Negotiating Modernity: Rural Dress and Sociocultural Change in Cyprus during the British Period

Petroula Hadjittofi of the University of Cyprus presents the aims, methodology, and initial findings of the postdoctoral research project Negotiating Modernity: Rural Dress and Sociocultural Change in Cyprus during the British Period (NEMO), supervised by Maria Parani and Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou. She opens with a 1971 television interview in which an elderly man from Paralimni recounts his shame at giving up his traditional breeches (vraka) for European trousers to visit his children in London, and his resolve to return to the vraka and be buried in it.

Hadjittofi outlines the historical transition from Ottoman to British rule, noting how road building, motor transport, trade, and urban growth brought Western dress to the towns, while agrarian villages, where 83.2 per cent of the population lived in 1881 and 64 per cent in 1960, changed at a different pace, accelerating after the Second World War. The NEMO project studies rural dress as material culture across production, distribution, typology, and daily and symbolic use. It combines surviving garments in public and private collections, period photographs, folklorists' manuscripts, published texts, and hundreds of oral testimonies recorded between the 1960s and 2010s in the Folklore and Oral Tradition Archives of the Cyprus Research Centre. With Charalambos Paraskeva, the project built a Microsoft Access database using local dialect terminology from the testimonies to catalogue garments, materials, and manufacturing techniques.

Drawing on these oral histories, primarily of Greek Cypriots, Hadjittofi traces how countryside clothing was made and acquired. Ready-made items were long limited to headscarves, waist sashes, socks, shoes, and jewellery sold by itinerant pedlars (pramateftades), village shops, and fairs. Most everyday garments and fabrics such as cotton alatzia were made, mended, and patched at home by women, while children in poor households wore cut-down adult cast-offs. From the 1920s and 1930s, sewing machines, sold on instalments by companies that also ran sewing and embroidery classes, spread as prized dowry items, alongside knitting machines for socks and leather-sewing machines for boots.

Village tailors and seamstresses trained through apprenticeships and worked with client-supplied cloth, often as a seasonal supplement to farming, peaking before Christmas, Easter, and harvests; clients short of cash paid in crops or days of field labour (merokamata). Hadjittofi closes with the practical design of rural workwear, such as lined waistcoats (tzipouni) and iron-nailed boots (tsangaropodines), and the social pressures governing dress: testimonies from Lysi and Phrenaros recall how village custom required women to wear long socks even in summer and girls to adopt the headscarf and coin necklace (chrysa) upon leaving primary school, while migrants, urban trainees, mineworkers, and soldiers gradually introduced Western styles.