Knodara is a Turkish community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 30 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 80 metres, in the Mesaoria region, on the east bank of a stream that comes down from the southern foothills of the Pentadaktylos.¹ In the 1960 census it had 623 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The official gazetteer of Cyprus writes “Knodara”.² In the 15th-century sources the village is written “Chnodara” and “Conodori”, and the British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, notes that the medieval cartographers knew it as “Arodaro”.³ On the village’s land the Gazetteer records, among others, the place-names Vikla, Vryses, Kamara, Kofina and Potima.⁴

Founding and first records

Knodara already existed under Frankish rule. It appears in written sources in the 1460s, in the reign of King James II, and was known to the cartographers of the Venetian period.⁵

Frankish rule

In November 1467 King James II answered a number of requests from Venice concerning Venetian subjects in Cyprus. One of them was that the villages of “Glanga” and “Conodori” be returned to Gadit Gadit, a “white Venetian”, that is, a Cypriot who had been recognised by privilege as a Venetian subject. The king declared that he himself had a clear right to the two villages. The 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, who published the document, identifies “Conodori” with Knodara and “Glanga”, probably, with Aglantzia.⁶

In the same years, according to the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, James II gave Knodara as a fief to Gian Pères Fabrices, together with other villages, among them Karpasia.⁷ Fabrices was a Catalan who had arrived at the salt lakes of Larnaka in a small ship, and the king, judging him capable, persuaded him to stay in Cyprus. To honour him above all the nobles of the kingdom, he created for him a new barony, the county of Karpasia. In his will, in 1473, James named Fabrices, count of Karpasia and captain of the galleys, among the governors of the kingdom.⁸

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Knodara is described as a mixed village of the district of the Mesaoria, with 39 households holding property. Most of the fields were barren; the cultivated ones were mainly cotton fields and a few fodder fields, and there was also a small vineyard. The survey also records threshing floors and 36 olive trees. The animals, about 770 sheep, pairs of oxen, cows, mares and mules, were the largest part of the village’s property.⁹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land produced cereals and fodder crops, and part of the Tennaria forest, north of the village, lay within its boundaries. Stock-raising was highly developed: in 1973, 175 stock-breeders kept 2,061 sheep, 1,313 goats, cows and oxen.¹⁰

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 439 inhabitants in 1881, 487 in 1891, 510 in 1901, 536 in 1911 and 545 in 1921.¹¹ In 1931 Knodara had 519 inhabitants, 14 Christians and 505 Muslims, and in 1946 518, all of them Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 623 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 650 Turks (estimate).