Drapetsona is a suburb located to the west of Piraeus Port, today part of the united municipality of Keratsini-Drapetsona.

After the Greece-Turkey war in 1922, which led to the Asia Minor Catastrophe – the destruction of the Greek city Smyrni and the movement of masses of Greek refugees into this area, it became an overcrowded and poverty-ridden slum, a situation that had mostly remained for as long as until 1968.

In his autobiography, the Rebetika musician Giannis Papaioannou describes his first days as a refugee in this area, and the humiliation they experienced at the hands of the official bureaucracy as well as of the local residents, who considered them as different, inferior, Greeks:

“When we arrived… they put us in some warehouses full of worms…[then they] put us in quarantine and were putting our clothes in a furnace, the locals were stealing our clothes, everything we had, even our shoes; who can forget! Hunger, misery and especially despises – how can those things ever leave your mind?” After some time in tents, Giannis tells, the refugees built wood shacks for themselves, where they lived for a long time. Ιn the 30s they got very small apartments in small houses which were built for them.

Many writers and observers focused at the urban folk subculture that had developed in those areas: countless crimes, hashish dens… The special ethics, behavior and dress of men called Mangas, the underground music, the Rebetika… but in essence these people were heroes. “Uprooted people, with broken families who counted their dead, fought under difficult conditions and stood on their feet with great effort and sacrifice.” Immediately after they built the shack Giannis “set to work. I had to feed myself, my mother and my grandmother.” Not only did they have a poor starting point, but they also had been through difficult times, including prosecutions by the dictatorship in the 30s, the German occupation and the civil war in the 40s.

In 1960 the government decided to demolish the refugees’ houses. This stirred up a huge protest, which inspired composer Mikis Theodorakis and poet Taos Leivanditis. M. Theodorakis said: “for those people it was a fight for survival, a struggle of life or death when the bulldozers went and took down their houses.” This is how the song “Drapetsona” was born. “Drapetsona” describes the reality of a difficult situation that is converted “into stubbornness, pride and the desire for a better life.” (Sotiris Pastakas)

Built with blood, every stone and sorrow

every  nail is bitterness and sob

but when we were returning in the evening from work

I and she dreams and kisses

The wind and the rain beat it

but it was port and hug and  the sweetest hope

ah, our little house, and this one had soul

Take our wreath, take our geranium

in Drapetsona we don’t have life anymore

hold my hand and let’s go my star

we will live even though we are poor

A little bed and a cradle in the corner

on the leaking roof stars and birds

each of its door sweat and sigh

each of its window a sky

But when the night was coming

in the narrow alley the kids were having fun

ah, our little house, and this one had heart

Take our wreath, take our geranium

in Drapetsona we don’t have life anymore

hold my hand and let’s go my star

we will live even though we are poor

Dimitris Basis sings in a television show in front of its first interpreter Grigoris Bitikotsis:

********

In the years after the formation of the state of Israel, this country also experienced mass waves of immigration. People who were prosecuted in their native lands, Holocaust survivors and others, hundreds of thousands people flooded the country in a short time. This resulted in immigrants’ camps in which people lived in poverty in tents, wooden shacks and in derelict abandoned houses.

Two of the new-comers were singer Yehuda Poliker’s father who came from Thessalonki, and the poet Yaakov Gilad’s mother. Both were Auschwitz survivors. The song “Window to the Mediterranean” is written as a letter by a new immigrant to his beloved woman who stayed behind. He describes his difficulties a way reminiscent of “Drapetsona”, but he urges her to follow him – there is hope here:

I had promised to write as I left

and I have not written for a long time

now I miss you so much

it is a pity; it is a pity that you are not here.

After I had arrived in Yafo

hopes were born out of despair

I found a room and a half

on an abandoned building’s roof

There is a cot here 

if three of us want to sleep

you and me and the child

in front a window facing the Mediterranean

And maybe from afar there is a one to a million chance

and maybe from afar some happiness sneaks to the window

Nineteen Fifty, end of December

outside a war of winds

snow has suddenly dropped

white reminds me of the forgotten

The wound is still open

if only you were here with my now

I would surely tell you

what a letter could not tell

Here if you wish you will have a home

and you will have lots of me

children laugh at twilight

in front a window facing the Mediterranean

And maybe from afar there is a one to a million chance

and maybe from afar some happiness sneaks to the window

These two great songs are so different in style but are so similar in one thing: the hope that emerges in difficult times. The firm Zebekiko style of “Drapetsona” challenges the difficulties and concludes with “we will live even though we are poor!”, and in the letter intimate style of “Window to theMediterranean” the writer calls his beloved one to join him in the hardships because “maybe from afar some happiness sneaks to the window”. Somehow you feel that they will take this chance… “We discovered that there was always some hope that kept them (our parents) alive in the death camps and also in the postwar years,” Says Yaakov Gilad. “They did not dare to give up on hope, this hope that is the foundation of humanity in all places. Giving up on that hope meant the victory of the devil.”

http://www.snhell.gr/testimonies/writer.asp?id=88

http://www.koutouzis.gr/drapetsona.htm

http://www.poiein.gr/archives/1548/index.html

Loudovikos ton Anogeion-Loudovikos of Anogeia is the stage name of the singer, composer and writer Giorgos Dramountanis .

His pronoun tells of his origin village, Anogeia, which is located on a majestic site at the foot of mount Idi, or Psiloritis (“High Mountain”), the highest mountain in Crete.

In this region there is a cave in which, according to folklore, Zeus was born. The hard topographical surface helped the local resistance in times of occupation: of the Turks in the 19^th century and the Germans in the 1940s, which generated stories of the bravery of the locals. Several well-known songwriters and musicians originate in this region.

Dramountanis was born in 1951.  ”In winter I remember white.  I would see the sea for the first time at 11… I learned to play mandolin from childhood; then I learned music listening to the elders playing the lyre and singing serenades.” However, he thought of himself as a painter. His course had been determined in 1979 as Manos Hatzidakis heard him singing with friends and the mandolin: “he showed me [how] to paint with music and songs since then…”  He adapted a nickname as the Anogeians who are, as he says, “Teasers” use to do to everyone….

His father was a shepherd, a man like the Anogeian shepherds “that their eyes are full of mountains, full of colors and seasons. These genuine and true people, with their added connection to the environment are my great teachers.”

“I lived with six brothers and sisters in the basement of a small house with the animals, and I remember all those moments that are considered difficult for the young, to me were magical moments; little food, much appetite, much fun, many songs, much music. All affirm that in scarcity resides the significance and in the scarcity resides the joy.”

“…. My father would stare  at the dark clouds, and turning his head, would sniff the air: ‘I notice the smell of snow,’ he said, and hastily made ready with his brother to ascend the mountain, and  that same night, as they took the sheep down to the village, it had already started to snow…”

Here is a song dedicated to a father – a man and a hero, sung by Mario. It is said that this song is dedicated to all fathers… Loudovikos composed the music and the words are by Filippos Grapsas :

To grew next to you
how many times I flaunted 
the light of your heart
the pride of the look
the smell of the embrace
your tenderness

Who is passing outside on the street
with a cloud on his shoulder
Saint George who is returning injured
in the 40s from the mountains of Albania…

Loudovikos described himself as an “observer and collector of beautiful moments”, a latter-day fairy-tale storyteller: Ismene is a lonely woman who all her life is at the distaff and the wool spins. When one day she ran out of wool, she watched the dense fog that has come down on Charmatousa, an area of Mount Psiloritis, and thought it was wool. She took her distaff and went up there.

Kalliopi Veta sings Loudovikos’ song on Ismene, a clip with English titles:

“Life has to be lived naturally”, says Loudovikos ton Anogeion. “To speak slowly, walk slowly, to rejoice with small things in life, a shot of a Raki, a little cheese, some bread, an olive, greens…” You have to live in the moment. The present is in your hand; the past is yours too but not the future which you can only hope for. All people are busy doing their best in the present time so they may live better in the future, but the best does not always come, and all those who are chasing more consumption are always unhappy when they don’t get all of it, and anyway, a bigger car or a bigger house does not bring you happiness. “You see a big car and a man hidden from the rear through tinted glass; it is the most impersonal and useless thing. But you see an old man on a motorbike or a bicycle who with a bag of his purchases, garden stuff and he goes along slowly… You see that he is in accordance with the environment… and he is happy and courteous.”

