As post-Independence but still ethnically divided Cyprus enters Europe and speaks the idiom of multiculturalism, the fear of Others and otherness become re-inscribed in its cultural self-projections and the politics of the history of education. This article argues that the post-Independence fascination with roots and derision for otherness has been marked by a double colonial legacy: the colonial "Othering" of Cypriots as a "hybrid genus", and the resistance to colonial usurpations of educational control by tainting every cultural contact under or through colonial rule as de-Hellenization. Focusing on the transculturation of local educational idioms during colonial times, the paper suggests that the nationalist discourse that enveloped Greek Cypriot anti-colonialist educational politics was actually hybrid. It involved a partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the Empire and an ideological borrowing from the Hellenic diaspora. The re-iteration of this hybridity is proposed as a task for postcolonial education.