Combining historical maps and censuses of Cyprus from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: A geospatial approach

Abstract

Abstract. The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing project that combines historical cartographic and economic sources on Cyprus through the employment of geospatial analysis. The main sources are: the 1883 trigonometrical survey of the island by Horatio Herbert Kitchener; the 1572 fiscal survey and 1832/33 property survey by the Ottomans; and the 1931 British agricultural census. The Ottoman and British censuses, different though they are and separated by three and a half centuries, provide vital information on production, economic activity, population, and toponymy. The project correlates this data with the detailed recording of topographical, hydrological, and land use features of the Kitchener map, which constitutes an extremely close depiction of Ottoman conditions given that the transformation of the countryside witnessed during the British colonial period was not yet initiated. This allows the identification of certain constants in the Cypriot environment and landscape. The paper presents the interdisciplinary methodological challenges the project has encountered and proposes a framework for the combination of these different datasets and their analysis in order to better record and understand certain long-term patterns in the Cypriot economy, environment and landscape. It uses viticulture as a case study for the visualisation of data to determine the spatial distribution of vines in the historical long term. Finally, the paper situates its conclusions within broader historiographical discussions on the historical development of viticulture in the Mediterranean.

Long-Term Dynamics of Viticultural Landscape in Cyprus—Four Centuries of Expansion, Contraction and Spatial Displacement

“…Wine is enlisted as "grape juice" (Sira) and measured in loads (himl) (Table 1). Detailed data for every settlement of the island were made available by the research project "Mediterranean Insularities" hosted at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas and were georeferenced by the Department of Geography of Harokopio University, Athens as part of the project "Economy, environment, and landscape in the Cypriot longue durée" funded by the Sylvia Ioannou Foundation [42]. Considering that the rate for the tithe was set at 20% by sultan Selim II [41], the 17.087 loads recorded in the register amount to a total wine quantity of 85.435 units.…”

“…Records from the three historical surveys were geolocated as described in previous work [42], using K-map as the main source of locations. From the census of 1572, 95.38% out of the total quantity of the wine in 246 settlements was geolocated successfully and the remainder 4.62% is related to 31 abandoned settlements, most of which (17) were in the Nicosia district.…”