Petra is a large, mainly Greek community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 13 kilometres south-west of Morfou, at an elevation of 160 metres, in the valley of the Atsas river, north of the copper mines of Skouriotissa. In the 1960 census it had 1,034 inhabitants, of whom 966 were Greeks and 63 Turks.

Name

In the medieval sources the village is written “Petra” and “Pietra”, and in the 15th century also in the plural, “Petres”. From Petra the Petrasitis took its name, as the river of the valley is called in its lower part, towards Pentageia. The village is also called Petra Soleas, because it belonged to the villages of Solea: already the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florios Voustronios mentions it among the villages watered by the river of the Solea valley.¹

Archaeological sites

At the locality Chalandrikas, which the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records on the land of Petra and of Agios Georgios Lefkas, on the boundary with Kalo Chorio, lies a pre-Greek settlement, which the archaeologists named after Kalo Chorio. In 1973 and 1974 it was being excavated by an American expedition of Kent State University, under James R. Carpenter, until the excavation was interrupted in the summer of 1974 because of the Turkish invasion.²

Frankish rule

Petra appears in the sources in the 1370s, as a fief. The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas writes that King Peter II made Thibault Belfarage (Thibat Belfarage), a Cypriot burgess, a knight and turcopolier, that is, commander of the light cavalry, and gave him Trimithia and Petra with their area. It was his reward because, in the war against the Genoese, he had brought soldiers from Venice for the king. Belfarage then also asked for Elia, as a neighbour of Petra, and for the castle of Korykos in Asia Minor; when the king refused him the castle, he killed the priest who had advised the king not to give it to him, and was sentenced to death.³

In the 1460s Voustronios records “Petres” among the fiefs distributed by King James II, given to brother (fra) Gioan Ribera.⁴ In July 1468 the same king, in one of his decrees, calls Petra “our village” and grants to a man in his service, to live in, the manor house of the village with its gardens. The decree, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, entrusted its execution to the bailiff of Morfou, the royal governor of the area.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Petra is a village with a mixed population, with 63 property-holding households. They had mainly wheat fields and a few cotton fields, more than 400 olive trees and 127 mulberry trees, about 730 sheep and goats, three olive presses and a water mill.⁶

The German archaeologist Ludwig Ross, who passed through Petra in 1845, found it “a large village, beautifully situated in a fertile, well-watered basin”. He noted that shortly before, an old rock-cut tomb with small glass vessels had been found in the village, and that the church stood out for its very steep roof, with tiles and slabs. The priest of Petra led him to the ancient galleries of the Skouriotissa mines.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village is dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Saviour (Metamorfosis tou Sotiros), also known as Chrysosotiros. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus at the beginning of the 20th century, wrote in 1918 that until recently there had been a very picturesque old church of the Transfiguration in the village; according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the church was entirely rebuilt in the first decades of the 20th century.⁸

The church of Agios Vasileios, of the 14th century, is an Ancient Monument; before 1974 it was used as a mosque. In the cemetery, east of the village, Leventis built in 1960 the chapel of Saint Anastasios the Persian, a faithful copy of the church of Agios Iakovos at Trikomo.⁹ In the village there were also the churches of Agia Marina, Agios Georgios and Agios Zacharias.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 a large part of the land was irrigated from the two dams of Petra, on the Atsas, south-east of the village. The inhabitants grew pulses and vegetables, citrus, cereals and fruit trees. Many worked in the neighbouring mines of Skouriotissa, Mavrovouni and Apliki, at the installations at Xeros and at the port of Karavostasi, where the ore was loaded; to these the encyclopaedia attributes the great increase in the population at the beginning of the 20th century.¹⁰ In 1937 the New Co-operative Credit Society of Petra was founded and in 1954 the village’s Co-operative Grocery.

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the benefactor Anastasios G. Leventis gave considerable support to education at Petra in the first half of the 20th century and also funded other public-benefit works in the village.¹¹

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the Cypriot scholar Ieronymos Peristianis, before 1875 the priest Kyriakos Efthymiou taught basic reading and writing in the village. In 1875 a monitorial school was founded near the church and the river, with Leonidas Machlouzarides from Kalopanagiotis as teacher, who had studied at the Theological School of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem and continued to teach under British rule as well. The community paid him 30 Turkish pounds a year, and the parents sowed and reaped a piece of land and handed its harvest over to him. The first school was swept away by the river in a flood and was rebuilt elsewhere.¹² In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Petra had 109 pupils and four teachers.

Population

From the 1940s Petra had more than a thousand inhabitants. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 472 inhabitants in 1881, 477 in 1891, 537 in 1901, 574 in 1911 and 739 in 1921.¹³ In 1931 it had 983 inhabitants, 896 Christians and 87 Muslims, and in 1946 1,120, of whom 1,010 were Orthodox, 102 Muslims and 8 others (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,034 inhabitants, 966 Greeks, 63 Turks and 5 Maronites, and in 1973 910 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 572 inhabitants of Petra signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 63 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Petra was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population suffered ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of the inhabitants.

Six inhabitants of Petra, all of them civilians, were recorded as missing. Five were lost in the village itself, and the sixth in the area of Elia. The remains of two of them were located and identified; the other four are still missing. Two soldiers from Petra were killed elsewhere, in the area of Aglantzia and at Mia Milia.

The 2009 list records the church of the Transfiguration and the other churches of the village as lying inside a Turkish military camp. Today the village is in ruins, and part of it, together with the churches and the cemetery, is a prohibited military area.¹⁴