Maratha is a small Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 18 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 40 metres, on the plain of the Mesaoria, about two kilometres west of Santalaris. In the 1960 census it had 113 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

In the document of 1234 that is the first written record of the village, the name is spelled “Marathe”.¹ The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) has “Maratha, i”.²

Founding and first records

Maratha first appears in a written source in July 1234, in a document of King Henry I that survived in the archive of the Latin cathedral of Nicosia, Saint Sophia, and was published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie. The same document names, as boundaries of the village’s land, neighbouring Santalaris to the north and Styllos to the south.³

In the village’s land the Gazetteer records the place-names Agios Georgios and Agios Georgios o Lagkatos.⁴

Frankish and Venetian rule

By the document of 1234 Henry I gave Guillaume, son of Acharie, and his heirs ten “carrucates” of land (a carrucate was the area one plough and its team of oxen could work in a year) in the land of Maratha. He gave them in exchange for the estate of Kavallari, which his father, King Hugh, had given to Guillaume’s father and which Henry granted to the Latin archbishop of Nicosia.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Maratha is recorded as a Muslim village, with nine property-holding households. The owners had cotton fields, grain fields and barren land, oxen for ploughing, 130 sheep and beehives.⁶

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land was sown mainly with cereals and fodder crops, and in 1973 the inhabitants kept 502 sheep and 105 goats.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Maratha had 30 inhabitants in 1881, 39 in 1891, 40 in 1901, 49 in 1911 and 56 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 it had 43 inhabitants, all Muslims, and in 1946 39 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 113 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 120 (estimate).