Krini is a Turkish community in the occupied part of the Keryneia district. It lies 10 kilometres south-west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 340 metres, at the southern foot of the Pentadaktylos range. On a height near the village stand the ruins of a fort of the pre-Greek period.¹ In the 1960 census it had 277 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron, in the list of the fiefs of King James II, writes the village “Grini”.² The official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) writes “Krini”.³

Archaeological sites

The land of Krini was already inhabited in the pre-Greek period. In 1952 the British archaeologist Hector Catling collected at the site of Merra sherds of painted pottery of the pre-Greek Middle Bronze Age. According to a later study, the vessels were not made on the spot but were probably brought from Lapithos and Vounous, which shows contacts between the settlement and the centres of the north coast.⁴ In 1959 the archaeological survey of the Keryneia range, carried out for the Department of Antiquities by the Cypriot archaeologist Kyriakos Nicolaou, recorded on a height near the village a fort, probably of the same period, with an outer wall and bastions on the north side and a second, inner wall.⁵

After the invasion, in 1988 and 1992, the occupation regime carried out, without authority, rescue excavations in the village cemetery and at Merra, following reports of illicit digging. They found an empty shaft tomb, perhaps looted, a tomb with three chambers, and a tomb with clay vessels, a spearhead and a bead necklace, all of the pre-Greek period. In a surface survey of 1995–1996, also without authority, a second looted tomb was found in the cemetery.⁶

Frankish rule

In the 1460s King James II gave Krini, together with neighbouring Agirda (“Agridi”) and another village, “Letrico”, as a fief to two persons jointly, Tuccio de Costanzo and Lady Helena Podocataro.⁷

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Krini is recorded as a Muslim village, with 6 property-holding households. The owners had wheat fields and cotton fields, a few mountain olives and carobs, two olive presses, beehives and 80 goats.⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals and fodder crops, and much of the land was uncultivated; to the north, part of the Karmi forest fell within the village boundaries. Stock-raising was well developed: in 1973 the village had 1,266 sheep, 786 goats and 124 cows. South-east of the village stood the ruins of a watermill,⁹ at the place the Gazetteer calls Neromylos (“watermill”).¹⁰

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 100 inhabitants in 1881, 157 in 1891, 170 in 1901, 203 in 1911 and 246 in 1921, and in 1880 it suffered from an epidemic of plague.¹¹ In 1931 Krini had 239 inhabitants, 5 Christians and 234 Muslims, and in 1946 267, of whom one was Orthodox and 266 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 277 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 around 450 (estimate).