Galateia is a large Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, in the Karpasia. It lies 36 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 90 metres. To the west of the village spreads a marsh that becomes a lake in very wet months.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,270 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The official gazetteer of Cyprus (Gazetteer) writes the name “Γαλάτεια, η” (Galateia).² At the end of the 15th century the village is written “Galatia” in a Venetian list of the royal villages published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie,³ and in the same form on Kitchener’s British map of 1885 and in the 1931 census.⁴ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites Simos Menardos and N. Kliridis, the people of the area called the village Galadkia, and the name probably comes from Galatia in Asia Minor, where its first inhabitants would have come from.⁵

Venetian rule

In the same Venetian list Galateia belonged to the royal domain and was one of the 23 villages of the bailiwick of Karpasia, that is, the administrative district of the royal villages of the peninsula, together with Eptakomi, Galinoporni and Koroveia.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Galateia is recorded as a Muslim village, with 41 property-owning households. The owners had mainly cotton fields and a few grain fields, while much of their land lay fallow. They had only five olive trees, almost 500 sheep and goats, cows, oxen, horses and mares, and six mills turned by horses.⁷

Churches and monasteries

West of the settlement, within the village lands, stand the ruins of the church of Agia Marina, which the Register of Ancient Monuments of the Department of Antiquities lists as an Ancient Monument.⁸ North of the village the Gazetteer marks the locality “Christianikon Koimitirion” (Christian Cemetery).⁹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the main products of the village were tobacco, cereals and carobs, and before 1974 the inhabitants kept 3,095 sheep, 682 goats, 127 oxen and 27 cows.¹⁰

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Galateia had 596 inhabitants in 1881, 577 in 1891, 707 in 1901, 814 in 1911 and 882 in 1921.¹¹ In 1931 it had 944 inhabitants, 938 Muslims and 6 Christians, and in 1946 1,191, of whom 1,190 were Muslims and one Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,270 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 around 1,200 Turkish inhabitants (estimate).