Domna Samiou: The Keeper of Greek Folk Tradition Is Singing with the Angels

In Domna Samiou a modern Homer lived: taking a rich, oral tradition and compiling decade after decade, century after century of culture into an opus of incomparable magnitude.

Domna Samiou was born by Greek parents, refugees from Asia Minor. And it was her cultural background, steeped in traditional and at the same time cosmopolitan music from the region of Smyrni/Ismir, which prompted her to later immerse herself in music: byzantine music, the mother load of all folk music in the Eastern Mediterranean, through to Greek folk music and the music of magna Grecia. She travelled the lengths and breadths of Greece, from the high mountains of Rodopi and Pindos to the lowlands of Thessaly down to Crete and the islands, always carrying a small recorder and seeking the elders: the keepers of the great oral tradition ever since the Homeric times...

She died at 84, active and joyous to the end. May the earth that lies above you be light, oh Grecian one.



Folk song Tzivaeri, the mother's lament of migration



Cretan song "The Sound of the Chains" (As heavy as the irons hang, so will the black clothes)


Thracian folk song "If I were a bird to fly" (to go abroad and see my beloved again)

Note how similar the tenuta, the harmonies and the solemnity of the voice performance is with byzantine ecclesiastical hymns.



Song Black Sea, modern orchestration & additional lyrics mixed with a Thracian folk dance song) by D.Savvopoulos

"Φταίνε τα τραγούδια του, φταίει κι ο λυράρης
μα φταίει κι ο ίδιος του ο λαός γιατί 'ναι μαραζιάρης
Μαύρη θάλασσα κλειστή, μακρινές μου πεδιάδες
πίσω από τις συμπληγάδες"

The songs are to blame, the lyra player too.
But it's its people to blame most because they like lamenting to.
Black sea, closed, faraway lowlands
behind the Symbligades*.

*translation by me

"Only Greeks and Brits Were Left Standing": Why Europe Stands to Lose if Greece is Forced Out

Greek women & men from Greek People's Liberation Front during WWII

"there is also an ethical argument: modern Europe exists thanks to ancient Greece and modern Greece exists thanks to the European powers that guaranteed its independence in the early 19th century. Since then, Greeks have more than repaid their debt. They fought to defend western ideals and interests in every corner of the world – from the trenches of Europe, to the hills of Korea and the deserts of the Gulf. When Germans fell into the darkness of Nazism, when the empires of old (Belgium, Netherlands, France) surrendered within days, only Greeks and Brits were left standing. Ask those who were cowering from the pounding of Luftwaffe in the tube stations of London, during the long winter of 1940, and they will tell you that the only pieces of good news they were getting for months, were coming from the Greek mountains."

From an article on the Guardian on "What Europe Loses if Greece is Forced Out" mentioning several reasons beyond the ethical ones: Greece being the barrier to the tons of illegal immigration from Asia, the Nato efforts to assure stability in the Balkans, the undiminished geopolitical strategic point that Greece and Cyprus present in the area, betraying the sacrifices already made in the name of European directive.

"We should remember that those who sacrifice Greece on the altar of speculation, hoping that economic fascism will be satisfied with this small country and that they will escape ...those are the same ones who reliquinshed Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, hoping that this new prey offered him would suffice, after they had already reliquinshed the democratic Spain."
from the Nantes announcement on "Je Suis Grec aussi, solidarité avec le peuple Grecque"

click to enlarge

The Dec. 1, 1940 New York Times editorial reported: “The hypnotism of gloom has become dangerous as the wishful thinking that preceded it in the prewar years. We can thank the people and soldiers of Greece for ridding our minds of a foul superstition…It will be the glory of modern Greece in history to have shattered the myth of invincibility of the Axis and to have given to all free men a new proof of the worth of courage.”

Further Reading:
"Heroes Fight Like Greeks, The Greek Resistance Against the Axis Powers in WWII" (Hardcover) by Ronald J. Drez
"Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44" [Paperback] by Mark Mazower


pics via the National Herald and absinthemakeyouawhore.tumblr.com

"Study of the Classics is the Foundation of Our Culture"

Clip from the 1994 film The Browning Version, a remake directed by Mike Figgis, starring Albert Finney as Andrew Crocker-Harris, an embittered and disliked teacher of Greek and Latin at a British public school, forced to retire on pretext of his health and unhappily married to a wife who is unfaithful to him and wounds him constantly.
In his despair he finds parallels between his plight and Agamemnon, the Greek king coming back from the Trojan War only to be murdered savagely by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, as told in the tragic play Agamemnon by Aeschylus.

Humble Herbs, Rustic Roots

There is something about the herbs of Greece: They're sprouting with the insolence of the race, haphazardly and defiantly, surely against all odds. They're fragrant with a rustic honesty that is superior to artificial pretence. And they stand best when they stand proud on a most formal of setting: a wedding procession.

Shot on the island of Sifnos, Greece, summer 2011. Click to enlarge.
Photo copyrighted by Elena Vosnaki

Two Statues: "It was for them we fought"

George Seferis, the Nobel prize poet (and Greece's ambassador to London in the 1960s) wrote of a beloved leader of the revolution, General Makriyannis; Makriyannis had no formal education and in his old age taught himself to read. In his battling days he had been able to preserve two ancient statues until the liberation. At that time he found that some soldiers were thinking of selling them.

Seferis quotes Makriyannis: "I took these soldiers aside and told them this: You must not give away these things, not even for ten thousand talers; you must not let them leave the country; it was for them we fought".

And Seferis wrote: "You see it is not a great scholar, nor an archaeologist speaking. It is a shepherd's son from Roumelia, his body covered with wounds: 'It was for them we fought'.

~from the memorandum submitted by Jules Dassin to the British Parliament (on occasion of a plea to return the Elgin marbles)

On this fateful day, may we remember "it was for them we fought" and not be swayed by false dilemmas and hyenas: where one head gets cut off, two spring up again. You must burn the cancerous in order to get rid of it once and for all.

Further reading:  
Makriyannis: The Memoirs of General Makriyannis 1797-1864 (ed. & trans. H.A. Lidderdale), Oxford: OUP, 1966 (in English).

The Wedding Musicians

photo by Robert Brun/flickr

Wedding band on the island of Alonissos: Sparse, simple, focused. Feast and make merry because by tomorrow we might be dead.

Rough Terrain

by dungodung/flickr

Greek pebbles on the ground of the Serbian military cemetery, Zejtinlik, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Rough terrain breeds men who're tough, said Greek historian Herodotus. A land between rock and sea. The contrast of roughness and calm: so Greek.