Mora is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 16 kilometres east of Lefkosia, at an elevation of 80 metres, in the Mesaoria plain, near the Pediaios river, and its eastern boundary reaches the border of the Ammochostos district. In the 1960 census it had 501 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Founding and first records

Mora is already mentioned at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Together with neighbouring Angastina, it belonged to the military order of the Knights Templar. When Pope Clement V dissolved the order, its property was given in 1313 to the Knights of St John, the Hospitallers, and among the estates that passed to them the sixteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron records “the villages of Mora and Angastina in the region of the Mesaoria”.¹

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

In 1418 the French nobleman Nompar de Caumont, travelling from Ammochostos to Lefkosia, spent the night at a place of the Hospitallers of Rhodes which he calls “Mores”, four leagues before Lefkosia.² According to the British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus in the early twentieth century, this is perhaps Mora.³ And at the end of the fifteenth century, in a Venetian list published by the nineteenth-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, a “Casal Mera” is recorded among the villages of the Grand Commandery of the Hospitallers, which Mas Latrie considers most probably to be Mora in the Mesaoria.⁴

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Mora is recorded as a Muslim village with 25 property-owning households. Its land consisted of fields and many barren fields, with a garden with a waterwheel and threshing floors. The owners had more than 800 sheep and goats, 30 oxen, cows and calves, three mules and five beehives.⁵

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 only cereals and fodder crops were grown at Mora, without irrigation. Stock-breeding was highly developed, as it already was in the survey of 1832/33: in 1973 the village had 3,256 sheep, one of the largest flocks in the district, and 1,544 goats.⁶

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 238 inhabitants in 1881, 283 in 1891, 332 in 1901, 438 in 1911 and 661 in 1921.⁷ In 1931 Mora had 547 inhabitants, 14 Christians and 533 Muslims, and in 1946 627, of whom one was Orthodox and 626 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 501 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 around 650 (estimate).