Kornokipos is a Turkish community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 38 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 260 metres, on the southern side of the Pentadaktylos; its land stretched north as far as the ridge.¹ In the 1960 census it had 292 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The official gazetteer of Cyprus writes “Kornokipos”; in the 15th-century sources the village is written “Cornochipo”.² On the village’s land the Gazetteer records, among others, the place-names Kivkikki, Triminthies and Farfaris.³

Founding and first records

Kornokipos already existed under Frankish rule: its first known written record dates from the 1460s. The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, describes it as an old village that is not marked on the old map of Cyprus.⁴

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

In the lists of the fiefs that King James II distributed in the years 1464–1468, the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron records that “the abbey of Cornochipo” was given to Merbeo Caramadin. Which monastery this was is not specified.⁵

In the 16th century, according to Jeffery, the Cypriot historian Estienne de Lusignan mentions Kornokipos as an Armenian village of his time.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kornokipos is a Muslim village of the district of the Mesaoria, with 22 households holding property. They had small fruit and vegetable gardens, running water, threshing floors and barren fields. The survey records 143 olive trees, most of them mountain olives, about 215 sheep and goats, pairs of oxen and beehives.⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land produced cereals and fodder crops, but a large part of it, north of the settlement, was state forest, with pines, cypresses, mastic trees, strawberry trees and wild olives. Stock-raising was well developed: in 1973, 87 stock-breeders kept 3,002 goats, 820 sheep, oxen, cows and poultry.⁸

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 169 inhabitants in 1891, 207 in 1901, 194 in 1911 and 202 in 1921.⁹ In 1931 Kornokipos had 185 inhabitants, all of them Muslims, and in 1946 280, of whom one was Orthodox and 279 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 292 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 300 Turks (estimate).