Loudovikos feels that life in the village has given him a deep understanding of man and the world: “If you know the silence of a man and empathize with it you will also understand his thoughts… and momentary things, small things, lead me to understand the world better, to find the direction of man in the beauty and wisdom.” And for that, “the greatest joy in me is that I grasped only that I exist…”

Living in the moment goes with friendship and love. Friendship is goodness and kindness but love is the most powerful force in the world and “you can not say that you love life or human beings, or your environment, if you have never felt sorrow or pain. Love is born and grows, initially, from the pain, so as to repay you…”

What is the color of love?
Who will find it for me?

To be red like the sun
it will burn like fire
yellow like the moon 
it will have loneliness

to have the color of the sky
it will be far
to be black like night 
it will be sly

What is the color of love?
Who will find it for me?

To be a white cloud 
leaves and passes by
to be a white jasmine
spoil onto the blossom

To be the rainbow
which can not be caught
all the time seems like I am near
and all the time it disappears

What is the color of love?
Who will find it for me?

Loudovikos ton Anogeion:

In a certain place in our planet there is a church. And in this church there is a priest. Every evening after all lights are turned off and quietness prevails all around, he gets up to his room, and then, in solitude and serenity, he listens to the one and only music album he possesses. The sounds fill the room and flow out the door and into the church itself…and the priest feels then that he and God are closer to each other…

That album is “Songs for the Months” by Eleftheria Arvanitaki. Twelve songs, as the number of the months, and three short orchestral pieces, two of them are dedicated to the Equinox days. The composer Dimitris Papadimitriou had set music to the work of various poets, beginning with Sappho the poetess from Lesvos, who lived in the 7^th century BC, going to the 1920s Kostas Karyotakis and the one who loved him Maria Polidouri, Noble Prize winner Odysseas Elytis, Michalis Ganas, and one folk song.

Here is the opening song by Sappho, and then the song, “The Grievance”, from the cycle:

The Grievance

Odysseas Elytis

Here in the middle of the road

time has come to say that

other things are those I love

for other places for other places I set out

Really and not really

I say it and I confess

As if it were another and not me 

I marched through life

However much one is careful

However much he chases something

Always always it will be too late

There is no second life

Why “Songs for the Months”?  The composer Dimitris Papadimitriou writes that months, not years, are the perception of time to which our experiences, emotions and sentiments are related. Years are chronological units to count time with, no more, he says. Months, however, in their cyclicality, give you the “familiarity of true friends. September will be forever the ‘Grapes Harvester’ and March will be the ‘Flayer’ (because of rapid and extreme weather changes)… and then December with the snowballs… you will sleep with eiderdowns and you will dream August and mackerels and fat months. The months are like statues that watch our steps, observing silently in the squares and main roads of our life… under the same statue every child had passed and now is waiting for the first date. Under another statue he won and then lost a love, a friend. And it was September, yes, September that we were holding umbrellas and the movies were starting… but of what year?

Dimitris says that if we consider months and not years to be the time of the poets and their art, it becomes that a B.C. century poetess can be very close in time to a 20^th century one… maybe only one month away… In this way, “poets and musicians, we met in the circle of the months, like children in a garden, at Eleftheria’s garden… we spoke by poems on life, on friends… on love, and we didn’t avoid talking a little about death… fortunately April came then and cut the conversation…”

Let’s go again to the miracles

 Michalis Ganas

I will come to take you one bright moon evening

in streets the lights are lit for love

green lights in a row

and in the mirrors two moons

Let’s go again to the miracles

as once

and if love do not let us in half

we will moor at Aegina and Siros and Ikaria

loosen the ropes

silver path in my bow

moonlight on the water

a good sailing body, my steamship

take us to the wide open sea

I will become a dream and I will come to put you to sleep

and all we dreamed together to remind you

dreams that we were making both

over the same pillow

I think that this album is a miracle, or rather, a series of miracles. Firstly, in some way it came out of the blue. The year is 1996, a time when setting poems to music had already been unpopular for many years, neglected by creators and performers, as well as by audiences. One can say that the second miracle is that there is no big story behind it. It just happened. Eleftheria heard Papadimitriou’s music to a Karyotakis’ poem and this was the spark that lit the fire. Then came “The Grievance” by Elytis, which the Nobel Prize winner managed to hear short time before his death, and then came another… and another… But the most striking miracle is of course the work itself, with the beautiful lyrical music and splendid orchestration which fits Eleftheria’s voice perfectly, and the magical lyrics; the composer describes them as “pure and clear, significant, simple and explicit”… and above all completeness and the musical balancing of the whole album which gives you a sense of travel on the wave of human emotions to a magic, internal point of the universe in which time has other meaning…

“…And it was all fine and perfect… and Eleftheria began to sing…” and the people loved it… acquiring this album of poems’ music in masses. This was the fourth miracle.

The summer took everything away

Odysseas Elytis

A video with English subtitles

When talking about Greek soul music at the first half of the 20^th Century, many will rightly focus on Rebetika, the music that had developed in the poverty of the slums and their hashish dens, which were overcrowded by refugees from the Turkish-Greek war of 1922.

However, there was another music genre at the time, actually European, which was popular with the higher economic classes, and at its best it was no less of a genuine reflection of the artist’s soul. A prominent artist in this genre of music is Cleon Triandafillou, known by his stage name Attik.

He was born in 1885 in Egypt to a very rich cotton producer and merchant. The family migrated to Athens and around that time his father died. His mother had a great passion for arts, literature and music. She used to conduct “music hours” in which she and her children played the piano, and she would not hesitate to hire a whole train to Paris for her family and the servants, so as not to miss Caruso in the opera.

Cleon’s sensitivity and appeal to sounds was revealed at an early age. He liked the droning hum of flies and “to watch [them] on the windows. How they fell in love, how they go two by two and how one fly speaks to another”.

Cleon studied music in Paris and very quickly became a sought-after young musician, lyricist and performer in Paris and over Europe,America and Japan. A serious illness of his sister, and the deterioration in the family’s business hampered his international success and brought him back to Athens. Here he developed further his composing and lyrics’ writing abilities.

He was married three times and he loved each of his wives very much. His first, Mari-Eleni died just a few months after they had lost their baby son. His second great love Marika left him for another man after four years, leaving him in heartbreak that would be translated into poetry and music. The third was Shura, a lovely Russian dancer whom he fell in love with during his visit to Russia in 1917. His painful experience of past marriages introduced some hesitation on his part, and they only married nine years later.

Cleon’s (or Attik’s) rich artistic qualities reached their peak in 1930 as he established the “Mantra”, a group of artists that gathered around his leadership and performed at the beginning in an outdoor yard in Athens. He starred in multiple roles as pianist, composer, lyricist, singer, actor, mime, and speaker. He improvised on the piano, whistled and exchanged humorous banter with the enjoying audience.

Nena Venetzanou sings a song of Attik:

One evening, Marika, his ex-wife and her second husband attended the show. The audience who picked up on the fact of her presence there implored Attic insistently and rhythmically to sing one of his favourites, the song “I Saw Eyes” that he had once dedicated, in the old days, to his beloved Marika.

Cleon-Attik, still embittered by that sight, stood near the piano and then left the stage; he returned after a short time with a new song, an answer that reflected his emotional anguish:

You ask me to tell you
my first tune
my obstinacies of the past
you ask, “I Saw Eyes”
you tear me to pieces

In an old wound 
that is still bleeding
do not turn over the knife
since everyone knows 
what pain it would bring to me…

At this cheer of yours
It would not be right of me
instead of another liquor
to drink such poison
with such a song….

As it turned out, Cleon would see another painful romantic event expressed in a song. As the years passed Shura, his wife, felt neglected by his preoccupation with the theater, his songs and the audience, and so at some point she surrendered to the love of another man, Theodoros Anglos. Cleon was severely hurt when he learned of this love. One day he incidentally saw them sitting in a cafe, and leaving on the table, as they were going off, a bunch of jasmine flowers that Anglos had previously offered her. As soon as they left he approached the table and took the flowers. Sorrowful as he was, he wrote the song about the one drachma jasmines that children sell. Ultimately he forgave her.

In rendezvous wilderness
in poor cafes
One drachma jasmines 
that the children sell to us 
learn so many secrets
that when separate any couple
clutch the bosom hastily,
not to fall suddenly
at the hand of the indiscreet

One drachma jasmines,
tell to the jaunty couples,
that none of their love affairs
live for many moons.
Cupid’s love has only one ugliness
with which he quip them all,
that for a new acquaintance
One drachma jasmines
forgotten on the table.

