A dunam (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic: ; ; ; ), also known as a donum or dunum, is a unit of measurement of area. Its origin, also known as the old dunam, Turkish dunam, or Ottoman stremma, was the Ottoman unit that roughly represented the amount of agricultural land that could be plowed by a team of oxen in a day. It is analogous in role (but not equivalent) to the stremma in Byzantine Greek units or the acre in the English system. The legal definition was "forty standard paces in length and breadth", but its actual area varied considerably from place to place, from a little more than in Ottoman Palestine to around in Ottoman Iraq.
The unit is still in use in many areas previously ruled by the Ottomans. The modern definition is standardized, and the current dunam (or new dunam, metric dunam) is defined as exactly .
Ottoman origins The name dönüm is from the Ottoman Turkish ( ), and literally means "to turn". Victor Louis Ménage has suggested this was probably a calque (literal translation) of the Byzantine Greek stremma, which also literally means "a turning" and has a similar size. This word likely migrated during the early period of Ottoman rule of Mysia-Bithynia when there would have been many Byzantine Greek-speaking citizens and Turkish-speaking administrators.
The Dictionary of Modern Greek defines the old "Ottoman stremma" as approximately .
Definitions Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro Various Balkan countries use the dunam, although they all use the metric dunam now of 1000 square meters. In Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia the unit is called the () or (). In Bosnia and Herzegovina it is known as a (or ). In Albania it is called a or .
An exception is the region of Leskovac in south Serbia, where one dulum is equal to .
Cyprus In Cyprus, a donum is .Department of Lands and Surveys web site http://www.moi.gov.cy/moi/dls (retrieved April 2014) In the Republic of Cyprus, Greek-Cypriots traditionally used the local Greek Cypriot dialect word σκάλες [skales], rather than the mainland Greek word stremma. Since 1986, Cyprus officially uses the square metre and the hectare.
A Cypriot donum consists of 4 evleks, each of which consists of .
Greece
In Greece, the old is called a "Turkish stremma", while today, a () or "royal stremma" is exactly one decare, like the metric .
Costas Lapavitsas suggests a value of for the dunam in the region of Naoussa in the early 20th century.
Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey In Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, the dunam is now standardized on , which is 1 decare. From the Ottoman period and through the early years of the British Mandate for Palestine, the size of a dunam was , but in 1928, the metric dunam of was adopted. The metric dunam is still used today in Israel and Palestine.
United Arab Emirates The Dubai Statistics Center and Statistics Centre Abu Dhabi use the metric dunam (spelt as donum) for data relating to agricultural land use. One donum equals .
Similar units
The Byzantine Greek was the probable source of the Turkish unit. The (; Turkish , ) was a similar unit derived from the area plowed by a team of oxen in a day. The English unit acre is a measure of area for a similar size of land, although it developed separately. In Bulgaria, the () is used, which is an SI unit, literally meaning 10 ares.
See also Orders of magnitude (area), for other units of area Conversion of units (), a similar non-SI unit of area used in Egypt, Sudan, and Syria , a land tax based on the area of a farm
References
External links Foreign Weights and Measures Formerly in Common Use Variable donums in Turkey Summary based on UN handbook