Kioneli is a large Turkish community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 7 kilometres north-west of Lefkosia, at an elevation of 150 metres, in the Mesaoria region, and its northern boundary reaches the border of the Keryneia district. In the 1960 census it had 1,377 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Founding and first records

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the settlement of Ara, which Ortelius’s map of 1573 marks north-west of Lefkosia, stood on the site of the present village or very close to it in the years of Frankish rule, and Kioneli was founded later in the same area.¹ Ara is mentioned by the fifteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas at the time of the Genoese invasion of 1373–74: Dimitrios Daniel, who was secretly carrying letters of Queen Eleanor from Keryneia, stopped at Ara with one of his godparents, took the clothes and the milk pail of his young shepherd and in this way entered Lefkosia.² The sixteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron records that in the 1380s King James I gave the village of Ara to Jean de Neville, lord of Caesarea, and that in the 1460s James II gave it to Mutio de Costanzo.³

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Kioneli is described as a mixed village, that is, with Christian and Muslim owners, with 25 property-owning households. Its land was mainly fields, with a few vineyards and threshing floors, and 135 olive trees are recorded. The owners had more than 1,100 sheep and goats and 16 oxen.⁴

British rule

On 12 June 1958 eight Greeks were killed by a Turkish mob near Kioneli. They had been arrested by British security forces and then released far from their village, which according to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia was Kontemenos. The British governor appointed a commission of inquiry into the event, headed by the Chief Justice of Cyprus.⁵

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants lived from farming and stock-breeding: they grew mainly cereals, fodder crops, vegetables and pulses, and in 1973 they kept 1,214 sheep and 2,354 goats, just as livestock had already been the largest part of the village’s property in the survey of 1832/33.⁶

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 307 inhabitants in 1881, 269 in 1891, 302 in 1901, 452 in 1911 and 537 in 1921.⁷ In 1931 Kioneli had 632 inhabitants, 31 Christians and 601 Muslims, and in 1946 814, all of them Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 1,377 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 around 1,700 (estimate).

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 five soldiers were killed on the land of Kioneli, four of them of ELDYK. A UN report of 5 August 1974, cited by the European Commission of Human Rights, states that most of the men of the Greek villages in the areas then controlled by the Turkish forces were taken prisoner and escorted by Turkish troops into the area of Kioneli and Ortakioi.⁸