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 disseminated.
Printing came to Cyprus in 1878 ( the same year as the British, though