Cleon was lovingly devoted to his mother, without limits. “When she was moody he went to the piano, sang to her and she began to smile and change the atmosphere,” recalls her niece, and when she died in 1940 his creative mood suddenly fell on nothingness… and later there was the German occupation and its depressing troubles. This had further damaged his fragile soul, and his humor couldn’t save him this time. One day, on the 29^th of August 1944, he drove his bicycle and incidentally stumbled unto a German soldier. That cruel man began mercilessly beating the helpless Cleon-Attik. He returned home bleeding. It was the last straw in his exhausted heart. That night he increased his dose of sleeping pills, and never woke up again.

‘Although they are  from the other side of Greek Music’, said the notable Rebetikan Yannis Papaioannou, ‘Attik and Gounaris have a ‘watermelon field’ heart just like ours’.

Haris Alexiou sings: “You asked me to tell you”

In 1960  the song “One drachma jasmines” became a soundtrack and title of a movie (With a different plot). Here is the song which was interpreted by Orestis Makris and Jenny Vanou:

Manolis Rasoulis was an important lyricist. One may say that the course of his life began with his name; Emmanuel (Manolis) means “God with us” in Hebrew, and Ar-Rasul is an apostle in Islam. On the one hand his life was passionately dedicated to harmony and love among people, and between people and their environment, as based on Osho’s saying “everything flows”. On the other hand, as a mirror image, he was uncompromising in his fights and revolutionary spirit confrontations with any feature of human nature that stood in the way of this harmony such as social injustice, exploitation, spoiling the environment and most of all, the establishment. His competence in writing made the song a major way of communicating his feelings and ideas.

He was born in Heraklion,Crete in 1945. His father had already spent years in the Italian prison for his leftist activism. He himself entered the young organization of the Left and proved to be the best student in his class. At the end of high school he began to show his ability as a singer to his classmates, who loved his singing and urged him to move to the “Big City”, Athens. At 18 he did so: “I left a real paradise and I found myself in the arena, the Coliseum to fight. I liked the idea of fighting. I had the Alexander syndrome. I wanted to conquer the world. I considered myself better…”

He studied cinema, worked at a left-oriented newspaper and began to take part in every social struggle and demonstration; there, on the streets, beyond the posters, the seeds of his lyrics were sowed.

In 1967-1974, the years of the Hunta regime, he stayed in London, participated in the activities of the Trotskyte left wing movement. There he wrote his first songs. He was seriously wounded in the students’ uprising in Paris and called his daughter Natalie, in honor of Trotsky’s wife.

During the later part of the 1970s Manolis steps to the stage-front of Greek music with songs that have became very popular, many of them to this day. ”He would write lyrics about everything that preoccupied his lively soul, his warm heart and spirit: love (fulfilled and hurtful), political scandals, people that sacrificed their lives in favour of their ideals, good old fun among friends, his beloved homeland (Crete)… it’s a never-ending list,” says the singer Katherina Siapanta. Here she sings a song that speaks to both Manolis’ social concern and human compassion. It is about a woman who has lost her lover in a traffic accident (an issue that concerned him a lot), and she feels somewhat guilty now that she’s found someone else…

You keep coming in my dreams,

like a cry within my heart

telling me that I’ve betrayed you.

It’s been four years without you

and I, a true queen of sorrow,

have sought comfort elsewhere….

You didn’t think of me when you were speeding like crazy

and eventually you eloped with horror

not thinking for one moment

that cars don’t fly in the sky

and love can’t live in nothingness.

Manolis continued to write songs, books and articles and to make “confrontations with establishments of all sorts,” as he put it. He paid dearly and personally for these, especially in the form of his isolation in the music industry, being considered suspect and even, unjustly, dangerous, especially as he followed Osho, the guru of meditation who was himself controversial.

In a 2008 interview he said: “I think I have a particular role, which I have taken on like the stone of Sisyphus. I must step into the most difficult things of humanity and to solve the Gordian knot… I have an awareness of things, and I document it through my books, songs and on the radio.”

He would never let music companies to divert his mastery in words and his ability of expression from the issues he was dealing with for commercial purposes, and he felt that he had an influence. Art and songs were for Rassoulis the “the strongest medium to reach people’s heart and mind” says his daughter, Natalie, who is a singer herself. “His motto was ‘Emotion, but with consciousness’ “. But at the same time he was aware that there are bigger things which control the world in the long run than the poet’s temporary life span.

What is song for Manolis beyond ideology? ”Without song I would be lost. Song saved me… we try to write a song to communicate with ordinary people, who have been lost in the deteriorated situation and the stress. We try to give them a bit, just a little bit of fun…. When I write a song I am addressing the welder in Perama (a shipyard) who will sing it.”

Here is Manolis Rassoulis’ famous song on the social struggler who is at a time of fatigue and looks for some encouragement:

Almost fifty years
of suffering and persecution
now in this black disease
unworthy reward.
The just cause of the struggle
deprived you of many things
but life like a pregnant woman
gave birth to hope.

Nothing goes to waste
in your wasted life
I revive your dream
and your every “why”

You never say that fate
has been unjust to you
but only that History
spoke to you differently.
Head down at the coffee shops
thoughtful in the streets
but yesterday at the protest march
you walked by smiling. 

Haris Alexiou, Sokratis Malamas and Alkinos Ioanidis:

“…I love everything and all but I am afraid I am the but-man of your neighborhood who wants desperately to communicate with you to wish you a happy new year and all the best for the planet and humanity, but I find it very difficult, although not impossible”

Manolis Rasoulis passed away on 5 March 2011 at 66 years of age.

Sometimes a banal, everyday event, stands behind the creation process of a great work of art, songs being no exception: without explanation, such an event can trigger a channel of inspiration for the gifted artist. This is the story of the song “Don’t Ask the Sky” (mi ton rwtas ton ourano).

The time is around 1958-1959. Jenny Karezi, who is considered as one of most successful actresses in Greek Cinema, was about to start shooting a film in Crete. The film, “To nisi ton genneon”, The Island of the Braves, is about the resistance to the Nazi occupation of the island. On the eve of the early morning flight, she was at a party also attended by her musician and composer friend Manos Hatzidakis. He had promised her before to prepare a tape of a song for the film, especially for her. They chatted and she reminded him about the tape with the song. But he was wrapped up in jubilation, and so he told her with little regard, shrugging his shoulders, to pass by in the morning at his home and he will give it to her.

Indeed, the next day, very early in the morning, she knocked on his door, but in vain! The great artist was sleeping deeply.  After knocking time and again Jenny became stressed and began to turn away when she heard something from inside…  slippers dragging, then the door opens and the drowsy Hatzidakis appears. “What do you want so early in the morning, my Christian?” he cried out. “Did you see me in your sleep?”

“Hey you Manos, I came to get the tape, remember?” she says, having begun to lose patience. ”I hope to have it ready for I fly out in about an hour…”
“Ah, well. Make a coffee till I get dressed and I’ll prepare the tape!”
“You will prepare… what you mean? You’re going to do it now?”
“Oh my poor woman… make some coffee and I come…”

Eventually, after Manos got dressed, while he was drinking his coffee and smoking his cigarette, seated in front the piano in brief ten minutes he created “Don’t Ask the Sky”

Word after word and we forget ourselves  

the pain took us and the night caught up with us

wipe the tear away with your handkerchief

that I drink the sun through your lips

Don’t ask the sky

the cloud and the moon

your dark gaze

has taken something from the night

Whatever found us and whatever made us sad

hit us sneakily like a knife

wipe the tear away with your handkerchief

that I drink the sun through your lips

Don’t ask the sky

the cloud and the moon

your dark gaze

has taken something from the night

Jenny Karezi sings in a scene from the movie:

A year later, in 1960, the movie “Never on Sunday” (Pote tin kyriaki) was released featuring lead actress Melina Mercouri, and enjoyed international success. The music was composed again by Manos Hatzidakis who won the Oscar for the title song. The melody of “Don’t Ask the Sky” was also featured in this movie, and in 1962 it reached the managers of the 18 year-old pop star Brenda Lee. They set it to English lyrics and “All Alone am I “was born; a hit for almost fifty years hence.

