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Cyprus Other Ethnic Groups
Cyprus had three other ethnic groups at the beginning
of the
1990s: Maronites, Armenians, and Latins. Together they
numbered
only about 6,000, less than 1 percent of the island's
population,
but they maintained social institutions of their own and
were
represented in organs of government. The Maronites and
Armenians
had come during the Byzantine period, and the Latins
slightly
later. The Maronites, Arabic-speaking peasants from around
Syria
and Lebanon, were already an important ethnic group at the
time of
the Turkish conquest in 1571. By the mid-twentieth
century, they
lived mainly in four villages in northwestern Cyprus.
Armenian
Cypriots were primarily urban and mercantile, most of whom
had
arrived after the collapse of the Armenian nationalist
movement in
the Caucasus at the end of World War I. Latins were
concentrated
among merchant families of the port towns on the southern
coast and
were descendants of the Lusignan and Venetian upper
classes. The
Ottomans had suppressed Roman Catholicism, and Latins were
largely
Greek Orthodox, but retained their French or Italian
names. Some
Latins reverted to the group's original religion.
Data as of January 1991
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