Agios Efstathios is a small Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 31 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 50 metres, in the southern part of the asymmetric fold of the Karpasia, three kilometres from Komi.¹ In the 1960 census it had 90 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The village bears the name of Saint Eustathios. The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes it “Άγιος Ευστάθιος, ο”,² the British Kitchener map of 1885 “Ayios Evstathios”³ and the 1931 census “Ayios Evstathios”.

Turkish rule

The village is recorded in the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, as Muslim, with 8 property-holding households. Almost all their land was uncultivated or fallow; they had threshing floors, 6 olive trees, 65 sheep and goats, a few oxen, cows and mules, and two mills turned by horses.⁴

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village land, with little rain, was sown mainly with cereals, with scattered olive and carob trees, and stock-raising was small and kept at household level: in 1973, 13 stock-keepers had 345 sheep, 60 goats and 10 cows.⁵

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 78 inhabitants in 1881, 88 in 1891, 72 in 1901, 77 in 1911 and 64 in 1921.⁶ In 1931 Agios Efstathios had 46 inhabitants, all Muslims, and in 1946 84, again all Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 90 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 around 90 Turkish inhabitants (estimate).