Ardana is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 27 kilometres north of Ammochostos, 230 metres above sea level, on the southern foothills of the Pentadaktylos. The village’s land reached north as far as the forests of the Pentadaktylos, including part of the Kantara forest, and to the south it included the small forest of Vikla.¹ In the 1960 census it had 433 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes “τα Άρδανα” (plural, “the Ardana”).

Archaeological sites

The land of Ardana was inhabited from antiquity. In 1965 a previously unknown cemetery of the Archaic ancient Greek period was found in the village, and the Department of Antiquities excavated one of its tombs. It contained the skeleton of a child, small bichrome jugs and jugs of plain clay.²

South of the village, on the community’s land, the digital gazetteer of ancient places Pleiades marks an ancient settlement bearing the village’s name, inhabited from the Archaic ancient Greek period, through the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) and Roman periods, to the early medieval Greek (“Byzantine”) period.³

Antiquity

The 1965 tomb and the settlement south of the village show that the area of Ardana was inhabited from the Archaic period and in the centuries that followed. The village lies about 19 kilometres north of Salamis, the capital of the most important ancient Greek kingdom of eastern Cyprus, and most probably belonged to it.

Frankish and Venetian rule

The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron records that in the 1460s King James II gave Giames Saplana as a fief, together with Tochni, Maroni and other villages, a village “Ardana” as well. Saplana had served the Genoese of Ammochostos while James was besieging the town; he was taken prisoner by the bailiff of Karpasia, and the king set him free and won him over to his service.⁴

The French editor of Bustron, René de Mas Latrie, notes that “Ardana” may be the “Casal Ardoma” of a Venetian list of the late 15th century, published by his father, the historian Louis de Mas Latrie. There “Ardoma” is one of the twenty-three royal villages, that is, villages that belonged directly to the state and not to a feudal lord, of the bailiwick of Karpasia, the administrative district to which Ardana belonged, together with neighbouring Trikomo, Agios Andronikos and Galateia.⁵

Turkish rule

In the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Ardana is a Christian village, with 16 property-holding households. Their holdings were cotton fields, unirrigated fields and threshing floors, and they had 257 olive trees and an olive press. They also had 342 sheep, a few oxen and cows, and 25 beehives.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint George and dates from the 19th century. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, describes Ardana as an old village with a new church.⁷

About one and a half kilometres north of the village, on the road to the Pentadaktylos, stands the Greek Orthodox chapel of Agios Dimitrios.⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, olives and carobs, and a large part of their land remained uncultivated, with forest and scrub. Stock-raising had a large place in the life of the village, as already in the 1832/33 survey: in 1973 Ardana had 788 sheep, 1,410 goats and 23 oxen.⁹ The Ardana Co-operative Credit Society was founded in 1929 and the Ardana Olive Growers’ Co-operative Society in 1948.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Ardana had 40 pupils and two teachers.

Population

The population of Ardana grew steadily until the middle of the 20th century. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Ardana had 99 inhabitants in 1881, 202 in 1891, 285 in 1901, 343 in 1911 and 440 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 the village had 493 inhabitants, 490 Christians and three Muslims, and in 1946 561, of whom 559 were Orthodox and two Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 433 inhabitants, all of them Greeks, and in 1973 412 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece, 309 inhabitants signed, in effect all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 131 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Ardana was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

One person killed in 1974, a civilian, is recorded on the land of Ardana. Three more inhabitants of the village, all civilians, are recorded as killed at Gypsou, where in the months after the invasion the Turkish forces held Greek civilians from the villages of the area in confinement.¹¹

According to the record made by Cyprus Religious Heritage in 2022, all the doors, the windows and the bell had been removed from the chapel of Agios Dimitrios, and its interior was empty.¹²