Avlona is a Greek community in the occupied part of the Lefkosia district. It lies 11 kilometres east of Morfou, at an elevation of 160 metres, in the Morfou plain. It is built on the east bank of the Akaki river, close to the point where the Merikas, the Akaki river and the Peristerona river join to form the Serrachis, the great river of the plain.¹ In the 1960 census it had 524 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

In the Frankish sources the village is written “Avelone” and, in a royal document of 1468, “Avlones”.² The villagers also had their own tradition about the name: they said that Avlona had been the great courtyard (avli) of a royal couple who once lived nearby.³

Founding and first records

The life of Saint Artemon, preserved in a manuscript written in Cyprus in 1089/90, tells that the saint came to the island from Asia Minor, landed at Kormakitis and went to a place called Avlon, where, according to the story, he made a spring of holy water flow. There he died and was buried, and a basilica was built in his honour. In the buffer zone, north-east of Avlona and north of Akaki, the ruins of a basilica with a mosaic floor and a small baptistery, of the late 4th or early 5th century, have been located; the Cypriot archaeologist Christodoulos Hadjichristodoulou connects them with the Avlon of the saint’s life.⁴

The first certain written record of the village is in the genealogies of the Frankish families of the East, written in the 13th century. There Avlona, “Avelone”, appears as the fief of a Frankish noble. The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in 1918, notes this medieval form of the name.⁵

Frankish rule

Under Frankish rule Avlona was a fief. According to the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, one of the first lords of Avlona was Hélie du Rouvre. His daughter Isabelle married Laurent du Plessis, lord of Marathasa, who was also called Laurent de Morpho.⁶

In 1468 Avlona was the fief of Piere Enpolo. In September of that year King James II gave him leave to free a serf of his fief, “of the village of Avlona” (cazal d’Avlones), “Philippe Yani tou Blondia”, that is, Philippos son of Giannis tou Blondia. The document survives in the books of the royal secretariat published by Mas Latrie, and shows how a Greek villager could be released from serfdom only with the king’s leave.⁷

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Avlona is listed as a village of mixed population with 20 households holding property. Among the owners was also a priest. The holdings were mainly fields of grain and cotton and gardens, with threshing floors and running water, and 82 trees, mostly olives and mulberries. The villagers had about 170 sheep and goats and a few oxen.⁸

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, in its centre, is dedicated to Saint Marina, the patron saint of Avlona. It dates from the 16th century and was renovated in the 18th. It is a single-aisled barrel-vaulted church with wall paintings. Beside it, to the north-east, lies the village cemetery.⁹

The chapel of Agios Georgios, in the garden of the primary school at the exit of the village towards Filia, dates from the 15th century and is an Ancient Monument. According to the Community of Avlona, it is a small single-room church with a dome and keeps wall paintings, among them the Raising of Lazarus and the Virgin with angels in the apse. In 2021 conservation works on it were completed by the bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, funded by the European Union.¹⁰

Outside the village there were also the small church of Agios Romanos, which the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) calls Agios Romanos tis Kafkallas, and the ruins of Agios Efthymios. According to the Community of Avlona, mothers went to the ruined church of Agios Efthymios when their babies had a fever, lit candles on the stones and walked three times round it, so that the children would be healed.¹¹

Economy and society

The land of Avlona was fertile and irrigated. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the villagers grew mainly citrus fruit, vegetables, fruit trees, cereals and fodder crops, and kept almost a thousand sheep and about three hundred goats.¹² According to the Community of Avlona, much of the land and water belonged to the Monastery of Kykkos, which had a metochi (estate) in the village and a watermill, where the surrounding villages also came to grind their grain. Later the Monastery rented its fields to the villagers, and finally sold them to them. To water their fields, the villagers also dug their own underground water channels, the lagoumia.¹³

In 1940 the Avlona Co-operative Credit Society was founded, and in 1959 the Avlona Co-operative Grocery. According to the Community of Avlona, from 1931 a local union of the Pan-Agrarian Union of Cyprus was active in the village, with its own football team.¹⁴

Education

According to the Community of Avlona, the first school of the village opened in 1912, with 35 pupils. Until then the children went to the school of neighbouring Akaki, while under Turkish rule some learned to read from the village priest, with the Oktoechos and the Psalter.¹⁵ In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of Avlona had 85 pupils and 3 teachers.

Population

The population of Avlona almost tripled in 42 years. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 160 inhabitants in 1881, 174 in 1891, 182 in 1901, 220 in 1911 and 219 in 1921.¹⁶ In 1931 the village had 249 inhabitants, 230 Christians and 19 Muslims, and in 1946 406, of whom 401 were Orthodox, 4 Muslims and one of another religion (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 524 inhabitants, all of them Greeks, and in 1973 684 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 201 inhabitants of Avlona signed. The EOKA Fighters’ Register lists 3 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle. The EOKA hero Michalakis Savva, from neighbouring Akaki, who was killed by the British in 1957, had in Avlona one of the two workshops where he made bombs and hand grenades for the Organisation.¹⁷

The Turkish invasion of 1974

According to the Community of Avlona, on 14 August 1974 the village was bombed, and since then its inhabitants have been refugees. A few villagers entered the church after the bombing and saved the icons of Saint Marina, Saint John the Theologian and Saint Symeon the Stylite.¹⁸ Avlona was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. The village lies on the ceasefire line, and much of its land is inside the buffer zone. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants, many of whom live in neighbouring Akaki.¹⁹ One soldier from Avlona was killed in 1974 in the area of Nicosia airport.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Saint Marina into a mosque.²⁰ The chapel of Agios Georgios was desecrated and left empty, and Agios Efthymios and Agios Romanos lie inside a Turkish military camp.