Kouklia is a small Turkish community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 17 kilometres west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 30 metres, in the Kokkinochoria region, beside the old Lefkosia–Ammochostos road. North of the village lies the large Kouklia reservoir.¹ In the 1960 census it had 229 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, notes that on the old maps the village is written “Covocha”.² According to Jeffery, the Cypriot scholar Simos Menardos derived the name Kouklia, which occurs in two or three places in Cyprus, from a Greek word for summer palaces.³

On the village’s land the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records, among others, the quarter of Agios Theodoros and the place-names Agia Thekli, Vasiliki, Lapithia, Foiniki and Toumpa ton Kouklion.⁴

Founding and first records

Kouklia already existed in the Middle Ages. According to Jeffery, it had formerly been a place of some importance, and by his time only a few traces of the medieval settlement remained.⁵

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

Among the traces of the medieval village Jeffery recorded a roughly built stone channel near the high road and a small bridge over it, paved with incised tomb slabs from some medieval church; on one of them the figures of a man and his wife could still be made out, almost worn away by the hoofs of the animals.⁶

Near Kouklia, on the land of the neighbouring village of Kontea, stood the castle of Sigouri, which, according to the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, was built by King James I.⁷

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Kouklia is a Muslim village of the district of the Mesaoria, with 28 households holding property. They had cotton and wheat fields, gardens and an orchard, threshing floors, a water wheel with running water, that is, a wheel for irrigation, and many barren fields. The survey records 13 olive trees, more than 1,000 sheep, pairs of oxen, cows, horses and 91 beehives.⁸

British rule

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in 1898–99 some of the 1,125 Russians who had been deported by Tsarist Russia, and whom the British later moved to other colonies and to Canada, stayed at Kouklia. In 1905 a police station was established in the village.⁹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Kouklia lies above the great underground aquifer of the Kokkinochoria, and boreholes and the dam north of the village made it possible to irrigate a good deal of land. Before 1974 the village’s land produced citrus fruit, vegetables, cereals and fodder crops, and in 1973, 35 stock-breeders kept 911 sheep and 255 goats.¹⁰

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 135 inhabitants in 1881, 208 in 1891, 165 in 1901, 153 in 1911 and 172 in 1921.¹¹ In 1931 Kouklia had 236 inhabitants, 41 Christians and 195 Muslims, and in 1946 242, of whom 28 were Orthodox and 214 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 229 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 250 Turks (estimate).

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Kouklia was occupied by the Turkish army. Three dead of 1974 are recorded on the village’s land, all of them soldiers.