ABSTRACT
When Great Britain assumed control of Cyprus in 1878, two main categories of musical culture were already established among the Cypriot population. The relatively few extant sources referring to Greek-Cypriot music during the Ottoman period show that Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical music was performed in churches and monasteries, and that traditional secular music (dimotiki, or ‘demotic music’; ‘folk’; see Chapter 3, note 3, for how the use of these terms changed over time) was performed in a variety of non-religious settings. European classical music, on the other hand, only started to gain ground on the island under the influence of British colonialism.
