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Cyprus and Greek Cypriot Collections at the Library of Congress

Materials in the General and Microform Collections

General Collections

Cypriot reference collection. Library of Congress European Reading Room.

The majority of materials pertaining to Greek Cyprus at the Library of Congress are in the general collections. They are simultaneously embedded within the larger Modern Greek Collection. The Library of Congress holds about 24,895 catalogued materials about Cyprus. They include: monographs, periodicals including newspapers and journals, maps, manuscripts, legal materials, photos, prints and drawings, audio recordings, films and personal narratives, as well as web archives.  They range in age from the sixteenth century and the early modern period, more broadly, to the present day. As is the case with its Greek counterpart, the Cypriot collections' history reflects the Library's growing interest in the Mediterranean region after WWII and the Cold War period. The collections are multidisciplinary and capable of supporting a variety of research projects with varying degrees of depth. They span across all disciplines with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture. Those two subjects, respectively, are collected by the National Library of Medicine and the National Agriculture Library.

The Library of Congress Cypriot collections are particularly strong in the history and archaeology of the island. The literature of the island is featured in the works of the island's Greek and Turkish-speaking writers, but also in those of the English and other foreign authors who lived and/or traveled there. Thus, the twentieth and twenty-first century works of Lawrence Durell, Nikos Nikolaides, Loukis Akritas, Pavlos Liasides, Kostas Montes are well represented in the collection.

The Cypriot reference collection at the European Reading Room features 150 works. Overall, these reference materials provide good coverage of Cypriot history, religious and church history, art and archaelogy with numerous volumes on monuments and museums. The multi-volume set of the Kypros Encyclopedia has individual volumes devoted to Cypriot artists, history and culture, church, arts, and literature, geography and the economy, as well as general studies. The same is true for the 20-volume set of the Great Cypriot Encyclopedia, Μεγαλη Κηπριακη Εγκηκλοπεδια. Paschalis Kitromilides' and Marios Evriviades'  bibliography of Cyprus is a comprehensive resource guide into all facets of Cypriot studies and, therefore, valuable to all levels of scholarship.

Nicosia telephone directory 1951. Library of Congress General Collections.

A smaller number of reference works highlight different aspects of the Greek Cypriot language and literature, as well as the country's educational system and Cyprus' relationship to Turkey.

The Library of Congress also subscribes to a number of academic and official publications concerned with Cyprus. Of these, the bilingual Cyprus Review, which comes out twice a year from the University of Nicosia Press, aims to provide multidisciplinary coverage of humanities and social science topics related to the country to an international audience. The Library also holds a number of current and historic academic journals related to Cypriot archaeology and government statistics. They span the British colonial period to the present day. The same is also true of official publications.

Finally, the Library of Congress collections are unique in that they include international telephone directories from Cyprus. The Library of Congress has a number of catalogued and uncatalogued telephone directories from Cyprus published between 1943 and 1991. Uncataloged telephone directories from Cyprus may be identified using the guide Cyprus: Address and Telephone Directories. The uncatalogued collection contains 40 country-wide directories, and 10 city and regional directories. For uncataloged items in the general collections, a researcher must request the items by completing a call slip in the Main Reading Room or asking in person for help in the European Reading Room.

Microform Collections

The Modern Greek Cypriot collections in the Library of Congress feature a diverse collection of materials in microfilm and microfiche formats in several different European languages. They include a variety of reports compiled during and after British rule, travel books, and archival documents which are relevant to the study of Cyprus during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular. The items described below include microfilm and microfiche sets found in the European Reading Room, the Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room, as well as the Microform and Electronic Resource Center (MERC) and the general collections.

The titles below also link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.