Trachoni, also known as Trachoni Kythreas, is a Greek community of the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 12 kilometres north-east of Lefkosia, at an altitude of 110 metres, in the plain of the Mesaoria, a little south of Kythrea and north of the Lefkosia–Ammochostos road.¹ Its fields had long been watered by the Kefalovrysos spring of Kythrea. In the 1960 census it had 578 inhabitants, all of them Greeks.

Name

The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes the name “Trachoni”. On old maps the village is marked “Tracani”, as the British architect of the early 20th century George Jeffery observes,² and on Kitchener’s British map, in the first years of British rule, “Trakhoni”.³ The qualifier “Kythreas” distinguishes it from the village of the same name in the district of Lemesos.

Founding and first records

The first known written mention of Trachoni is connected with its water. Bustron describes the two springs of the Kefalovrysos of Kythrea, which together watered twelve villages winter and summer and turned more than fifty mills. The water, he writes, came down from Kythrea and Chrysida to Trachoni, and from there to Neo Chorio, Voni, Palaikythro, Exo Metochi and the other villages of the Mesaoria.⁴

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Trachoni is recorded as a mixed village, of Christians and Muslims, with 25 households with property. Their holdings were mainly fields, a few orchards and threshing floors, and they had 157 olive trees. Six entries concern shares in the running water, which, together with a fountain, were valued at about one third of the value of all the property of the village. They also had some 100 sheep and goats, three pairs of oxen and five camels.⁵

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village is dedicated to the Panagia Theotokos and dates from the late 16th century. It stands in the southern part of the old settlement, and the cemetery spread around it. Jeffery describes it as a small cross-shaped church with a dome, and notes that the icon of the Panagia bore the date 1680. It is an Ancient Monument.⁶

The chapel of Agios Nikolaos, of the 16th century, survives in ruins. According to Jeffery it was a small single-aisled Latin church with a semicircular apse, of the kind built on the estates of the feudal lords for the Latin servants and their overseer; at one time it had been used as a mosque, and in his day it was abandoned and served as a stable. Besides the Panagia, a mosque of the village is also entered in the List of Ancient Monuments.⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, fodder crops, olives and a few citrus, and in 1973 the village had some 200 sheep, 165 goats, 78 cows and almost 2,000 poultry. The village lay beside the new Lefkosia–Ammochostos road, which connected it with the two towns.⁸ In 1959 the Trachoni Co-operative Credit Society and the Trachoni Co-operative Grocery were founded.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Trachoni had 88 pupils and three teachers. From 1969 the children of the village went on to the new Kythrea Gymnasium, together with children from Voni, Neo Chorio, Palaikythro and Exo Metochi.⁹

Population

In the years of Turkish rule and at the beginning of British rule Muslims also lived at Trachoni; from the 1920s only Christians were recorded.¹⁰ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 199 inhabitants in 1881, 204 in 1891, 172 in 1901, 220 in 1911 and 263 in 1921.¹¹ In 1931 the village had 296 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 429, all Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 578 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 654 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 258 inhabitants of Trachoni signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 13 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Trachoni was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. In the 1976 Report of the European Commission of Human Rights a woman from the village testified that her family and other inhabitants left before the Turkish troops arrived, and that her father was held in confinement at Voni, guarded by Turkish soldiers. According to the Red Cross information recorded in the same report, between 17 and 24 August 1974 inhabitants of Trachoni were expelled and taken in vehicles to the ceasefire line.¹² Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants’ return.

Twenty-two inhabitants of Trachoni, 18 civilians and 4 soldiers, were recorded as missing; 13 were lost in the village and on its land and 9 elsewhere (Agkastina, Voni, Kornokipos, Pachyammos, Mia Milia, Tziaos, Mora). The remains of 16 have been located and identified; the other 6 are still missing. One civilian inhabitant was killed in Lefkosia. On the village’s land 10 people were killed, 9 civilians and one soldier.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Panagia into a mosque, which operated for years; the 2009 list records it as looted and desecrated. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the church was repaired in 2013. Of the cemetery around it only a few large tombs or their bases remain.¹³