Andreas Patsalidis

Born in the village of Kannavia¹, Nicosia district, on August 14, 1930.

Killed on June 20, 1958 in the village of Kourdali², by a bomb explosion.

Andreas Patsalidis finished the primary school of Kannavia and initially worked in Amiantos, where he acted as one of the founding members of the local New Syntechnia, and later at the Platanias forestry station.

He was one of the first fighters of EOKA and took part in the operation “Towards Victory” on November 23, 1955 with the group of the hero Christos Tsiartas, in the ambush on the Kakopetria-Spilia road. He collaborated with the local leaders of the Organization of the surrounding villages and with the guerrilla groups of his area. He took part, together with the hero Costas Anaxagorou and other comrades, in the removal of radios from the Platania forest station³ and in the attack against this station.

Together with his wife, he hid weapons and ammunition and hosted guerrillas. His house was used as a distribution center for ammunition, which he channeled to the Pitsilia, Troodos and Marathasa sectors. For the greater safety of the rebels he was hosting, he tried to dig a hideout in his house, but he could not, because the ground was too hard. The group of rebels that went there, on June 20, had as one of its missions the investigation of a way to build a hideout. Another mission was to blow up a bridge with a mine.

While they were preparing for this mission, the mine exploded in their hands while they were trying to learn how to use it in the house of Andreas Patsalidis in Kourdali and killed them all, destroying the house as well. Miraculously, Andreas Patsalidis' wife, Irini, who was in her fourth month of pregnancy, and their daughter Maria, who was only sixteen months old, escaped.

“I was holding the child in my arms,” she recounts, “and I waited for the tiles to stop falling in front of me, so I could move away. First, before the English army, my brother Kyriakos arrived and later Sergeant Amiantos Dimos Voskaridis, my husband’s collaborator, who collected and destroyed their weapons with the help of my sister Marikou, and thus we at least saved the weapons.”