Here is Brenda Lee, so young and yet so mature:

It seems that the sky really can arrange fate. The miracle of the birth of this great song, which has been speaking to the hearts of so many people around the world for so many years, maybe would not have happened if Jenny Karezi had not pushed and pressed on Manos Hatzidakis that morning in a way that would now seem exaggerated. Why was it so urgent? I feel that there are things which are beyond our understanding, and this event is one of them. Maybe we should ask the sky….

Since then, the song is very popular in Greek music shows. Here is Dimitra Galani, singing together with the audience:

“Kineret” is the Hebrew name of the Sea of Galilee. Just next to its  south-west bank there are two adjacent communities, both bearing the name of the lake – Kineret. And here in this beautiful landscape of the lake and the far Golan mountains had lived two women; one was a poet, the other a composer and lyricist; creations by both have established a home in Greek music.

The 21 year-old Rachel, whose life and fate are surprisingly parallel in many ways to those of her Greek peer, the poet Maria Polidouri*, came here in 1911, to study and work in a women’s agricultural ranch. Early one morning the poet, writer and activist Zalman Rubashov came to a visit . As he was getting near the gate he saw a beautiful and charismatic young woman who was leading geese outside the yard. “I couldn’t breathe,” he wrote. Later, he joined Rachel and her friends on a trip around the lake. Rachel started singing wonderfully, and Rubashov couldn’t understand that she was singing only for him and not for the others, and that that day was fatefully meaningful for her.

Soon their ways separated as both went abroad. A short time after Rachel returned in 1919, she was found to be suffering from Tuberculosis, and was ejected cruelly out of her (new) community there. During this period she published her first poem. The paths of Rachel and Rubashov crossed again in the mid 1920s as Rubashov, now married, was in the position of literary editor in a newspaper, and she sent poems to him.

The unavoidable decline in her health, and the forthcoming death, gave Rachel the freedom to express poems of sorrow for the lost love to Rubashov. At first he ignored her poems and again failed to understand that they were addressed to him. Then he understood, and the unfulfilled love story found an echo in his own poems too. She would express her inflaming erotic desires: “I will kneel on my knees on a stormy lake bank, from it to drink me fill”; and sometimes her anger at him: “locked garden, no way, no path to it”. And he would write a poem on the “internal alliance” between lovers, and after that, on the missing “spark of hope” for a close relationship between them. It was a hidden dialogue of love and pain between the lovers-poets, carried in the language of poetry.

Shai” – Gift, a painful poem on what remains of love:

Like I harvest just the last grapes

I will gather the remains of the whispers

And I send you a present

from the crop of my heart

all that the hand of sorrow

had not uprooted

all that the hot wind of anger

has not dried inside me yet

I will pad the wicker basket

memories of  Lake Kineret

rose of morning sky

among the garden’s trees

gold of noon

in a serene expanse

and the lilac of evening

on the Golan mountains

Memory of moon night

on the water’s smooth surface

is the cheer of happiness

as I age

as with the scarlet of silkworm

I will wrap the basket

and I will send to you

will you be happy for the gift?

The Greek version is by Christos Thivaios and it keeps the concept and atmosphere of the poem:

Giorgos Dalaras sings in Hebrew:

Rachel was defeated by the disease in 1931. A young couple attended her funeral in the small cemetery on the lakeside, along with their one-year-old daughter. The baby Naomi grew up to be one of Israel’s most important song composers and lyricists. In the 1960s Naomi Schemer wrote a song about the Eucalyptus Grove, a nearby site, just next to the point where the Jordan River joins the lake; the same grove which saw the young children had not changed throughout the generations – the same quiet, the bridge, the boat on the water….

The melody of the song captured the Greek singer Eleni Dimou, and with new lyrics it became one of Eleni’s own favorites, and one of the most beloved of her songs.

I need you in difficult times
to open your hug
There count words and loves

I need you in difficult times
to say affectionate words
I do not want steel illusions

“Sta diskola se thelw” –I need you in difficult times:

And the Hebrew version, “The Eucalyptus Groove” by Ishtar:

Yannis Parios is one of Greece’s most popular singers. He is “the great lover of Greek music,” as someone dubbed him for his romantic love songs, for his soft voice and his melodies, a part of which he composed himself. He has enjoyed a career that began in 1969 and continues to this day, with huge sales of albums inside and outside Greece.

Yannis was born on the island of Paros, one of the Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea. His birth name was different, and he changed it to Yannis Parios for his love to his native island, Parios being the origin of the island’s name.

From his early childhood he would hear “the songs of my cradle”, as he put it, the Nisiotika – the folk songs and dances of the Aegean Islands, songs and dances in which the tenderness of the arid land ornamented with greenery, small white houses and the blue sea is mixed with various human feelings such as love, sorrow, anger, happiness, and courage. They are songs of the soul of the islander.

Here is Parios, younger, singing and dancing:

As Parios tells, his father was the one who had “planted the melodies” in him as a child:

“I have memories of my life from the age of six. I remember very strongly the mornings…. My father used to get up early every morning and I liked to nestle up in his hug and he sang to me or chanted.  Every Sunday morning he went to the cafe and my joy was to go get him late at night. I used to hit the window that he would see me and my wish was to get the pasteli (sweet with sesame and honey) or yogurt, rewards of his victory in cards. If he was the winner he came out quickly and if not I had to wait a little, because he would go to buy it instead and tell me that he had won it. After we would leave the cafe we would walk along the coastal road  to go home. I remember he had a long black coat, very thick, from the army. He was a lighthouse keeper and needed something warm. He would open the coat, cover me with it. I felt  at those moments so secure, it was like I was keeping in me the whole world.

We lived in a room which had a kitchen, a bedroom, everything, and had a fireplace that was useful to keep warm, to cook and for ventilation. We usually ate potatoes with a little salt…”  Sometimes Yannis would go to the lighthouse to give his father blankets, food. He would sit there watching the ships in the sea and wondering where they were going, what is beyond the horizon…

After high school Yannis left for Athens: “Even today I remember the white boat at the port of  Paros, the paper bag, my mother and my father, the nest egg of 750 drachmas, their blessing and their hugs just before I turned my back to get into the boat. ‘Farewell, my son.’ I took the paper bag that was full of fears, dreams, hopes and insecurities.”

In the middle of the seas I sail 

and I have for a bow my longing

and I have love at the stern

and for mast the separation

Sea, don’t send me away

separation, you make my heart bleed

Black Fate has written

to leave away from shore and get lost

far away from my island

and from the girl I love

(Kostas Moundakis)

In 1982, as Parios was a well-known and admired singer of love songs, he entered the studio to record songs of his “most beloved place in the world” –Paros and the Aegean islands. It was a time of enthusiasm and high spirits for him. The album made history in Greece: the Aegean atmosphere captured people everywhere and it has the highest sales record ever in Greek music.

The poet and lyricist Lina Nikolakopoulou says: “In one song Parios tells about his life. He is happy because he was wounded by love, because he lived, believed in love and was a convict of love. One night, I saw him dancing a dance of his island; I saw the ‘yes’ that he said in life and the source of his power, a blue horizon”

]]> http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/you-had-planted-melodies-in-me-my-mother-and-father/feed/ 0 avinishri parios33 http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/the-anthem-of-the-soul-2/ http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/the-anthem-of-the-soul-2/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:14:43 +0000 avinishri http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/?p=253 ]]>

This is a story of a song that has virtually become a kind of national anthem for the Greek people. It is lodged deep in their collective soul:

Cloudy Sunday
you look like my heart
which has always cloudiness
Christ and Holy Mary

When I see you rainy
I have no moment of quiescence
you bring darkness into my life
and I sigh heavily

You are a day like the one
which I lost my joy
cloudy Sunday
you make my heart bleed

The song is “Sinefiasmeni Kiriaki”-Cloudy Sunday and here is a version by  Poly Panou, Glykeria, Manolis Mitsias, Lakis Halkias, Pitsa Papadopoulou, Marios Kostoglou, Gerasimos Andreatos, Giannis Lempesis, Eleni Gerani

These simple and blunt words are well-rooted in the suffering of the people at the time of the German-Italian occupation of Greece during World War II, a time of “hunger, misery, fear, repression, arrests, and executions” as the song’s author Vassilis Tsitsanis puts it, arguably the greatest Rebetica composer and lyricist.

In a 1972 interview, Tsitsanis speaks of the circumstances of the writing of the song:

“I remember the blockade by the Germans being put up, overnight. I was in a tavern and none of us inside there knew who would leave the place alive. They put me up and I played [Bouzouki] till morning. They let us leave at dawn. Outside it was covered with snow, and as I went home I saw spots of thick red blood. Inside the dim light I saw the lad who was killed. I went home and wrote the song.” The song’s initial title was “Bloody Sunday”.

