The Cypriot High Commission closes its cultural year with the Limassol ensemble ANTAMA at Cyprus House — folk song on love, migration and memory, and carols to finish.
ANTAMA means together, and the trio founded in Limassol in 2010 has spent fifteen years carrying a repertoire that survives almost entirely by being played. Cypriot folk music is an oral tradition, learned by ear from the generation before it, and the island’s dispersal after 1974 took most of its singers out of the villages that held it. Anna Aristeidou sings and plays percussion, Nicolas Vryoni sings and plays the violin, and Grigoris Ioannou sings and plays the lute, and all three move between voice and instrument inside the same song, as this was done before anybody wrote it down.
They have taken the programme across Europe, North America and the Middle East, and bring it to St James’s Square with songs of love, migration, community and memory, and carols from Cyprus and Greece to close the year. Cyprus House on St James’s Square is the high commission’s own building, which is why the evening costs nothing to attend.
Alongside them the ceramic artist Maria Michael throws a traditional koukoumara during the performance — the water jar that would have been in the room — putting the island’s musical and ceramic traditions in the same hour. The evening runs about two hours and is the last date in the Cultural Section’s 2026 programme. Admission is free and the seating is limited enough that part of the room will stand.