Xerovounos is a Turkish community in the occupied district of Lefkosia. It lies 23 kilometres west of Morfou, at an elevation of 200 metres, in the hills of Tillyria, and its land reaches the sea in the north, opposite the rocky islet of Petra tou Limniti. Limnitis also lay within its administrative boundaries. In the 1960 census it had 256 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Archaeological sites

On the small rocky islet of Petra tou Limniti lies one of the oldest known settlements of Cyprus. It was excavated for two weeks in the summer of 1929 by the Swedish archaeologist Alfred Westholm, a member of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition directed by Einar Gjerstad. On the summit plateau were found the remains of huts from four phases of occupation, stone tools and vessels, bone tools, an obsidian knife, bones of pigs, sheep, cattle and fish, and three fiddle-shaped idols of dolerite. Gjerstad described the settlement as pre-Neolithic; a later study dates it to the pre-pottery Neolithic, that is, to one of the earliest pre-Greek phases of the island.¹

On the mainland, near Limnitis, Pleiades tentatively marks the site of ancient Limenia, which the Greek geographer Strabo, writing in the reign of the emperor Augustus, mentions inland above Soli. Pleiades gives the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) and Roman periods and late antiquity for the site.² The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) also records an ancient monument on the village’s land at the site of Moutti.³

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Xerovounos is recorded as a Muslim village with 27 property-owning households. Its land was almost entirely barren fields, with a vineyard and threshing floors, but 363 trees are recorded, most of them olives, together with fig, carob and mulberry trees, as well as five olive mills and water mills. The owners had 453 goats and 21 oxen and cows.⁴

British rule

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the inhabitants of Xerovounos were Linobambaki, that is, outwardly Muslims but secretly Christians, and until the first decades of the twentieth century they all spoke only Greek. Their final turkification came about, according to the same encyclopaedia, through teachers who taught only in Turkish, but the older inhabitants went on speaking Greek.⁵

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 olives, carobs, citrus and almonds were grown on the village’s land, just as olives and carobs already appear in the survey of 1832/33. A large part of the land, especially south of the village, was taken up by the state forests of Pafos and Xerovounos.⁶

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 227 inhabitants in 1881, 246 in 1891, 293 in 1901, 333 in 1911 and 329 in 1921.⁷ In 1931 Xerovounos had 442 inhabitants, 4 Christians and 438 Muslims, and in 1946 541, of whom 6 were Orthodox and 535 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded religion only). In 1960, when Limnitis was counted separately for the first time, Xerovounos had 256 inhabitants, all Turks, and in 1973 around 300 (estimate).