Kiados (locally Tziaos) is a Turkish community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 33 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 90 metres, in the Mesaoria region, where the plain rises towards the southern foothills of the Pentadaktylos.¹ In the 1960 census it had 844 inhabitants, of whom 842 were Turks and 2 Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. The official gazetteer of Cyprus writes “Kiados”, while the villagers called the village Tziaos, and, according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, it was mostly known by that name.² In the survey of Cyprus by the British officer Herbert Kitchener, in the first years of British rule, it is written “Chatos”.³ On the village’s land the Gazetteer records, among others, the place-names Kkiaditika, Toumpa and Charangas, and the Strata tou Agiou Charitou, that is, the road to the neighbouring village of Agios Chariton.⁴

Founding and first records

The village already existed before Turkish rule. The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, notes that on the map of Cyprus of 1573 the village is marked as “Chiadis”.⁵ It does not appear in the fief lists of the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron or in the Venetian memorandum of the royal villages of the late 15th century.

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kiados is a Muslim village of the district of the Mesaoria, with 48 households holding property. Most of their fields were barren; the cultivated ones were mainly cotton fields, with a few fodder fields. The survey also records threshing floors and 74 trees, most of them olives, with a few fig and carob trees. The animals, about 800 sheep, pairs of oxen, cows, horses and mules, made up more than a third of the value of the village’s property.⁶

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land was given almost entirely to cereals, and stock-raising was well developed: in 1973, 183 stock-breeders kept 1,753 sheep, 1,932 goats, oxen, cows and poultry.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 565 inhabitants in 1881, 420 in 1891, 484 in 1901, 524 in 1911 and 543 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 Kiados had 517 inhabitants, 3 Christians and 514 Muslims, and in 1946 721, all of them Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 844 inhabitants, 842 Turks and 2 Greeks, and in 1973 about 900 Turks (estimate).

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Kiados was occupied by the Turkish army. Nine dead of 1974 are recorded on the village’s land, all of them soldiers, killed or fatally wounded in the fighting in the area of the village.