Instruments: The violin [en geman touton, enjen pattihozoumon]

Scholarship seems to agree that bowed instruments weren't around in the ancient world, and use of the bow probably has a central Asian origin (see e.g. kobyz, and various other similarly shaped instruments such as the Nepali sarangi, or the morin khuur). Among the Western violin's ancestors are the now extinct Byzantine lyra (which apparently was tuned like the Dodecanese and Thracian lyra, with a middle drone string). And there's a long history of the transformation of the medieval rebec into the violin, which evolved from the Italian Renaissance onwards.

There's some speculation about whether the pear-shaped lyra was in use in Cyprus prior to or alongside the violin (see this article by Anogianakis, p. 18), which must have been imported around the 19th century, probably late. If this were the case, it would not necessarily be because the lyra was imported from Crete - there's also the hegit, played in nearby South-Eastern regions of Turkey:



One problem with the speculative supposition of the use of lyres in Cypriot music is that using the left-hand's fingernails to play, as the lyra and hegit demand, doesn't allow (or at least makes it very inconvenient) to press on two strings simultaneously, which apparently Cypriot fkiolaries [violinists] do all the time.
There are, nevertheless, some lyra-like instrumens which are played like the violin by pressing on the strings, e.g. in this dance (Καβοντόρικος Καραλίδικος) from Ag. Demetrios in Euboea, which sounds a bit like this Cypriot karsilamas.

This type of speculation serves to exclude another speculative possibility, that of the use of the type of gourd or coconut based spike-fiddle that abounds in the middle eastern world, from the kamancheh used in Persia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, to the the joza of Iraqi maqam, to the Arab rebab in its many forms (used e.g. by the gypsies of the lower Nile, or to accompany epic poetry), to the Turkish kabak kemane which is made from water-gourds.
Water-gourds abound in Cyprus, and dried decorated gourds are a commonplace sample of 'traditional crafts'. And apparently gourds were used for making musical instruments in Cyprus: Anogianakis (p. 72) includes a photograph of a laouto made from a large dried gourd by some Paphite youngsters.
While thinking about this, it dawned on me that there's an odd Greek-Cypriot expression that I had once heard, which goes: "εν κκελλέ τούτη, έντζιεν κολόκα για φκιολίν' ('it's a head, not a gourd for a violin'). So it could be likely that herein lies stored a memory of a violin-like instrument made from a gourd.
If one had to engage in imaginative speculation, then, it would seem that the rebab, and not the Cretan lyra, is the way to go. And since we're already engaged in speculation, why not go even further and assume the existence of a variety of instruments made from gourds, including (based on the photographic evidence, limited though it might be) laouta-like instruments, and even gourd-based tamboura/saz-like ones, similar to this baglamas from Crete.