Platanissos is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos, on the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 43 kilometres north of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 80 metres, in hilly country between the state forests of Cheromylia, to the north, and Atopetra, to the west.¹ In the 1960 census it had 386 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) writes the name “Πλατανισσός, η”.² On the British Kitchener map of 1885 and in the 1931 census the village is written “Platanisso”.³

Founding and first records

The first written record of the village is in a Venetian memorandum of the late 15th century on the villages of the royal domain, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie. There “Casal Platanisso” is one of the 23 royal villages of the bailiwick of the Karpasia, the administrative district of the peninsula.⁴

The English archaeologist David Hogarth, who travelled through the Karpasia in 1888, saw on a desolate stretch of coast below Platanissos two sites with ruins of late churches, which he took to be relics of the many stations that carried on trade with Anatolia in the Middle Ages.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Platanissos appears as a mixed village, with Christian and Muslim owners and 36 property-holding households. The owners grew mainly cotton and had five mills, more than 200 sheep and goats, cows and plough oxen.⁶

Economy and society

Hogarth found Platanissos, like its neighbouring villages, tucked behind the ridge in deep valleys or on sheltered plateaux, where the inhabitants grew cotton, gourds, melons and all kinds of vegetables wherever there was water.⁷ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, until 1974 the village land was planted with tobacco, cereals, fodder crops, olive and carob trees, and stock-raising was well developed.⁸

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 308 inhabitants in 1881, 329 in 1891, 369 in 1901, 375 in 1911 and 359 in 1921.⁹ In 1931 Platanissos had 419 inhabitants, 8 Christians and 411 Muslims, and in 1946 445, all Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 386 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 about 400 Turkish inhabitants (estimate).