Greek Dialogues - Anglo-Greek radio culture, 1945-1960 | Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies

Date and Time: Thursday 5th March 2026 at 17:00h GMT

Venue: Room 11, Lecture Block, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA

For our second seminar of the term, we are pleased to host Dr Persefone Antonelaki (Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), whose paper examines a little-known strand of wartime and post-war broadcasting history: the BBC’s Greek-language service for Cyprus. Situating this service within the wider landscape of imperial and European broadcasting, the paper explores how radio became a site of literary experimentation, cultural mediation, and political imagination during a period of profound upheaval.

In November 1941, during the Second World War, a bi-weekly service in Greek for Cyprus was introduced into the Empire Service. That service was at a different time and on a different wavelength from the Greek Service, which had been launched in 1939 and had been part of the European Services. This paper tells the story of the BBC Greek for Cyprus service (1941-51). It investigates its literary broadcasts vis-à-vis the cultural programming of the Empire Service, on the one hand, and the (post-)WWII Anglo-Greek literary interactions, on the other. To reconstruct the ephemeral output of this short-lived service, I draw upon the collections of the BBC Written Archives Centre, particularly upon the boxes labeled “Cypriot scripts,” which contain over one hundred and fifty broadcasts. Particular emphasis will be given to the original plays and features that adapt ancient Greek myths in light of both the modernist engagements with radio writing and the BBC’s role in popularizing ancient Greek literature.