The fiddlers featured on The Cypriot Fiddler were men of limited financial means, who worked in the fields or had other occupations, and who took up their instruments whenever there was need for musicians. Being a fiddler in mid-twentieth-century Cyprus was therefore a part-time, seasonal profession, held alongside the musicians’ main job. The only exception were a few urban musicians, who played and taught music for a living.

The mores of traditional Cypriot society dictated that no women could be fiddlers. As in many other small, close-knit societies in the Mediterranean and beyond, in Cyprus too there was a strict separation between the public and private spheres. While men could perform freely both in private and in public, women could only sing or play music at home, in front of close family and friends. Playing music or singing outside the private, domestic sphere was enough to label a woman as ‘immoral’. However, some women did manage to play music in public too, without fear of this label. These were either disabled women (e.g., blind), who had to work to make a living, or women whose physique or behaviour somehow differed from the perceived female stereotype of the time (e.g., those frequently labelled by others as ‘antrogenaitzes’; i.e., ‘manly women’).