Santalaris is a small Turkish community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 16 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 20 metres, on the plain of the Mesaoria, about two kilometres east of Maratha. In the 1960 census it had 94 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

In the document of 1234 that is the first written record of the village, the name is spelled “Sandallari”.¹ On Kitchener’s British map of 1885 it is written “Sandalaris”,² and the official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) has “Santalaris, o”.³

Founding and first records

Santalaris first appears in a written source in July 1234, in a document of King Henry I about the land of neighbouring Maratha, which survived in the archive of the Latin cathedral of Nicosia, Saint Sophia. There Santalaris bounds that land on the north. The 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, who published the document, identified “Sandallari” with the village of the Mesaoria.⁴

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Santalaris is recorded as a mixed village of Christians and Muslims, with ten property-holding households. The owners had large cotton fields, a mulberry garden watered by running water, scattered mulberry and olive trees, and a garden with trees. They had almost 1,200 sheep, camels, oxen for ploughing, cows and beehives.⁵

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the village’s land was sown mainly with cereals and fodder crops, and in 1973 the inhabitants kept 389 sheep and 138 goats.⁶

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Santalaris had 25 inhabitants in 1881, 47 in 1891, 51 in 1901, 90 in 1911 and 105 in 1921.⁷ In 1931 it had 107 inhabitants, all Muslims, and in 1946 128 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 94 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 about 100 (estimate).