Cypriot traditional music grew up around the village wedding, the panigyri (a saint's day fair) and the coffee shop. The national inventory of intangible heritage kept by the Cyprus National Commission for UNESCO calls the island's dances an integral part of the music and dance traditions of the wider Greek world, with elements taken in from the coasts of Asia Minor and from Cappadocia. The name of the main dance, karsilamas, comes from the Turkish word karşı, 'opposite', and Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots shared much of the music: the zurna, a reed pipe, and the davul, a large drum (zornes and toumbanon in Cypriot Greek), often played alongside the fiddlers, particularly at Turkish Cypriot weddings.
The classic band is a pair: a violin and a laouto. In Cyprus the word 'fiddlers' usually means the two playing together, says The Cypriot Fiddler, a research project led by the ethnomusicologist Dr Nicoletta Demetriou. The violin, the same instrument as in a symphony orchestra, carries the melody. The laouto, a lute with four pairs of strings played with a long, narrow plectrum, keeps the rhythm and the chords; Cyprus Post's 2014 Europa stamp issue called it the principal string instrument of Cyprus, accompanying the violin in the dance tunes. Fiddling was a part-time, seasonal trade held alongside a main job, and the customs of the time meant that no women played.
Two older instruments came first. The pithkiavli is a shepherd's flute about 30 cm long, cut from a reed between two knots, with six finger holes and one for the thumb; shepherds made it and played it, Cyprus Post calls it the most ancient Cypriot wind instrument, and a 15th-century Nativity wall painting in the church of the Archangel Michael at Pedoulas shows one. The tamboutsia began as a farm sieve 40 to 60 cm across with a skin stretched over it, played with the palm and fingers or with two small sticks, and it kept the rhythm when there was no laouto. Very many weddings were once played by pithkiavli and tamboutsia alone. After the early 1960s, The Cypriot Fiddler notes, the violin and laouto pair was itself largely abandoned for bands of three to five instruments, as the bouzouki, the harmonium, the electric guitar and drums took over weddings and parties.
The dances were danced by one pair at a time, two men or two women: in traditional Cypriot society, as it worked until the 1970s, men and women did not dance together, except the newlyweds. The most widespread dance for both is the antikristos, the 'facing' dance, or karsilamas: a suite of five dances in a fixed order, the fifth also called the mpalos, built on improvisation. Between the third and fourth men's karsilamas the two dancers sing tsiattista couplets to each other, and the third women's karsilamas is also the couple's dance, which the newlyweds danced for their guests on the last night of the wedding feast. In most villages a wedding lasted three to five days.
The syrtos was danced by two dancers linked by a handkerchief, men and women separately, with more women joining in mainly in the mountain villages, and the sousta was mostly a women's pair dance, danced calmly like the karsilamades. Men also had solo show dances: the zeimbekikos, with elaborate steps and figures; the tatsia, danced with a glass of wine set inside a sieve, with elaborate moves and figures that must not spill it; and the drepani, which began as reapers playing with the sickle on the last strip of a harvest. A glenti, the party itself, usually ended with the Panhellenic kalamatianos, with everyone in a circle.
The tradition best known abroad is tsiattista: improvised verse duels in rhyming couplets, usually in lines of fifteen syllables, in which poet-singers called poiitarides try to outdo each other, sung to violin and laouto at weddings, fairs and other celebrations. UNESCO inscribed tsiattista on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011, Cyprus's second entry after Lefkara lace in 2009, and Byzantine chant, a joint entry with Greece, followed in 2019. Cyprus's national inventory also lists the traditional dances (2017 and 2021) and the fones (2019): free-rhythm melodies, named after places such as Paphitissa and Paralimnitissa, to which new couplets, mostly about love, are sung at the table.
Much of the old repertoire survives because Theodoulos Kallinikos (1904 to 2004), the Church of Cyprus's chief cantor, visited almost every village from 1924 to write down songs from the elders, and published them in 1951 as Kypriaki Laiki Mousa, in both Byzantine and European notation. In 2026 The Cypriot Fiddler project won a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award in the research category, and the non-profit Cyprus Music Archive, founded in Nicosia in 2022, expects to open the first part of a free digital library in early 2027.
The surest place to hear the music live is Kataklysmos, the Festival of the Flood in Larnaca, held over Orthodox Pentecost. In 2026 it ran from 29 May to 3 June, with contests in Cypriot dances (antikristos, drepani, zeimbekiko and syrtos), tsiattista, the mpalos and the flute, where the tunes must be purely Cypriot. Larnaca has not announced 2027 dates; by our calculation Pentecost falls on 20 June 2027. Village festivals in the Deputy Ministry of Tourism's yearly list sometimes feature the dances (Pissouri's Traditional Dances Festival was on 6 September 2026), and some tavernas put on shows: Vraka Tavern in Agios Athanasios, Limassol, has live Greek music and traditional dances every Friday and Saturday night and on Sunday afternoons. For the tradition in a modern form, look out for Monsieur Doumani, a trio whose tzouras, trombone and acoustic guitar meet electronics and looping: they play in Cyprus several times a year, and their last Limassol show was at the PSI Foundation on 18 October 2026.
To learn it, the state Music Schools in Nicosia, Limassol, Larnaca, Paphos and Famagusta district, secondary schools with entry by audition, teach traditional instruments and songs as a compulsory subject. Adults can take violin, laouto or traditional Cypriot dances at the Ministry of Education's Adult Education Centres: 25 weekly lessons of 90 minutes a year for a fee of 55 euros, with enrolment in September and the 2026 to 2027 classes due to start in the second half of October; a class runs only with at least 9 members in rural centres and 11 in towns. In Limassol, the music school of the Holy Metropolis teaches Byzantine, Greek and Cypriot traditional music on instruments including the violin and the laouto, and folklore groups such as the Limassol Folklore Group teach the dances.
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