Zoria

Zoria (Зоря), formerly Afiny (Афіни), is a village in Donetsk oblast, Ukraine.

Since the October Revolution it has been a Soviet kolkhoz 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 kolkhoz "Afiny" on 15 May 1927 after the name of Athens, Greece (Ukrainian: Афіни, Afiny, Russian: Афи́ны, Afiny, Greek: Αθήνα, Athína) 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 of Kremenivka, Kalchik and Kasianivka. Their ancestors were coming in Donetsk, in 1780, from the Tatar-speaking Greeks and from the villages Balky (131 men & 113 women), Chardakly (75 men & 79 women), and Bai-su (51 men & 56 women). It was renamed Zoria in 1945, but it still keeps the name "Afiny" for the local minority of the Greeks.[1]