Trapeza is a small Turkish community in the occupied part of the Keryneia district. It lies 13 kilometres east of Keryneia, at an elevation of 220 metres, on the northern side of the Pentadaktylos range. On its land, to the south, rises the Pentadaktylos peak, with the forest around it.¹ In the 1960 census it had 79 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Founding and first records

On the land of the village the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records the place name Palia Trapeza (“Old Trapeza”).²

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Trapeza is recorded as a Muslim village with a single property-holding household. The owner had 200 donums of uncultivated land, a threshing floor, 100 mountain olives and 10 carob trees, beehives, 150 goats and a pair of oxen.³

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 cereals, olives and carobs were grown on the village land. Most of it, however, was uncultivated and covered with pines, mazies and lentisk.⁴

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 44 inhabitants in 1881, 22 in 1891, 21 in 1901, 71 in 1911 and 53 in 1921. For a time it was a chiftlik, that is, a large estate of a single owner, and the 21 inhabitants of 1901 were 15 Muslims and 6 Greeks.⁵ In 1931 Trapeza had 63 inhabitants, all of them Muslims, and in 1946 107, of whom 2 were Orthodox and 105 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 79 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 around 130 (estimate).