Psyllatos is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 27 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 60 metres, on the plain of the Mesaoria, between Goufes, Lefkonikon and Knodara. In the 1960 census it had 455 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

In the 15th-century lists of fiefs the village is spelled “Psillato” and “Psilatos”.¹ On Kitchener’s British map of 1885 it is written “Psilatos”,² and the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) has “Psyllatos, o”.³

Frankish and Venetian rule

Psyllatos first appears in a written source in the 1460s, in the list of the fiefs distributed by King James II. It is preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron. James gave the village to Zullo de Rames; in the same text Psyllatos is also listed among the fiefs of Antonio de Bon, together with three other villages.⁴ Antonio de Bon was “magister hospicii”, that is, head of the royal household, and in 1463 he was one of the Cypriot nobles who had taken refuge in Rhodes and received letters of safe-conduct from the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller.⁵

It stayed in the hands of that family under Venetian rule. In a Venetian memorandum of the late 15th century, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, “Casal Psilatos” is one of the four villages of the by then late Antonio de Bon.⁶

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Psyllatos is recorded as a mixed village of Christians and Muslims, with 19 property-holding households. The owners had mainly grain fields, a few cotton and fodder fields, threshing floors and much barren land. They had more than 500 sheep, pairs of oxen for ploughing, cows and horses.⁷

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land was sown almost entirely with cereals, and stock-breeding was well developed: in 1973 the inhabitants kept 1,339 sheep, 751 goats and 52 cows.⁸

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Psyllatos had 334 inhabitants in 1881, 363 in 1891, 361 in 1901, 375 in 1911 and 409 in 1921.⁹ In 1931 it had 460 inhabitants, 3 Christians and 457 Muslims, and in 1946 455, of whom 3 were Orthodox and 452 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 455 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 500 (estimate).