Zorja

Afini (Афины), now Zorja (Зоря), is a location in Donetsk, Ukraine. Since the Soviet revolution it has been a Soviet kolhoz with few inhabitants in the area of Mariupol amongst the villages of the native minority of the Greeks of Mariupol, which was very large amongst the Greeks in Russia and the Soviet Union. The leading communists of the Greek minority named the kolhoz "Afini" in 1927 (15 May) after the name of Αθήνα (Athens), Greece and twenty buildings were constructed in the center of the tiny village. The inhabitants were almost all from the local tatar-speaking Greek minority. They all came from the villages New Cherdakli, Kal'chyk and Kasyanovka. Their ancestors were coming in Donetsk, in 1780, from the Crimean Tatar-speaking Greeks and from the villages Karakuba (131 men και 113 women), Cherdakli (75 men και 79 women), and Bai-su (51 men και 56 women). It has been renamed as Zorja, but it still keeps the name "Afini" for the local minority of the Greeks.^[1]

References