Platani is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 29 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 260 metres, on the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos, below the Kantara forests. In the 1960 census it had 378 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

On Kitchener’s British map of 1885 the village is written “Platani”,¹ and the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) has “Platani, to”.²

Antiquity

The Pleiades database of ancient places, following the Barrington Atlas of the ancient world, marks at Platani an ancient settlement, with traces from the Archaic ancient Greek and the early Greek medieval periods.³

Frankish and Venetian rule

The 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, relying on the 16th-century Cypriot historian Stefano Lusignan, writes that Platani, together with Spatharikon and Kornokipos, was still a village of Armenian farmers under Venetian rule.⁴

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Platani is recorded as a mixed village of Christians and Muslims, with 22 property-holding households. The owners had about 170 olive trees, mostly mountain olives, carob trees, a mulberry garden, a little cotton and fodder, threshing floors and much barren land. They had more than 300 sheep, pairs of oxen for ploughing, cows and horses.⁵ In the village’s land the Gazetteer records the place-names Agia Eirini and Agios Georgios.⁶

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 stock-breeding was well developed. Part of its land was pine forest, within the state forests of Kantara.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Platani had 158 inhabitants in 1881, 178 in 1891, 224 in 1901, 246 in 1911 and 269 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 it had 312 inhabitants, one Christian and 311 Muslims, and in 1946 410 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 378 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 400 (estimate).