Dodecanese campaign lies in the south-eastern Aegean Sea, and had been under Italian control since the Italo-Turkish War in 1911. During Italian rule, the strategically well-placed islands became a focus of Italian colonial ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Rhodes, the largest of the islands, was a major military and aerial base. The island of Leros, with its excellent deep-water port of Lakki (Portolago), was transformed into a heavily fortified aeronautical base, "the Corregidor of the Mediterranean", as Benito Mussolini, the Italian leader, boasted. An early British attempt to contest Italian control of the Dodecanese, codenamed Operation Abstention, was thwarted in February 1941,
Cypriot Greek varieties, along with the dialects of the Dodecanese and Chios (with which it shares several phonological phenomena). Though Cypriot Greek tends to be regarded as a dialect by its speakers, it is unintelligible to speakers of Standard Modern Greek without adequate prior exposure. Greek-speaking Cypriots are diglossic in the vernacular Cypriot Greek (the "low" variety) and Standard Modern Greek (the "high" variety). Cypriot Greek is itself a dialect continuum with an emerging koine. argue that diglossia has given way to a "post-diglossic [dialectal] continuum [...] a quasi-continuous spread of overlapping varieties". Studies of the phonology of Cypriot Greek are few