Exploiting academic rigor for storytelling
Two islands, one story
When the city of Acre fell in 1291, the Knights Hospitaller fled to Cyprus. Fifteen years later they sailed from Cyprus to take Rhodes, which they held from 1309 until 1522–23. Cyprus had its own story: a Lusignan kingdom that lasted from 1192 to 1489, with castles, abbeys and cathedrals that outlived it. The two islands were neighbours, partners and rivals, and their histories kept crossing the water. The REBOOT project has now put that shared history online, monument by monument. The Rhodes and Cyprus narratives cover fifty places, 40 on Rhodes and ten in Cyprus, plus an introduction to each series: 52 pages in all.
One page for every place
Each monument has a statement of significance: a short page that says what the place is, how it came to be, why it matters and how sure we are about all of it. Every page follows the same plan, so a reader who knows one can find their way around the next.
The pages are careful about what they claim. Each statement is marked as documented fact, scholarly inference, tradition or fiction, and where the sources disagree the page says so instead of quietly choosing one. A date that three books give three ways stays three dates, with the reason.
From heritage to stories and games
The statements are the factual base for what REBOOT builds next: stories and games set in these places. A good story needs a solid ground to stand on, and the pages give it one. The project team has also assigned each place a game play location (GPL), so that the heritage record and the game design can be developed side by side.
One rule keeps the two apart. A story may imagine; the record may not. Where a page carries a story, it is kept separate from the evidence and labelled as invented, so a reader can enjoy the telling without mistaking it for the record.
Built with AI, checked by people
The pages were drafted with an AI assistant, working from named sources, and every claim was checked by a person. The work was not error-free, and the errors taught as much as the successes. In one early plan, a section was called "Lusignan Cyprus after Rhodes". It read as a sequence, but the kingdom of Cyprus lasted from 1192 to 1489, before, during and after the Hospitaller years on Rhodes. The title was corrected, and the lesson stayed: small words like after and first carry a lot of history.
That experience became a training pack, From Source to Statement, for students who want to work with generative AI on heritage places. It teaches how to brief an AI, how to label evidence, how to verify, and how to declare AI use honestly, including a chapter on the EU AI Act. The pages remain working drafts: each states its status, and specialist review is still to come.
Explore the narratives
All 52 pages are open to read at rhodes-reboot.netlify.app, with a hub page that groups the monuments and lets you search. Start with the Rhodes introduction, which now includes a short film, then follow the Street of the Knights, the harbours and the gates, and cross to the castles and abbeys of northern Cyprus.
Teachers and students can take the training pack further and work on the pages themselves. Follow REBOOT at ivetagr.org/reboot for the next stories.
REBOOT is an Erasmus+ KA220-HED project, No. 2025-1-CY01-KA220-HED-000351980. [Add the official Erasmus+ co-funding disclaimer here.]
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