Melounta is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 33 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 300 metres, on the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos, where its land reaches the Kantara forests. In the 1960 census it had 274 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

On Kitchener’s British map of 1885 the village is written “Malounda”.¹ The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) has “Melounta, i”, and uses the form “Malounta” for the state forest in the village’s land.²

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Melounta is recorded as a Muslim village, with six property-holding households. The owners had more than a hundred olive trees, a few almond and carob trees, mulberry gardens, a small tobacco plot and much barren land. In the village there were an olive press and a watermill that worked in winter. They had about 270 sheep, cows and oxen.³

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land was sown with cereals and fodder crops and planted with olives and carobs, and much of it was pine forest and scrub. In 1973 the inhabitants kept 1,281 sheep and 70 goats.⁴ In the village’s land the Gazetteer records the state forests of Malounta, Kantara and Tennaria.⁵

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Melounta had 73 inhabitants in 1881, 83 in 1891, 95 in 1901, 122 in 1911 and 148 in 1921.⁶ In 1931 it had 179 inhabitants, all Muslims, and in 1946 225 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 274 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 300 (estimate).