The ballad of Cyprus, and who we are

Let’s take, for instance, the ‘poiitarides’ – or ‘itinerant poets’, as Nicoletta Demetriou calls them. ‘Poiitarika’ (the category name for their works) were “long narrative songs,” she explains, “the closest thing in English might be ‘ballads’” – like the old broadsheet ballads of the Anglo-American world, printed on a single piece of paper and easily […]