Kiomourtzou is a small Turkish community in the occupied part of the Keryneia district. It lies 8 kilometres south-west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 370 metres, about one and a half kilometres south-west of Agirda.¹ In the 1960 census it had 64 inhabitants, 63 Turks and one Armenian.

Name

The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) writes the name “Kiomourtzou”.² In the 1931 census the village is recorded as “Keumurju”.

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kiomourtzou is recorded as a Muslim village, with 10 property-holding households. The owners had wheat fields and threshing floors, 102 trees, mostly mountain olives and carobs, an olive press and beehives, and about 250 sheep and 235 goats.³

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the main products of the village were olives and cereals, as already in the survey of 1832/33.⁴

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 44 inhabitants in 1881, all of them Muslims, 44 in 1891 and in 1901, 46 in 1911 and 39 in 1921. According to the same encyclopaedia, in 1880 the inhabitants suffered from an epidemic of plague, as reported by the British commissioner of Keryneia.⁵ In 1931 Kiomourtzou had 39 inhabitants, all of them Muslims, and in 1946 44, also all Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 64 inhabitants, 63 Turks and one Armenian, and in 1973 around 100 Turkish inhabitants (estimate).