Achaeans, the name points to the “Shore of the Achaeans” of the ancient geographers, where, according to the 1st-century BC Greek geographer Strabo, Teucer, the founder of Salamis, landed after the Trojan War. Modern researchers, however, place the Shore of the Achaeans further east, on the north coast of the Karpasia. The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios wondered in 1890 whether Akanthou is the “village of Alkathos” (Ἀλκάθου κώμη) of Cyprus mentioned by the 2nd-century AD Greek lexicographer Julius Pollux; the identification has not been proved.

Founding and first records

Akanthou is considered the continuation of the ancient Greek city that stood on the coast, at the locality Liastrika, and was most probably Aphrodision. The British archaeologist David Hogarth, who visited the area in 1888, wrote that Akanthou stands in the same relation to Aphrodision as Rizokarpaso to ancient Karpasia: it is the inland settlement that succeeded the ancient city. The inhabitants told him that they took stones from the ruins to build the village. When the city was abandoned in the years of the Arab raids, its inhabitants most probably sought safety at the foot of the mountain, where Akanthou grew. The site of the village, however, was inhabited much earlier: tombs of the pre-Greek period have been found near the church and at its northern end.

Around Akanthou there were also smaller medieval Greek settlements, which were deserted. The largest lay at the locality Pergamos, around Panagia Pergamiotissa, where the inhabitants told Hogarth that the church was contemporary with the ruins around it. Ruins of a village also surround Panagia Melissa, to the east, towards Flamoudi, and according to the Municipality of Akanthou its inhabitants moved to Akanthou and Flamoudi, which is why the two villages celebrated the church’s feast together. Hogarth also noted traces of small settlements at Agios Perpyros and between the village and Pergamos. The inhabitants of these settlements most probably gathered gradually at Akanthou.

The first written mention of the village is in the chronicle of Machairas, which records its grant as a fief by King James I (1382–1398); the same grant is mentioned by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron (“casal Acatho”). In 1468 the village appears as a royal estate producing sugar, and at the end of the 15th century as one of the royal villages of the bailiwick of the Karpasia. The village had two quarters, the Upper and the Lower Quarter, and each had its own cemetery, with the chapel of Agia Varvara and of Agia Foteini respectively.

Archaeological sites

The ruins of Aphrodision, at the locality Liastrika, about 2 kilometres north of the village, near the mouth of the stream that crosses Akanthou, cover a headland between two bays and the fields inland. The identification with Aphrodision, proposed by Hogarth, is accepted by modern researchers too. Hogarth describes the horseshoe-shaped bay west of the headland as the best natural harbour of this part of Cyprus. The site has not been excavated.

The ruins of Makaria cover the Moulos headland, west of the village, near Kapsalos, and the necropolis lies further south. Its harbour was most probably the small bay to the east, with its natural rocky breakwaters, while local tradition places the acropolis on the neighbouring hill of Kastros. In the colonial period, in 1959, the British archaeologist Hector Catling collected on the west side of the headland fragments of four large Minoan vessels. In 1961 the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus found there more sherds of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery, among them a handle of a stirrup jar incised with a sign of the Cypro-Minoan script, most probably from a tomb that had been opened by looters.

The ruins of Aphrodision, Makaria and the settlement of Pergamos are declared ancient monuments. In 1954 the Department of Antiquities salvaged tombs with paste beads and pre-Greek pottery in a previously unknown cemetery near the village church, and in 1963 objects brought to light by bulldozer works at the locality Orompos, at the northern end of the village: vessels, copper daggers and a few other small finds.

On the coast, at the site known in the literature as Arkosykos, the British archaeologist Nicholas Stanley Price located in 1972 and 1973 tools of obsidian and flint, fragments of stone vessels and bones. After 1974 the occupation regime carried out at the site, without a permit, a surface survey and excavations, which the Department of Antiquities describes as illegal. According to their publications, the settlement belongs to the beginning of the pre-Greek period, around 8200–7700 BC, and had circular buildings and more than 4,000 pieces of obsidian, which had come from Cappadocia. Since 2018, again without a permit, underwater surveys have been carried out in the bays of Akanthou, where finds of the Roman period were made.

