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Cyprus Land Use and Tenure
At the end of the 1980s, the total area of the "TRNC"
was
measured at 2,496,370 hectares. Of this area, 56.7 percent
was
agricultural land, 19.5 percent forest, 4.96 percent
uncultivated,
10.68 percent occupied by towns, villages, and roads, and
8.16
percent unusable. In 1975, of the agricultural land, 50
percent was
cultivated; by 1987, some 68.7 percent was cultivated.
The "TRNC" recognized three categories of land
ownership:
private, state, and communal. The greatest amount of land
was
privately owned. Unrestricted legal ownership of private
land in
Cyprus dated only from 1946, when the British
administration
enacted a new land law, the Immovable Property (Tenure,
Registration, and Valuation) Law, which superseded the
land code in
effect under the Ottomans. Under the Ottoman code, all
land
belonged to the state, and those who worked the land were
in effect
hereditary tenants whose right to the land was
usufructuary. Land
could be transmitted from father to son, but could not
otherwise be
disposed of without official permission. The 1946 British
law ended
this tradition, stipulating that all state land properly
acquired
by individuals became their private property. Communal
land
remained as before, but all unoccupied and vacant land not
lawfully
held became the property of the state. As a result,
virtually all
forests become state property.
The Muslim religious foundation Evkaf Idaresi (Turkish
Religious Trust, usually known as Evkaf) was the largest
private
owner of property in the "TRNC." Before the events of
1974, Evkaf
owned 1 to 2 percent of the island's total farmland. These
holdings
dated back to Ottoman times and were mainly donations in
perpetuity
from members of the Turkish Cypriot community. Much of
Evkaf's land
was located in parts of the island that remained under the
control
of the Republic of Cyprus.
Data as of January 1991
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