In an interview a year later he added: “The gloomy atmosphere of the occupation had inspired the lyrics of the song and its music… I wanted to cry for the black despair that we were all beaten by at the time of the occupation; the notes were talking only of despair.”

But this song spread its wings among the people, and many found in it their own “Cloudy Sunday” – the voice of their pain in distressing times, whether as individuals or as Greeks, like those who were living abroad and were missing their homeland, or the Cypriots and their memories of the British occupation. I believe that many feel that the same words express the mood of many Greeks these days that face very hard times. Tsitsanis is “the bard of the poor, wounded, to lovers” (John Tsarouchis). He touched the heart of the people exactly because he lived a life that was no different to theirs.

Vassilis Tsitsanis had been challenged by two persons who claimed that they have a part in writing these lyrics; one case was brought to court in the 70s and Tsitsanis won. His rights on the lyrics are recognized by The Hellenic Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AEPI)* but, as someone had said, “it belongs to all Greeks.”

“Without the song ‘Cloudy Sunday’,Greece would be nothing,” said the famous lyricist Manolis Rasoulis. “A song can be a cornerstone. Therefore, one song can change the minds of people… With the songs ‘Cloudy Sunday’ and ‘My Whole Life’ by Akis Panos I saw the world more vibrant and more hopeful….”

*According to an article by Maniatis in the “Ta Nea” (The News) newspaper in 11.7.2011

Here is an old famous version by Stelios Kazandzidis:

And another old version from a film by kaity Grey and Tsitsanis:

She was Mariana Pineda Munoz and he was Federico García Lorca. Both were born in the Granada area in southern Spain, both lived during eras of great changes, and both found their violent death there, as young innocent people, guilty of nothing but their liberal political orientation.

Mariana was born in 1804, and at 18 she was already a widow with two children. By the age of 21 she had become a political activist and sympathizer with the liberal underground against King Fernando VII, and begun to be active in it, taking part in facilitating her cousin Pedro de Sotomayor’s escape from prison, an important liberal and freedom fighter who had been sentenced to death for conspiracy.

When Mariana was 27, in 1831, a police search at her home revealed a flag on which the words “Igualdad, Llibertad y, Ley”  (“Equality, Liberty, Law”)  were embroidered. During the trial the judge offered Mariana to escape the death penalty by naming the liberal underground members. Mariana refused and on May of that year she was publicly executed. The Liberals did nothing to help her in her legal defense or escape.

Mariana Pineda became a Granada folk heroine. At the turn of the 19^th century, the child Federico García Lorca would hear songs and stories about her from the servants in his home; later he would live not far away from her statue in Granada. Almost one hundred years after Mariana’s death, in 1925, he wrote the play “Mariana Pineda”.

The play plot is very much parallel to history. Mariana and Pedro are freedom fighters, and Pedrosa,Granada’s police commander,  loves Mariana. But Mariana harbors a great passion for Pedro. Mariana loves him for his fight for freedom, she becomes liberal and  embroiders the flag because of this love. She puts everything aside, even her children, and thinks of nothing but him. Pedro on the other hand is only interested in saving his life. He loves the fight for freedom more than he loves Mariana. In the end, the representative of the law and disappointed lover Pedrosa is the one to bring on Mariana’s destruction. She believes that her love will bring Pedro to act to save her, but it is turns out to be a cruel illusion.

Mariana tells Pedro: “You love freedom more than your Marianita? I will be the same freedom that you adore!” The heroine realizes that the ultimate feelings of love and freedom are being  close to each other and both can’t prevail in the authoritarian, conservative world – they are  in a contradiction to it. “I am free because I wanted to love… I am the freedom wounded by men!” Mariana says from far away towards the end of the play.

The struggle for love and freedom was exactly  Lorca’s own destiny. He was a liberal and homosexual who couldn’t show his inclinations freely in a conservative society. His yearning for liberalism and personal freedom brought his death when he was shot by the Nationalist militia in the beginning of the civil war in Spain in 1936. He was 38 when he died.In a prophetic way, “Mariana Pineda” foretells its author’s own fate.

The Greek people and its writers have much affection towards Lorca’s works. It was especially significant in the 70s in the time of the dictatorship, but also at present. “Ah.. Erota”- Ah.. Love, is an album of Lorca’s songs which was  recorded in 1974, and was released to great acclaim. Leftheris Papadopoulos translated and Christos Leontis composed the music. “Day full of sorrow” describes Mariana’s tragedy and Pedro’s philosophy:

Day full of grief in Granada

even her stones cry

as they see her die on the gallows

beautiful Mariana for she didn’t betray

I am a borderless man

and I go where I like

I am at odds with the leader

I don’t ask anybody

Hai hai hai

set up dancing, girls

Hai hai hai

Set up dancing

Hai hai

Day full of grief in Granada

even her stones cry

as they see her die on the gallows

beautiful Mariana for she didn’t betray

Manolis Mitsias and Tania Tsanaklidou:

Mera gemti tlipsi-Day full of grief

Lyrics: Federico Garcia Lorca/Leftheris Papadopoulos

Music:Hristos Leontis

Vcals: Mnolis mitsias and Tania Tsanaklidou

‘When I was a little girl I used to sing. People around used to say I sung as nice as Jenny Lind. People used to come and listen when I sung. And-when they stood-and heard me singing, me and them were together more than you could ever know. I was thankful. There are not so many people that can feel so full, so close, like those people standing there and me singing. I thought maybe I’d sing in theaters but I have never done it. And I’m glade. Nothing separated  me and them. And-that’s why I want you to pray. I want to feel that closeness once more. It’s the same thing, singing and praying, just the same thing. I wish you could hear me sing.’

***

About eight years ago, in the beginning of my interest in Greek music, I heard a song that I could not understand a word of. But in the refrain, and especially when it was sung by the audience, you could sense a kind of devotion, a plea of pain and passion, a kind of prayer that reminded me of the singing you can hear out of synagogues as you pass by them on holy days in our country.

But the words of the song are not connected at all to a holy worship. They are about a broken man, who fails in love time and again, and he is yearning to speak to an anonymous woman whom he encountered by chance at night, maybe in a tavern:

Whoever you are, whatever you are,
keep me company tonight.
I don’t ask you to love me
I only ask a little comfort.

If my fate is crippled
the world is not to blame, nor you.
Whatever I love, dies
and I start all over again.

All the women I have known
left away without reason
and yet I have not hated any of them
it has been written in my destiny.

If my fate is crippled
the world is not to blame, nor you.
Whatever I love, dies
and I start all over again.

Whoever you are, whatever you are,
say to me few tender words,
to relieve my soul a little
and tomorrow tell me goodbye.

When later I came to understand the words, I realized why I felt that this song is like a prayer. The woman is just a medium. The man is actually speaking to God. He tells of his distress to God, and it is God from whom he asks for comfort. The line “O’ ti agapaw egw pethenei” – whatever I love dies – is the essence of much of the pain of humanity, and for the audience it serves as a moment of putting their collated distress on the table; a purification of the soul and a search for consolation, and all this, as Sairy says, in spiritual closeness to each other, as in a prayer.

Here is Giorgos Dalaras with the audience in “Zygos” club in Athens:

***

Here is a little story about a Hebrew song, a love song “Hayom” which means “today”:

Today we shall do something unforgettable

that will leave a memory of a blessed happiness

today I will lend a hand to caress your head

today I will make you smile at last

today I will drive the sadness out of your eyes

I will make this day the happiest in your life

And this non religious song, found its place, besides liturgical poems, in an evening of prayers to the health of an adored “Rabi” (a chief religious post in Judaism) where its writer and singer Ehoud Banai, took part. The “together spirit” celebrates again:

***

Let’s return to “Whoever you are”, the version of Haris Alexiou which, for me is really great, as the song is.

‘Opioa kai na ‘sai- Whoever you are

Lyrics:Giorgos Samoladas

Music:Apostolos Kaldaras

]]> http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/it-is-the-same-thing-singing-and-praying/feed/ 0 avinishri http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/a-city-of-heaven-and-earth/ http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/a-city-of-heaven-and-earth/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:59:59 +0000 avinishri http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/?p=214 ]]>

Alexandria is a city of greatness. Alexander the Great founded it, ordering his chief architect Deinokratis to plan and build a great city on the Mediterranean shore. His successors later built the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world  and the famous library.