Antiquity

The land of Akanthou was inhabited from very early on. On its coast lies one of the oldest known settlements of Cyprus, from the pre-Greek period, and on the Moulos headland sherds of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery were found, that is vessels from Crete and from the Mycenaean Greek world. The coast therefore already had contacts with the Aegean at the end of the pre-Greek period.

In the classical Greek period the area most probably lay on the boundary between the Greek kingdom of Salamis and the territory of Keryneia. Strabo mentions Aphrodision, the city that took its name from Aphrodite, as the point where the island narrows, for from there to Salamis was only seventy stades. In other words, the shortest route to the capital of the most powerful Greek kingdom of Cyprus passed from the coast of Akanthou.

Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period

In the Ptolemaic Greek period both ancient cities of the coast flourished, Aphrodision and, further west, Makaria. Among the ruins of Aphrodision Hogarth found, half-buried, a stone grave stele of the 3rd century BC with the inscription «Ἀριστόλαος Παυσανίου Θεσσαλός», that is “Aristolaos, son of Pausanias, from Thessaly”: a Greek from Thessaly was buried in the city. An inscription of the 2nd century BC from the same site attests the worship of Hera.

Roman period

In the Roman period the two cities of Akanthou continued to be inhabited. The 2nd-century AD Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy names them and places Makaria between Keryneia and Aphrodision. On the Moulos headland, where Makaria stood, pottery of the period is spread over the whole plateau, among ruined walls and large marble blocks.

Greek medieval period (“Byzantium”)

In the early medieval Greek period Aphrodision and Makaria were still inhabited, and at Pergamos a basilica was built. Both cities were gradually abandoned in the medieval Greek period of the Arab raids, which began in AD 647, and life moved inland. In the middle medieval Greek period the church of Panagia Pergamiotissa was built on the ruins of the basilica, and around it spread the settlement of Pergamos with its necropolis.

Frankish and Venetian rule

King James I granted Akanthou as a fief to Sir Jean Gorab, auditor of the kingdom, as a reward for having taken his side. Gorab held high offices at the Frankish court. According to Machairas, as bailli of the court he took part in the murder of King Peter I in 1369. In the same year he was sent to Cairo to negotiate peace, and in the war with the Genoese (1373–74) he was adviser to the constable James, the later king.

In 1393, according to Sakellarios, a great plague broke out at Larnaka and Akanthou and from there spread across the whole island. Local tradition connects with the plague the chapel of Agios Charalambos, the saint whom Greek Orthodox invoke for protection from epidemics.

Later the village passed to the royal estate. By a decree of 1468 King James II sold the year’s sugar from Akanthou (“cazal de Acathou”) and Kanakaria to the Venetian nobleman Andrea Cornaro, to repay money Cornaro had lent him. Akanthou therefore then had sugar-cane cultivation and sugar production, the most profitable product of medieval Cyprus. When the island passed to Venice, the royal estate became an estate of the Venetian Republic. In a Venetian list of the late 15th century the “Casal Acatu” is one of the 23 royal villages of the bailiwick of the Karpasia.

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property and not all the inhabitants, Akanthou is recorded as a mixed village, with 78 households with property, 1,717 olive trees, seven olive presses and a water mill, as well as vineyards and many mulberry groves, which fed the silkworms for the village’s silk weavings. A few years later, in 1845, the German archaeologist Ludwig Ross describes it as built on a hill beside a stream, with green surroundings, below the high peaks of the Pentadaktylos.

