AVDIMOU

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Avdimou is a village situated in the Limassol district, sixteen miles west of Limassol and three miles south of Prastio. Goodwin suggests that Avdimou may mean “place of good production.” The current municipality website offers two interpretations regarding the village's name. The first claims that the Phoenician prince Abdemon took refuge there after his expulsion by Evagoras I in 411 BC, giving his name to the settlement. The second claims that Avdimou derives from the name of the village’s first settler, Evdemos (www.avdimou.org.cy). Evdim was the Turkish name of the village until 1958, when Turkish Cypriots adopted the new name Düzkaya, meaning “flat rock.”

 
Historical Population

As can be seen in the above chart, Avdimou/Düzkaya was a Turkish Cypriot village from the Ottoman period. Although some Greek Cypriot families lived there until 1931, they all left the village in the 1940s. The population of the village more than doubled during the British period, rising from 398 persons in 1891 to 911 in 1960.

Displacement:

No one was displaced from this village during the 1950s emergency years, nor during the inter-communal fighting of 1963-64. However, the village served as a reception center for displaced Turkish Cypriots who fled the nearby villages of Kilani(266), Anogyra/Taşlıca(257), Prastio/Çeliktaş(279), and Malia/Bağlarbaşı(270). Richard Patrick recorded 191 displaced Turkish Cypriots still living in the village in 1971. The first conflict-related displacement from Avdimou/Düzkaya took place in July 1974, when the village’s Turkish Cypriot population fled to the Akrotiri British Base Area. Although some fled clandestinely to the north, most remained in the base area until January 1975, when they requested to be transferred via Turkey to the northern part of the island. They were subsequently resettled in Agios Epiktitos/Çatalköy(208) village in Kyrenia district. The total number of displaced Turkish Cypriots from Avdimou/Düzkaya can be estimated to be 1,000 (911 in the 1960 census).

Current Inhabitants:

Currently the village is mainly inhabited by displaced Greek Cypriots from the north, coming from 42 different villages. Also, much land in the area was given by the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) to displaced families as part of the RoC self-housing scheme. The last Cypriot census of 2001 put the total population at 614.  


 
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