A Greek community flourished in Muslim Alexandria during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, but this came to an end by the Nasser regime. From the end of the 50s and the 60s most of the Greek people were forced to abandon their homeland.

Among those families who left there were two: one was of the singer Alkistis Protopsalti, who immigrated to Athens when she was seven in the mid 60s. “My childhood was extremely happy and I remember it fondly. The warm evenings in Alexandria, the walks I took with my grandfather. The smells of the sea, the sunset, the rustling of the palm trees along the beach, the fishermen with their rods, the tram, and the special sweets I loved, the car rides to the Sahara… the little shops with the colored windows across the road that made falafel and hot sweets…”

 About the same time, another Alexandrian family, of the eleven years-old Aris Davarakis, immigrated to Athens. This proved to be a hard separation for the boy: I became two people, he wrote. “I carefully locked in my closet the Alexandrian ‘Zacharouli’ (as my grandmothers, Elizabeth and Dimitra would call me), and began to build Aris Davarakis, the Athenian Egyptian. I had no choice. And it’s never pleasant to have no other choice.”

Aris became a radio producer, journalist and lyricist. In his  song  about his native city, there is  much enthusiasm, been reflected in the repeated  word ‘yia-salam’, the Arabic ‘wow!’ or ‘fantastic!’, of a place in which erotic love blossoms, and the third verse betrays his sense of a mixed identity…..

The Alexandrian clear sky

in love it is like a diamond, long-lasting

and as it is reflected warmly on the sea

you say yia-salam for a worthy reward

Hey yia-salam, how to imagine

this autumn is so sweet

this autumnal sky

is authentic Alexandrian

A port of mine is western

the other, the old one is eastern

I have an airport at the north

and an ancient lighthouse towards the south

Yes, the clear and authentic sky

in Alexandria is so long-lasting

that when the wave breaks strongly against Kait Bay

padam padam hey yia-salam, love says

Yia-salam it will say so much I could bear

that I forgave my demon

for all its wild passions

yia-salam means Alexandria

Alkistis Protopsalty sings the song “Alexandria” with the Prague Symphony Orchestra, to the wonderful music of  Evanthia Reboutsika:

In 2009, Aris Davarakis wrote a short story on a visit to Alexandria, his feelings as he places his childhood dreamy traces in the miserable earthy reality:

“For me that I was born there and, in fact, I never really managed to leave, Alexandriaia psychologically is my base. I don’t ask much from her…”

Only to step at the airport, to take a taxi …to leave my suitcase in the miserable hotel’s room, ” to come out and walk on Sofia Zaagloul Street. To go one block down and order an espresso, standing, at the miserable and dirty «Brazilian» (that always seems to me to be hovering in embarrassment over the fabric of time) and to breathe  a strange aroma arising from the mixture of the foaming waves of the Mediterranean that crash ten meters away, and the dust that the wind carries from the Sahara sands, one kilometer down. I move on to the seaside boulevard, called ‘Cornish’.

On the right of me I now have the great sea and on the left the old ramshackle ‘apartment buildings’ with towering windswept palm trees in front of them. I am moving towards Kait-Bay, the point where once stood the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

I recognize everything around me and inside me, visible and invisible, as they are what I am and I am what they are. They know me and I know them, they are the traces that I left behind as a child, so as to have a place to return to. There, in front of Kait-Bay at the Nautical Club, with its small tables that overlook the whole boundless, immense and magical Muslim Alexandria, of its 15 million residents at the time being, I drink my second espresso and I’m full. Ι could immediately return to Athens. This walk that I managed to carry out one more time was more than enough for me.”

****

Let us visit another version of the song. Yanis Kotsiras, the first interpreter, in a duet with the younger Protopsalti:

I wish to give warm thanks to Nata for her help. The original article in Greek can be found at:

http://www.protagon.gr/?i=protagon.el.article&id=132

I sing only because you loved me

in forgone years.

Both in the sun, in the summer’s premonition

and in the rain, in the snow,

I sing only because you loved me.

Only because you embraced me

one night and kissed my mouth,

only for that I am like a wide-open lily

and I still have a quiver in my soul,

only because you embraced me.

Only because you watched me admirably as I was passing by

and in your eyes I saw passing

my lissom  shadow, as in a dream

flickering, hurting,

only because you watched me admirably as I was passing by.

Only, only for that it pleased you

only for that my passing remained so pleasant.

As if you were following me wherever I was going

like you were passing somewhere there near me.

Only, only for that it pleased you.

Only because you loved me I was born

for this my life was given.

In the joyless frustrated life

for me the life was fulfilled.

Only because you loved me I was born.

Just for your selected love

Dawn granted me roses in hands.

To light your way for a moment

the night filled my eyes with stars.

Just for your selected love.

When this poem was published in 1928 its author, the 26 year-old poet Maria Polidouri, was in hospital, suffering from Tuberculosis; the beloved one to whom this letter-like poem is addressed, the poet Kostas Kariotakis, was already dead. He had committed suicide shortly before, aged 32.

They had met in the beginning of 1922. She was twenty, a student at the Athens University School of Law, working in public service. Among her milieu of friends and work colleagues with whom she would discuss thoughts and ideas about literature, there was Kostas Kariotakis, a 26 year-old poet who had already published two collections of poems.

In April their love blossomed. Kostas was attracted by the young tall and slender woman, with her amazing black eyes cast in a spiritually profound face, and her outstanding character, which had its wide swings but ultimately belonged to a woman who dared to ask to be loved, to connect, to be kissed, to date men – things which were totally unheard of for other women of her generation. Maria was far ahead of her time.

In turn, Maria, apart from her bodily attraction to Kostas, saw in him the face of a poet with a proven mastery of the art. She was yearning to be driven by him in her own poetry, and most of all, she came to see him as “the only one who could ever understand me,” as she wrote in her last days.

One month later in May, Kostas writes: “My dear, why do you ask me if it pains me to think that you love me so much? It only pains me because I love you more than I could have ever imagined to love.” Maria’s May diary reveals: “My desperate poet, I wonder if I want to love you as much as you deserve… And a little later in a letter she begs him to marry her: “Come, Taki, to live together… you will see how sweet, how comforting I will be with you. It is not difficult, honestly not difficult at all. I know all the obstacles, all the consequences. We are both poor, but so what? If we separate now will we not be poor and without any hope of becoming rich? Two rooms are enough”.

Tragically, however, she pleads to the wrong person. Kostas Kariotakis simply did not have the energy to contain and enjoy her love and unusual personality that had attracted him initially. He was a skeptic, perfectionist, pessimistic about life, self-centred, and it seemed that his erotic feelings towards her were short-lived.

In the summer of 1922, Kostas contracted syphilis. On a walk in Faliro, he finally gave Maria a decisive answer. He refused her proposal, explaining that he had no right to marry any woman while suffering from the disease.

Dimitra Galani sings “evening”, a poem of Kariotakis  (music and by the piano: Lena Platonos)

Maria did not accept Kostas’ reasoning; to her, it was no more than an excuse, a cop-out. She felt humiliated and underrated. Her heartbreak would only be revealed a few years later, in her poems. Both kept relations by letters, and both did not succeed to handle their lives well thereafter. Kostas hated the bureaucracy that he was part of as a lawyer in public service, and Maria, who had a short stint as an actress, did not manage to keep any job for very long.

Their last meeting took place about six years later, at the Sotiria hospital in Athens, where Maria was hospitalized due to her tuberculosis. He brought her flowers and sweets, but soon the cold cruelty of reality took over… he kissed her and they never saw each other again.

Shortly after, Kostas put an end to his life. The news deteriorated further Maria’s poor health. She would not do as the doctors recommended, and went on secret night excursions away from the hospital. Then, in the face of  comming death, and in the presence of  Kostas’ souvenirs and the memories of their heart breaking love, she wrote her most moving poems.

In her last days she wrote a “letter to the world”:

“… Now, as I write the last lines, I look back and I realize how lucky I was: I lived free as no other woman of my time; I did things no other did and loved as few loved. And I will not forget, as my eyes close, that in a melancholic April’s dawn, I was not alone anymore. Young people who loved me have come to say goodbye and dear friends at my bedside have given me one last song.

This is my letter to a world that never wrote to me, as a good friend of mine says.

