Kampyli is a small Turkish community in the occupied part of the Keryneia district. It lies 20 kilometres west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 250 metres, in the geographical area of Morfou. It was also a Maronite village, and in the 19th century the Maronites still held half of it.¹ In the 1960 census it had 208 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

In the sources of the 15th and 16th centuries the village is written “Gambili” and “Camibili”.² The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) writes “Kampyli”.³

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

In the mid-15th century Kampyli was a fief of the nobleman Galtier de Nores. When James II took the throne from his sister, Queen Charlotte, Galtier was captured and refused to swear fealty to him, because he had sworn to defend Charlotte. For this reason in 1461 the king took his villages from him: Vasileia, Kormakitis, Myrtou, Karpaseia, Kampyli and “Margi”. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, who tells the episode, writes that ever since a proverb about stubborn people remained in Cyprus: “the faith of Ser Galtier”.⁴

Under the Venetians Kampyli was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state. In a Venetian memorandum of the late 15th century, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, “Casal Camibili” is listed among the royal villages of the bailiwick of Lapithos, together with Vasileia, Myrtou, Kormakitis and Karpaseia.⁵

Turkish rule

In 1596 the Italian Jesuit Girolamo Dandini, sent by Pope Clement VIII to the Maronites of Lebanon, passed through Cyprus and recorded the nineteen villages and farms where Maronites then lived; one of them was Kampyli (“Gambili”).⁶

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kampyli is described as a mixed village, with 34 property-holding households. The owners had wheat fields and cotton fields, 388 olive trees, a few mulberry trees, two olive presses, beehives, sheep and goats, and oxen. Among the owners is recorded Christofis, son of a convert to Islam, Ali.⁷ Mas Latrie notes that in his time the Maronites, who had gradually withdrawn from the villages of the mountains of northern Cyprus towards the far end of the area of Lapithos, still held half of the village, while the other half was Turkish.⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, fodder crops, olives and carobs, the olives as already in the survey of 1832/33, and in 1973 they kept 916 sheep.⁹

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 103 inhabitants in 1881, 113 in 1891, 151 in 1901, 155 in 1911 and 154 in 1921.¹⁰ In 1931 Kampyli had 162 inhabitants, 3 Christians and 159 Muslims, and in 1946 226, of whom 222 were Muslims and 4 others (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 208 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 around 350 (estimate).