Booking Someone Else's Culture

She did not arrive in Cyprus with a business plan. She arrived with a laptop, online university classes to finish, and an assignment: five months as a teaching assistant in Dali, during the particular strangeness of a pandemic that had made the whole world feel provisional.

Niki grew up in Thessaloniki surrounded by the things that form a person quietly and thoroughly: piano lessons, foreign languages, Greek folk dances, and the early understanding that culture is not something you visit in a museum but something you live inside of, daily, without always noticing. Her first encounter with other cultures came through a school exchange programme that sent her, still a teenager, into the company of people whose daily choreography was entirely different from her own. The experience did not leave her. It accumulated.

By the time she reached university, she had discovered Erasmus and recognised it immediately as a continuation of something already underway. Youth exchanges and training courses in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. More than three hundred people from different cultural backgrounds, each one adding a layer to her understanding of what she shared with others and what was specifically, irreducibly her own. She learned languages, digital tools, project management, the particular skill of presenting herself clearly in front of audiences. She learned, most importantly, that curiosity about other cultures is itself a transferable competence.

The voluntary programme brought her to Cyprus permanently. And Cyprus, on her first day in a local cultural centre, gave her a moment she did not forget.

An elderly Cypriot welcomed her with coffee, handmade delicacies, and a conversation about the modern history of the island. It was a small, unhurried gesture of inclusion, and it planted something specific in her: the knowledge that this history, this warmth, this particular texture of local life, was at risk of being forgotten. Modern society, she observed, tends to move past the local on its way to the global. She made herself a quiet promise to do something about that.

Then science did not pay her bills.

She says this plainly, without self-pity, because it is simply what happened. She had a degree. She had a job. She did not have a car, which on a small island limits everything, and she did not have enough income to make the life she was trying to build feel stable. So she did what people do when necessity and curiosity arrive at the same time: she started thinking. She tried a travel blog. She tried a dropshipping jewellery store. She tried candles. None of them were the thing. But each one was practice, and practice is never wasted.

She took courses online, mostly from Greek NGOs, because Cyprus had none. This detail lodged itself in her story as evidence of a gap she was already, without fully realising it, preparing to fill.

Book My Culture began as a specific idea with a specific logic: that the best way to experience a place is to make something in it, alongside the people who live there. Not to observe local culture from a comfortable distance, but to enter it, briefly and genuinely, through the hands. Make your own cheese on a Tuscan farm. Shape your own jewellery in Athens. Visit a local apiary in Cyprus. The name came from the concept itself: booking someone else's culture for a while, carrying it forward as something you made rather than something you photographed.

She went to Italy for a month and a half through Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs to test the idea in practice and refine her understanding of digital marketing. She came back and launched. She built a remote team of freelance sales agents. She grew the platform to more than twenty experiences across six countries. She attracted the attention of Dragon's Den Greece. She began conversations with investors.

Through the HERS process, writing gave Niki the form her story needed: direct, honest, and forward-facing, like the woman herself. She did not arrive in Cyprus as an entrepreneur. She arrived as a scientist with a promise to an elderly stranger over Cypriot coffee. Everything that followed was the work of honouring it.

HERS

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