British rule

In the years of British rule Akanthou was one of the most prosperous villages of Cyprus. Hogarth wrote in 1888 that the plain of Akanthou, Flamoudi and Davlos was the richest area of the island in carobs and cereals, and that every villager kept the surplus of his harvest in funnel-shaped pits dug in the ground, the «βούφες» (voufes). With this prosperity the inhabitants began in 1916 to build, with voluntary labour, the large new church of the village. According to the Municipality of Akanthou, in the Second World War many people of Akanthou enlisted as volunteers in the British army.

Churches and monasteries

In the centre of the village rises the church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour (Chrysosotiros), one of the largest in Cyprus. It was built in the 20th century, to designs by the architect Theodoros Fotiadis, mainly with voluntary labour by the inhabitants. For the mortar, powder from broken clay pots, ground in the church’s water mill, was mixed with local lime, while cement was used for the vaults. It was consecrated on 14 September 1941 by Metropolitan Leontios of Pafos, then locum tenens of the archiepiscopal throne. Its feast, on 6 August, lasted three days and brought pilgrims from all over Cyprus. Beside it stood the old church of the Saviour, of the 18th–19th century, which was repaired in 1777 by Archbishop Chrysanthos of Cyprus. Its carved wooden iconostasis, of the 19th century, was the work of craftsmen from Tatavla in Constantinople, the same who made the iconostases of Panagia Chryseleousa at Strovolos and of the Machairas Monastery, and it was later destroyed by fire.

Panagia Pergamiotissa, about 4 kilometres north-east of the village, was a monastery. Its church was built in the 11th–12th century on the ruins of a basilica of the early medieval Greek period; it has a central dome and wall paintings of fine art, which the British architect George Jeffery found in 1918 largely destroyed by a recent repair. Among the graves of the medieval Greek necropolis that surrounds it is a small underground chapel cut into the rock, with a rock-cut iconostasis. The church is an Ancient Monument.

Eight Greek Orthodox country chapels of Akanthou are also Ancient Monuments. Near the coast stands the chapel of Agios Mikallos, the village’s local saint, and beside it the cave with his tomb and his holy spring; the monument also includes Agios Perpyros. The chapel of Agios Charalambos, on the coast north-east of the village, is connected with the plague of 1393. Panagia Melissa was, as mentioned, the church of an abandoned settlement; according to local tradition, the mule carrying the icon of the Chrysosotiros from the harbour to the village broke loose and was found beside it. Also Ancient Monuments are Agia Paraskevi, the Archangelos at Neraides, Agios Ioannis and the two cemetery chapels, Agia Foteini and Agia Varvara.

The countryside of Akanthou had more than twenty Greek Orthodox country chapels, which belonged to the church of the Saviour, and the maps mark unusually many place names dedicated to saints. Other chapels were the new Agia Paraskevi, beside the old one, Agia Eirini, Agia Marina, Agios Georgios ton Teichion, Agios Nikolaos tis Laxias, Agios Savvas, Agios Merkourios, Agios Theodoros, Agios Pavlos, Agioi Pantes, Apostolos Andreas (Agios Trikas), Agios Therapon, Agios Chrysostomos and Panagia ton Trion Teratsion.

Economy and society

The economy of the village rested on olives, carobs, cereals and stock-breeding. The oil and above all the cheese of Akanthou were famous throughout Cyprus; Sakellarios considered the cheese the best on the island and noted that it was exported as far as Egypt and the opposite coasts of Asia Minor. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, consul of the United States in Cyprus in the 19th century, noted the small caves around the village, which the inhabitants used as cheese dairies. The carobs were gathered in large storehouses on the coast, at Lakkos and at Neraides, and from there taken for processing to Bogazi. The church of the Saviour had a large property in olive and carob trees, and with its revenues supported the school, the water supply and other works of the village.

From the beginning of the 20th century the village was in the forefront of the co-operative movement, to free the farmers from the moneylenders. In 1937 the Akanthou Olive Growers’ Co-operative Society was registered, and in 1962 the Co-operative Society for the Marketing of Agricultural Products. In the last years before 1974 the cultivation of early vegetables in greenhouses developed, and these were exported to Lebanon as well, by air or by caique. At Archangelos a fishing shelter operated for the village’s fishermen.

