Limnia is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the Famagusta (Ammochostos) district. It lies 12 kilometres north-west of Famagusta, at an altitude of 20 metres, in the Mesaoria plain. At the 1960 census it had 1,201 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

The name of the village is a neuter plural in Greek, “ta Limnia”, as the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes it.¹ The 19th-century Greek historian Athanasios Sakellarios, who described the village in 1890, writes it “Limnia”.²

Founding and first records

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Limnia is not mentioned by the medieval chroniclers and is not marked on the old maps, which show the neighbouring Agios Sergios.³ It is recorded in the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33 (see Turkish rule).

Archaeological sites

The Register of Ancient Monuments of the Department of Antiquities includes the site with the remains of the Late Bronze Age on the land of the village. In 1965 a tomb of the Roman period, already looted, was found in the village. The Department of Antiquities recorded many lamps, decorated with a bird, with shells and with a gladiator charging a gazelle, and a hollow clay dog. The finds were kept in the Famagusta Museum.⁴

Roman period

The land of Limnia belonged to the hinterland of Salamis. In the 19th century there were ancient inscriptions in the village that had been brought from the ancient city, and architectural pieces from it are built into buildings of the village, among them the church of Agios Georgios.⁵ Sakellarios records two of these inscriptions, both in Greek. One honours a Roman citizen, Servius Sulpicius Pancles Veranianus. The other names the officials of the chreophylakion of Salamis, the archive where the lists of the public debtors were kept:⁶

Χρεοφύλαξι(ν) Φίλτων ὁ πρὸς τῇ δι[α]λογῇ τῶν ἐν τῷ χρε[ο]φυλακί[ῳ] βιβλίω[ν] καὶ Κί[νν]ας Ἀρέστου γραμματεύων.

“To the keepers of the debt records: Philton, who was in charge of sorting the books in the record office, and Kinnas son of Arestes, who served as secretary.”

The language of the city and of its public records was Greek, as in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean in the Roman centuries.

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Limnia belonged to the district of Famagusta and is recorded as a mixed village, with Christian and Muslim owners. It had 66 households with property. The villagers grew cotton, wheat and madder, a plant from which a red dye was made, and had a few vineyards and gardens and 34 olive trees. The animals were almost 1,300 sheep and more than a hundred cows and oxen, and the village had a watermill and a mill turned by horses.⁷ Sakellarios describes it in 1890 as “a small village”.⁸

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint Nicholas and was built in 1895, on the eastern edge of the old village. On the western edge stands the church of Agios Georgios, built in 1863, which is an Ancient Monument.⁹

East of the village, near the Ampelia forest, stands the chapel of Panagia Paradisiotissa, of the 16th century.¹⁰

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the villagers grew mainly cereals, fodder crops and citrus fruit, and stock-breeding was fairly well developed. Because the village was close to Famagusta, many inhabitants worked in the town, and within a century the population almost trebled. The poet Pantelis Michanikos came from Limnia.¹¹ The Limnia Cooperative Credit Society was founded in 1946 and the Cooperative Grocery in 1953. A house of the village in the traditional style, known as the house of Dimitris Panteli Hadjiloukas, is also an Ancient Monument.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, a school was already operating at Limnia in 1835. The first teachers, a well-off villager and then the hieromonk of the village, taught without pay; those who followed were paid by the parents, with a few piastres a month and a loaf of bread every Saturday from each pupil. Before British rule a villager who had graduated from the Scholarcheion of Nicosia introduced the monitorial (mutual teaching) method.¹² In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 189 pupils and six teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Limnia had 498 inhabitants in 1881, 580 in 1891, 668 in 1901, 802 in 1911 and 916 in 1921.¹³ In 1931 it had 993 inhabitants, 991 Christians and two Muslims, and in 1946 1,210, of whom 1,208 were Orthodox and two Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,201 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 1,330.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for union with Greece (Enosis), 695 inhabitants of Limnia signed, essentially all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 15 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. The EOKA fighter Christos Samaras of Liopetri was active in Limnia, as in other villages of the district.¹⁴

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Limnia was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. The inhabitants fled before the advancing army.¹⁵ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent them from returning.

One inhabitant of Limnia, a civilian, went missing in the village itself and is still missing. Five more inhabitants, three civilians and two soldiers, were killed elsewhere: in the Agios Memnon area of Famagusta, at Deryneia, in the area of Kontemenos and in the area of Lapithos.

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the church of Agios Georgios was looted and badly damaged.¹⁶ The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Nikolaos into an events hall and the church of Agios Georgios into the workshop of a women’s association; all the crosses have been removed from both. In the cemetery the grave crosses lie scattered and the larger monuments are damaged.¹⁷