ERT's roots reach back further than most of modern Greek broadcasting. It began in 1938 as the Radio Broadcasting Service, transmitting from the Zappeion hall in central Athens. Through the Axis occupation it was renamed and pressed into other purposes; after liberation, in 1945, it was rebuilt as the National Radio Foundation, and in 1950 it stood among the 23 founding members of the European Broadcasting Union. Television came slowly - test broadcasts in 1965, full service in 1966 - and for the first two decades a Greek TV set glowed only from late afternoon until somewhere between midnight and two in the morning. Round-the-clock broadcasting, three channels, the familiar ET1, NET and ET3, all of that came later.

There is a sound that generations of Greeks associate with the act of switching on the radio. ERT's interval signal - the chime that marks the gaps between programmes - is built from the opening bars of an old folk song, Tsopanakos Imouna, "Once I Was a Shepherd Boy." The same melody serves as the corporation's theme music, a small thread of national memory woven into the broadcast day. Behind it sits the largest audiovisual archive in Greece, a vault of recorded sound and image stretching across the country's modern history: the voices, the music, the news bulletins, the broadcasts of the 2004 Athens Olympics, which ERT carried as host broadcaster.

By 2013 Greece was deep in financial crisis, and the government framed ERT as a luxury it could no longer afford - a "haven of waste," the spokesman called it, even though the broadcaster ran a surplus funded by a licence fee outside the state budget. The shutdown order took effect within hours. The nearest transmitters to Athens fell silent at around 23:17. Twenty seconds later, the communist party's channel began relaying ERT's signal, until it too was ordered off the air. Around 2,500 to 2,656 employees lost their jobs at a stroke. The European Broadcasting Union condemned the closure that same night, declaring "profound dismay" and keeping ERT on its council on the grounds that it was, whatever Athens said, still a broadcaster.

What happened next was extraordinary. Locked out of much of their own infrastructure, ERT's journalists improvised. The EBU beamed their feed across Europe by satellite; striking workers ran transmitters they still controlled. Even after the government lobbied a satellite operator to cut their capacity on 24 October, the resistance held. More than nine months after the shutdown order, the striking staff were still operating seventeen radio stations and a single television channel, ET3, broadcasting from regional studios and the ET3 building in Thessaloniki - on FM, on shortwave, and always on the web. Greece's highest administrative court had ruled the closure unlawful within a week of the announcement, ordering the state to maintain a public broadcaster.

The government tried to fill the silence with a successor. NERIT - New Hellenic Radio, Internet and Television - launched in stages through 2013 and 2014, preceded by a stopgap channel simply called Public Television. It never won the public over. When Alexis Tsipras, who as opposition leader had branded the original shutdown "illegal," became prime minister, his government moved to undo it. On 11 June 2015 - two years almost to the day after the screen went black - ERT returned to the air, replacing NERIT at six in the morning. The shepherd boy's tune played again, and the largest archive in Greece had its broadcaster back.