Extraction and dissemination of historical geospatial data from early maps are major goals of historical geographic information systems (HGISs) in the context of the spatial humanities. This paper illustrates the process of interpreting, georeferencing, organizing, and visualizing the content of a historical map of Cyprus in the context of GISs and highlights the development of a national-scale spatial database of the island in the 19th century. This method was applied to Lord Kitchener’s historical map of Cyprus (published in 1885), which is considered the product of the first scientific topographic survey of Cyprus, is rich in geographic information about the area, and covers the entire island at a scale of 1:63,360. Previous attempts to create historical geodatabases have either focused on small areas or, when conducted on a national scale, have been thematically focused. The positional accuracy of the map was found to be 1.08 mm in map units, which was equivalent to 68.76 m on the ground. Accordingly, the main categories of geographic content (land cover, administrative units, settlements, transportation/communication networks, stream networks/water bodies, points of interest, annotations) were digitized from the georeferenced historical map. The Web-based application developed in this study supported the visualization of the historical geographic content of the map and its comparison with modern basemaps. The creation of the geodatabase presented in the study provides a template for similar studies and a basis for further development of the historical geodatabase of Cyprus.

Viticulture has historically been an important part of the social and economic life in the Mediterranean, while wine is reckoned among the oldest documented trades. The aim of the study is to record, evaluate and analyze spatial data from historical sources in order to gain insights into the dynamics of the viticultural landscape from the beginning of the Ottoman period to the present day. The study was based on (a) three historical maps published in 1885, 1942 and 1969, (b) records from historical surveys—two from the Ottoman period (1572 fiscal survey, 1832/33 property survey) and the British agricultural census of 1931, (c) present-day records from the vineyard survey of 2009 carried out by the Republic of Cyprus. In the beginning of the study period the center of viticulture was well established within the area of the southern and eastern slopes of Troodos massif. The vineyards expanded mainly around the same growing area until WW2 when they gradually began to be relocated in southwest direction to lower altitudes. This long-term trajectory of spatial patterns was driven by external demand for the product but also by the interplay of environmental, topographic and cultural factors, as well as by the state’s policy framework which largely reflected long-term Mediterranean-wide patterns.

This study reconstructs the agricultural landscape of Cyprus in the early 1830s, a time of extraordinary socio-economic pressures on the island and immediately prior to the economic and administrative transformations of the later nineteenth century, drawing on the Ottoman property survey of 1832/33, an island-wide register documenting over 20,000 households and their assets across 622 principal settlements. The records were converted into a geospatial database and analysed through GIS, spatial statistics, and a transparent, reproducible landscape classification framework, complemented by historical cartographic evidence. The reconstruction reveals distinct agricultural regions shaped by environmental conditions, settlement patterns, and the interplay between subsistence and market-oriented production, with marked concentrations of viticulture, olive cultivation, cotton, grain, sericulture, and pastoralism. A hierarchical classification assigns 471 settlements (77%) to a single-dominant landscape type, 92 (15%) to co-dominant zones, and 50 (8%) to diversified categories, collectively synthesised into a broader interpretation of the landscape as an integrated socioecological system. The findings demonstrate that Ottoman surveys offer considerable, albeit bounded, potential for historical landscape reconstruction, providing a dated baseline for the study of Mediterranean agricultural landscapes and a transferable methodological framework applicable to any region with comparable historical records.