ABSTRACT

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the change of administration from Ottoman to British brought a radical change of culture to the island, as detailed in Chapter 6. By 1900 some of the infrastructure for a formal musical culture was already in place. 1 This was a result primarily of a conscious enterprise on the part of the British to modernize the culture and to provide education and entertainment for local inhabitants, but the impact of external political events also had a bearing. Chief among these latter were the Russian Revolution, the persecution of the Armenian population by the Ottoman government, and the Asia Minor disaster, all of them resulting in the permanent settlement of well-trained, experienced musicians in Cyprus. 2