With love,

Maria Polidouri”

Maria Polidouri passed away on 30 April 1930, aged 28.

There are at least 6 versions of the poem “I Only Sing Because You Loved Me” set to music.

Here is a touching version sung by Magda Pensou, with a video clip from a television series on Kariotakis. (music: Vasilis Dimitriou)

And here is the version that many consider to be the ultimate – Eleftheria Arvanitaki sings magnificently to the music of Dimitris Papadimitriou:

We usually take our way of life for granted: our faith, our freedom, our personal rights and security. But sometimes, as a famous Greek song goes, while you are sleeping others are writing history. We may find ourselves, suddenly, unprepared in a completely new world.

The people of Athens woke up on the 21^st of April 1967  ready for another day of work. Children were getting ready for school. Instead of everyone going about their business, however, they were shocked to find themselves being threatened by tanks just outside their windows.

“The Seven Years” of the military junta dictatorship had begun that morning. “Long standing political freedoms and civil liberties, that had been taken for granted and enjoyed by the Greek people for decades, were instantly suppressed. Freedom of thought and freedom of press were immediately suspended. Military courts were established, and political parties were dissolved.” (Wikipedia)  Political opponents were arrested, tortured and exiled. A psychology of fear prevailed among the people. Informers were all around.

The atmosphere of fear leaked to the children, who did not understand the reasons for this sudden need for caution. A woman recalls: “I remember fear, a big ‘hush, that they will not hear us….’, whispering conversation over air that you could cut with a knife, every time we the children approached nearby, lest our ears catch something and naively spread it around here and there… [I remember] the young people nearby who one day disappeared, they were arrested just for muttering. I heard that they were in jail but my child’s mind did not understand why, as they were not thieves or murderers…”

Another then child tells: “I remember my uncle who was terrified that I found a photo of George Panandreou in the library, ‘don’t tell anyone,’ he said in terror. And I could not figure out why.”

“I remember that military man who was furious with an ill-fated elderly villager who had the audacity to cough while the former spoke for the grounds of that ‘save the nation’ revolution. You see… the junta regime used the bait of cinema to gather the people, and before the screening started, a member of the ‘circus’ would brainwash the audience….”

The popular composer Mikis Theodorakis was an anti-junta activist. He went underground and founded the “Patriotic Front”. Consequently, the junta published the following command:

THE GENERAL STAFF
MILITARY COMMAND DIRECTORATE
PROCLAMATION Nr. 13
1. Having taken into consideration the stipulations of the “State of Siege” Act, put into effect by the 280/April 21st Royal Decree
WE HAVE CONCLUDED AND WE ARE ORDERING THE FOLLOWING:
WE PROHIBIT
Throughout the boundaries of the country,
(a) Any transmission or interpretation of songs whatsoever by the communist MIKIS THEODORAKIS, ex-leader
of the disbanded “Lambrakis’ Democratic Youth” communist organization; among other things, these songs
constitute a liaison among communists.
(bj The hymns of the party youth organization disbanded by our Nr.8/May 6th proclamation, as they rekindle
political passions and sow the seeds of dissension among citizens.
(c) Offenders will be subject to Court-Martial Extraordinary and are to be punished according to the stipulations
of the “State of Siege” Act.
Athens, June 1st, 1967
ODYSSEAS AGGELIS, Lieutenant-General/Commander of the General Staff

Theodorakis was jailed, than banished to  Zatouna and then exiled to Paris. All this time he composed music. The premiere of the song cycle “The Popular Songs” with words by the poet Manos Elefteriou took place in Rome in 1970. The songs were not played in Greece before 1974, the year of the dictatorship’s collapse. Here are two songs from the cycle; the first is “In this Neighborhood”:

In this neighborhood

evening and morning

we spent and we wasted

our  entire lives

In this neighborhood

the sorrows took us

they took us and betrayed us

for a morsel of bread

In this neighborhood

in the small alley

we were lost and lived

far away from God too

And a beautiful love song-”The train leaves at eight”:

The train leaves at eight

a trip to Katerini

the month November will not last

for you to not remember at eight

for you to not remember at eight

the train to Katerini

the month November will not last

I found you again by chance

drinking ouzo at Lefteris’

night will not come elsewhere

for you to have your own secrets

for you to have your own secrets

and to remember who knows them

night will not come elsewhere

The train leaves at eight

but you have been left alone

guarding in a sentry box in Katerini

inside the fog five to eight

inside the fog five to eight

turned into a knife  in your heart

guarding in a  sentry box in Katerini

S’afti tin getonia-In this neighborhood

Lyrics: Manos Elefteriou

Music: Mikis Theodorakis

Vocal: Doros Dimosthenous

To treno fevgei stis okto-The train leaves at eight

Lyrics: Manos Elefteriou

Music: Mikis Theodorakis

Vocal: Alexia

This song was written by Elefteriou after an incident during his military service which happened at a camp in Katerini.

Let’s begin with a song:

This song about a lover, who secretly comes to his girl at dawn, was written by one of the Fathers of the rebetika music-the Greek Blues, Markos Vamvakaris. The “Patriarch of Rebetiko” as his nickname suggests. He composed this song and other great masterpieces during the 1930s, in his finest years. After the World War his brand of music was no longer popular, and so Christmas of 1950 found Markos out of a job. The Greek clubs were looking for new names. Markos, who suffered from deforming arthritis, earned his little pocket money by singing with his bouzouki in cafes and ouzo bars along with his son Stelios. They would often receive payment in foods. Generally, that Christmas was very strange. People were squashed financially speaking and grocers were using much the debts’ notebook. But Markos was too proud to allow for any debts. He had to buy goods for his family. In the morning before Christmas he went and pawned two rings, including his wedding ring, and bought all that was necessary for the festive table. However, he could not speak for the whole night, burdened as he was by resentment and pain. So many songs, so many hits, so many people had a career thanks to him, and now he is forgotten by them… Silence was kept during the meal. Suddenly, Markos said: “the Russians will send humans to the moon!” He had seen this in a newspaper. Silence set again. As his wife and children finished their meal and went to bed, Markos sat in the basement, as he would often do, and picked up the bouzouki. He came out to the yard and looked at the sky for a long time. It was quite cold but the sky was crystal clear and there was an enormous Christmas moon. Μarkos stood and stared. It was so beautiful, bright and vivid, that Markos seemed to try talking to it, to tell it of the sorrow, the pain, everything he had confronted all those last years.

Suddenly something bright passed in his thought. He turned down to the basement, took a notebook and wrote:

Thousands of years in the high

for mates you have the stars

avoid it, the earth

because it is a seductress

never ask  my moon

to know people

because the suffering of the earth

you too will acquire

Human eye, do not let it see you

my moon in order to live

because if you are bright

without intention you will be extinguished

sit in your silence

and in your solitude

all on the Earth envy you

want to see all the good you have got

Do not open I tell you

any kind of dealing with people

because you’ll have yourself hurt hardly

and you will regret

the people on the globe are bad

and over this Earth you are not going

to see a white day

Bitterness sorrows and sufferings

you will have as first friends

they never will laugh

your two sweet lips

and if you are so rich

do not have trust

people do not ever discover

their goodness 

Markos Vamvakaris had the privilege of seeing his music be revived in his lifetime, in the 60s.

Haramata i ora treis- Dawn, three o’clock

Lyrics: Kwstas Makris

Music: Markos Vamvakaris

Vocal: “Kafe Aman”

Fengari an esai lambero-if you are bright, moon

Lyrics and Music: Markos Vamvakaris

Vocal: “Kafe Aman”-Giwrgos Koutoulakis

]]> http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/moon-if-you-are-bright/feed/ 0 avinishri 220px-Markosvamvakaris1 http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/all-is-illusion-of-the-nothingness/ http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/all-is-illusion-of-the-nothingness/#comments Sat, 06 Aug 2011 06:48:35 +0000 avinishri http://greeksongstories.wordpress.com/?p=144 ]]>

Efthechia Papayannopoulou was an artful song lyricist. She was a beautiful, foxy and impulsive woman, who was passionate in love as in life and who lived in the moment. She was the voice of the emotions of the Greek people, like Zorbas.

