East of the Vasiliko confluent, at “argaki tis Rigenas”, at a distance of 4 kilometres from the big village of Eptagonia, you will find Akapnou. It is a village in which there are only 20 settlers.
It is built on the slopes of a hill dominating over the big field that extends until Eptagonia. On the peak of the hill, in the centre of the village, in a small paved square is where you will find the Holy Church of Agios Georgios.
Upon walking along the narrow, paved streets of the village, the first thing you will notice, is abandonment and depopulation. The big amount of faucets that are found in all neighbourhoods, bear witness of the prosperity and the number of the residents it had until the very recent years.
The paved streets take you through picturesque neighbourhoods, where you can admire the architecture of the houses with the high walls and wooden balconies. The doors are impressive, since all of them, or almost all of them are dated in the past century and all have the same carved motive, something we did not notice in other villages in Cyprus.
In addition, the Holy Church of Agios Georgios deserves to be observed and studied. It is an old construction in the shape of a Basilica and has a gabled, wooden roof. The tiles that are found on the roof have been constructed in the same area.
Northwest, at a small distance that does not exceed 250 metres from the village, there is a Venetian bridge that connects the shores of the river. It is a very interesting bridge since it remained intact from time, but there are foundations of the narrow street that extended east and west of the bridge.
On the right hand side of the road that takes you to Eptagonia, at a distance of a kilometre from Akapnou, there is a byzantine chapel, “Panagia tou Kampou”.
The one who will decide to visit Akapnou, has a lot to see and a lot to learn about the way the villages of Cyprus are abandoned. When a village that has great irrigative areas of land, when it has a great number of water sources apart from the two confluents of Vasiliko that pass west and south from it, when this village is depopulated, then someone should search to find “why”. What is missing from Akapnou is Xenios Dias. Maybe the friendly God forgot to visit the village when it was prospering.
