Herodotus Project: a digital bridge to Cyprus and north Aegean region's rich heritage

Cyprus and the Greek Aegean islands share a common historical and cultural background, spanning from antiquity to the modern era. Tapping into this rich heritage archivists and historians from the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation’s have rescued over 10.000 broadcast and other files of unique historical value and digitised them into an open access database. The venture was made possible by the EU project, Digital Herodotus II.

“The uniqueness of our archive, it's because we were the only TV and radio station from 1957 until 1992," explains Thanasis Tsokos, Director General of CyBC and Head of the CyBC archive. "So, we try to digitalise [the recordings] because it's very important for our society. It's a part of European history”

The files are preserved at the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation’s archive. It provided hundreds of hours of audiovisual, audio and music files from 1950 to the 1990’s covereing a wide range of topics. It’s been an ‘archaeological’ process, says Thanasis Tsokos:

"First, we have to fix it, to digitalise it, and after to recognise who is who in the pictures, in the documentaries, in the radio so it's a complicated procedure”.

Twenty seven workers carefully selected, restored, documented and preserved the materials. Today the Digital Herodotus platform hosts 20% of the total archive of the national television. It was no simple undertaking, says Fivia Savva, project manager of Herodotus II: “Choosing the material was not an easy task. We had to choose only 400 hours of the material, from a total of two and a half thousand hours”

The total amount of the investment by the Digital Herodotus II, which launched in 2017 and ran until 2020, was around one million euros. Some 85% of the budget was funded by the EU