Arsos is a mixed, occupied community of the district of Larnaca. It lies 26 kilometres east of Nicosia, at an elevation of 80 metres, on the southern edge of the Mesaoria plain, between Tremetousia and Lysi.¹ In the 1960 census it had 613 inhabitants, of whom 316 were Greeks and 297 Turks.

Name

The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes the village “Arsos della Messaria”, that is, Arsos of the Mesaoria; the official gazetteer of Cyprus has Arsos.²

Archaeological sites

Outside the village lies an ancient sanctuary, which scholars associate with the worship of Aphrodite. In 1862 a French archaeological mission dug there for three days and found votive offerings in the shape of human limbs, some of them inscribed, which went to the Louvre Museum. A little later the German archaeologist Max Ohnefalsch-Richter investigated the temenos and found fragments of statues, which he identified as Geryon, that is, the three-bodied giant of Greek myth slain by Herakles, and associated with the worship of Apollo. A bronze cult group of a man and a bull of the pre-Greek period, kept in the Louvre, most probably comes from Arsos.³

In 1917 the director of the Cyprus Museum, Menelaos Markides, excavated the sanctuary. He found walls that had already been robbed, fragments of stone statues and a deposit with terracotta votives, beads, scarabs, necklaces, two bronze bowls and a gold one. Markides dated the beginning of worship to the pre-Greek period and its end to the early Greek medieval (“Byzantine”) period. Later scholars date most of the sculptures to the late 7th and early 6th century BC, the time when, according to the American archaeologist Joan Breton Connelly, the cult acquired an organised sanctuary. Ninety-five sculptures from Arsos are in the Cyprus Museum, most of them of the Classical and Ptolemaic Greek periods.⁴

Antiquity

Two Greek dedicatory inscriptions were also found at Arsos, published by the 19th-century Greek scholar Athanasios Sakellarios. They are dedicated to the gods of Egypt, who in the times of the Ptolemies and of Rome were worshipped throughout the Greek world:⁵

Σαράπιδι Εἴσιδι Ἀνούβιδι Λυκίσκος εὐχήν.

“To Sarapis, Isis and Anubis, Lykiskos, in fulfilment of a vow.”

Πασικράτης ἀνέθηκεν Σεράπιδι Ἴσιδι Ἀνούβ[ι]δι.

“Pasikrates dedicated (this) to Serapis, Isis and Anubis.”

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Simos Menardos proposed that “Argos, a city of Cyprus”, where by an ancient tradition Aphrodite found Adonis dead, in the sanctuary of Apollo, should be corrected to “Arsos” and identified with the village, where Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated a temenos of a male god.⁶

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

King James II gave Arsos, together with Vavla, Kornos, Mosfiloti and other villages, to Muzio de Costanzo. According to Bustron, Muzio was a nobleman from Sicily who arrived at Paphos with two galleys; the king kept him in Cyprus, made him admiral, that is, commander of the kingdom’s fleet, and married him to the daughter of Tommaso Verni.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of Arsos is dedicated to the Panagia Eleousa and dates from the 20th century. According to the government publication of 2019 on the displaced municipalities and communities, its feast was on 21 November.⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals and vines. In 1971 the vineyards, mostly of the xynisteri variety, covered about 400 skales, and Arsos was, together with Lysi, among the easternmost villages of Cyprus with sizeable vineyards. Stock-breeding was fairly developed.⁹ The Second Co-operative Credit Society of Arsos was founded in 1959.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Arsos had 185 inhabitants in 1881, 218 in 1891, 249 in 1901, 292 in 1911 and 349 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 it had 449 inhabitants, 153 Christians and 296 Muslims, and in 1946 516, of whom 210 were Orthodox and 306 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 613 inhabitants, 316 Greeks and 297 Turks, and in 1973 306 Greeks and around 400 Turks (estimate). In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 49 pupils and two teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 125 inhabitants of Arsos signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 5 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. According to the biography published by the EOKA Liberation Struggle Foundation, the fighter Toumazos Toumazou of Athienou also organised EOKA groups at Arsos.¹¹

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Arsos was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Three inhabitants of Arsos, all soldiers, were recorded as missing. They disappeared far from the village, in the areas of Lapithos, Klepini and Mia Milia. The remains of one have been located and identified, while two are still missing. On the village lands, between Arsos and Lysi, one person killed in 1974 is recorded, a civilian.

According to the 2019 publication, after the invasion the occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Panagia Eleousa into a military dormitory; later the army abandoned it, and today it is in ruins.¹²