Akanthou was famous for its coloured woodcarving. Its craftsmen made chests, cupboards, chairs and other furniture from the wood of the mountain trees, carved and painted with natural pigments. Examples are now displayed in the Folk Art Museum in Lefkosia. The village’s weavings, mainly silk, were also famous.

The village also kept Greek Orthodox customs of its own. On the night of the Resurrection the inhabitants went with their little lanterns from the church to the two cemeteries, to light the graves of their dead, and on Easter Monday the young men blew up the effigy of Judas in the churchyard. In times of drought the women “girdled” the church with thread, in a special supplication.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a school was already operating at Akanthou from the middle of the 19th century, at the expense of the Greek Orthodox Church. The village became known for the many teachers, doctors and lawyers it produced. According to the Municipality of Akanthou, rooms of the church and the chapel of Agia Varvara were also used at times as a school. In the school year 1957–58, in the years of the liberation struggle, the British closed the school because the Greek flag was flying on its flagpole. Lessons continued inside the church, with retired teachers, university students and gymnasium graduates. In 1963 a new six-grade Greek elementary school was built, which in the school year 1973–74 had 119 pupils and 4 teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 1,162 inhabitants in 1881, 1,178 in 1891, 1,403 in 1901, 1,588 in 1911 and 1,642 in 1921.¹ In the 1931 census Akanthou had 1,744 inhabitants, 1,736 Christians and 8 Muslims. The population reached its peak in 1946, with 1,790 inhabitants, of whom 1,782 were Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). It then declined: in 1960 Akanthou had 1,507 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 1,294. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, many people of Akanthou had settled in Britain, and their remittances supplemented the income of the village.

Municipality

According to the Municipality of Akanthou, Akanthou became a municipality despite its small population, thanks to its large area, its revenues and its distance from the towns. The request was made by the teacher Fotios Savva, later mayor, when he welcomed the English governor to the village in 1908. The decision was taken on 26 June 1908 and published in the Official Gazette on 10 July. In 1933 and in 1941 the colonial government considered abolishing the municipality, but did not proceed; the second time, the enlistment of many people of Akanthou in the British army weighed in its favour. The municipality provided the village’s water supply and electric lighting, asphalted the streets and in 1950 built the town hall, with the municipal market on the ground floor.

National struggles

In 1947 the mayor Kleanthis Kramvis, addressing the English governor, spoke of the longing of the Greeks of Cyprus for union with Greece. The governor left annoyed, and the mayor and the municipal council resigned in protest. In the 1949 elections they were re-elected. In the Ethnarchy’s Enosis plebiscite, in January 1950, 1,096 people of Akanthou signed for union, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants.

The Register of EOKA Fighters records 396 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Akanthou was captured by the Turkish army, which violated the ceasefire and attacked with superior forces. The whole Greek population of Akanthou was subjected to ethnic cleansing, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants’ return.

According to the Municipality, about 125 inhabitants who had remained in the village were taken at the end of August to a concentration camp at Gypsou. Six of them, civilians, died there. Two civilian inhabitants of Akanthou are still missing: one was lost in the village itself and the other at the hospital of Keryneia.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Saviour and the chapel of Agia Marina into mosques. The icon of the Chrysosotiros is now kept, according to the Municipality, in the church of Agios Mamas in occupied Morfou. Panagia Pergamiotissa was restored, but services are not permitted, and the occupation authorities illegally converted it into a museum. Part of its wall paintings had been removed by looters and taken to Germany for sale; two fragments were traced and repatriated. Other chapels were desecrated, looted and used as stables or storerooms, such as Agia Varvara, Agios Savvas and the Archangelos, while in the two cemeteries of the village the graves were opened and robbed.