Efthechia was born in 1896 in Aydin, Asia Minor (Turkey). She came to Greece after the disaster of 1922 – the deportation of millions of Greeks. She had a teacher’s diploma, but four years after her arrival she caught the acting bug and did not hesitate to break her marriage to join a theatre group. She kept acting for sixteen years. All that time she wrote poetry, on papers, on cigarette packs and on whatever she could find. Her granddaughter Rhea Maneli tells:

“Efthechia always wrote, but she paid no attention. She wrote and threw it, tore it… Could have done some lyrics and because there were no matches she lighted the paper on the stove to light her cigarette.”

In the end of the 1940s  Efthechia wrote her first song that was set to music. Very quickly she began collaborating with many leading artists in Greek music. She preferred to get paid quick small amounts, and never had her lyrics credited to her name. They were instead attributed to their famous singer buyers, who were happy to get credit on quality songs in a competitive world. “I write songs and I sell them. From there onwards I am not involved if they catch on or not, whether they come out or not come out on records. Once I deliver them I sign a statement of resignation from various rights, say, disown my intellectual children.” This was said in an interview in 1960, and revealed that some very famous songs were actually hers.

Efthechia’s way of life and her wasteful attitude to money did not make her an ideal mother. But she did love her children deeply. The death of her daughter in 1960 made a further sad and destructive impact on her, as she would later retell in an interview:

“Sit down. It may be my last interview and I want to tell everything. Do you know why I didn’t utilize so many hits economically? It is because after the death of my daughter in 1960, to forget, I turned to the cards. It was my catastrophe. Sleepless nights, inspirations, hard labour, all lost over the green felt, all had gone up in smoke.”

The writer Leftheris Papadopoulous, who wrote a book about Efthechia, tells of their close friendship:

“Eftichia Papayannopoulou … I remember her always with a scarf in her hair, looking at me lustfully and suddenly throwing me a couplet like ‘Forty days and one / I walked in the wilderness alone’ to see from the expression of my eyes if  I liked it and how much. And other times she insulted me as she said to me, with a hoarse voice, crushed from the cigarettes, ’I wish a pain was a person / so that we come to blows’, and I remained indifferent. And other times, again, she would repeat to me two verses for an entire morning to soften my soul because I was too worried: ‘I spent a whole night from life/ with my eyes closed’”

Her generosity and disregard of fame in the ego-tripping world of show-business, and her tendency to sell her lyrics for little money, meant that despite the success of her songs she died poor in 1972 without the appropriate recognition. Now there are about 160 songs that are officially hers, and in addition an unknown number of songs that are still attributed to others. They are all here, her hidden legacy.

Like the eagle I had wings

And I flew

and I flew very high

but a beloved hand

an adored hand

cut me my wings

that I will not fly high

I‘m a wingless eagle

without love and joy

without love and joy

I’m a wingless eagle

This adored hand

throughout my life

throughout my life I will love

and all that she has done to me

I forgive

with broken wings

I’ll always love her

I‘m a wingless eagle

without love and joy

without love and joy

I’m a wingless eagle

“…Sometimes…pity had overcome me… pity not only on people but on the whole world that struggles, shouts, cries, hopes and doesn’t see that all is an illusion of the nothingness.” (Nikos Kazantzakis)

Efthechia’s words in a very popular song carry a similar message about life:

All is nothing but a lie

breath in, breath out

like flower, some hand

will pick us one morning

Eimai aetos horis ftera-I am an eagle without wings

Lyrics: Eftechia Papayannopoulou

Music: Manos Hatzidakis

Singing: Viky Moscholiou

To telefteo vrady mou-my last night

Lyrics: Eftechia Papayannopoulou

Music: Stelios Kazandzidis

Singing: Stelios Kazandzidis

Once upon a time there was a king in old Athens, Iercales. After many years of marriage he and his wife had a daughter, Aretousa. And there was Erotokritos, the son of the king’s faithful adviser, who fell in love with the princess but could not reveal his love, as he belonged to a lower rank of society. So he went under her window at night and sang. Aretousa fell in love with the unknown singer, and once she incidentally revealed his identity, she sent him a basket of apples to show her response to his emotions, and they began to secretly meet.

The time had come and Aretousa urged Erotokritos to ask the king for her hand. But the king was incensed by the audacity of the young plebeian, and so he sent him to exile instead. The young lovers were secretly engaged just before Erotokritos left. When Aretousa refused a match to the king of Byzantium, her father imprisoned her together with her loyal nanny.

Three years later, Erotokritos returned to Athens in disguise, to save the king’s life in battle. The king promised his daughter to the unknown brave young man, and as it was revealed that he was no other than Erotokritos, the king accepted the marriage, and reconciled with Erotokritus, who ascended to the throne of Athens.

“Erotokritos” is an old and famous Cretan story. It was written in the early 17^th century by Vitsentzos  Kornaros  and consists of 10012 verses. The story of true love and courage became popular and beloved through the generations, as did the music that had been set to parts of the story by unknown composers.

Vasilis Papakonstantinou and Georgia Dagaki with her touching Cretan lyre sing an Erotokritos monologue, as he is about to leave for exile:

My Aretousa did you hear the sad news

your Father banished me to the road of exile

Only four days he gave me to stay

and than migrate, far away to go

And how I will separate from you and how I will get far from you

and how will I live without you, there in isolation

I know that your Father soon will wed you

a prince, a person fit to your class he seeks

And you cannot resist to what your parents wish

they overcome your mind and  your mood changes too

One favor, I am asking of you, Mistress, and that is all I want

and after that overjoyed I will  finish my life

The moment you will be engaged, you will  sigh deeply

and when  as a bride you are adorned, appear as married 

Shed a tear and say, “Poor Erotokritos

forget what I promised you , what you desired most is not anymore”

Vassilis and Georgia on the lyre conclude the scene with a beautiful song, from our modern era:

And if your eyes are not crying
they have a way to tell me
of the pain that hurtss them.
with a sad look
cloudy morning
about the spring they ask…

(Akos Daskalopoulos, Manos Loizos)

In the far days of the creation of “Erotokritos”, the world was still fresh, streams and rivers flew unspoiled, the skies were clear and you could breathe clean air and walk on pure land… Through the generations, the words and the music have wandered on so many different people’s lips, like a silk thread from the old days to our own, as it inspired 77 singers to make a video clip – “We are playing ecology” – for the sake of our earth:

To Tania Tsanaklidou the stage is home. Tania, one of Greece’s important singers and actresses, who sing some of the finest songs in Greek music, is very modest in her personal life, but she a fire on stage.

From April people were surprised to find her singing in the streets, in Metro stations, in parks, like any Street Singer. The hard time which had passed on the Greek people, the bad news from the demonstrations in streets of Athens and the politics, influenced her mentally and physically. “At times you are not singing you feel ill” said her friends. And she wanted to make people relieved, happier.

On the first day, she and her musician friends, sung in one of the Metro stations. At first, says Tania “people were searching hidden cameras. They had been thinking that it is a film’s  shooting, a joke, and when time passed people understood that this was only for those who were passing in the street. Gradually surprise gave way to embarrassment. A lady turned to give us fifty euros. We explained her that we don’t take money, we sing for ourselves. And she bent down to kiss our hands. It was like we all need something unexpected…”

Tania has a hard criticism on what had been seemed as Greek affluent society, on people which had been buying excessively unnecessary products, when Greece didn’t have really the resources. “The excesses carry great misery” says Tania. And she was shocked by the behavior of the police in the demonstrations, “I saw the police beating people who had taken refuge in shops and cafes”

And for this is the singing in the streets and round Greece this summer .Not for making a living. “It was a social political and human action and a sense of relief and freedom. Without any kind of dependence…. let us first come back to ourselves and then to our art…”

I am a poor, tired, oppressed little man.

Humbles’ and other birds’ mate.

Why don’t you leave me alone?

Leave me alone all of you.

I want to live free

without identity  anymore.

All the life they hold me, move me with a string.

Words, schools, morning  evening  work  over the bench.

Why don’t you leave me alone?

Leave me alone all of you.

I want to live free

without identity anymore.

Where happiness is in front, some thief is already there.

And any bad that makes the boss, I am the wrongdoer

Why don’t you leave me alone?

Leave me alone all of you.

I want to live free

without identity anymore.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

O anhtropakos-The little man

Words: Lefteris Papadopoulos

Music: Giorgos Hatzinasios

And one more:

http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_civ_2_10/07/2011_448551

Sotiris is my taxi-driver in Cyprus. I used his services mostly in my first visits to the island when I didn’t have enough confidence to drive on the left side…. During our journeys we talked a lot, especially on our music-loving sharing.

Sotiris told me that he is a refugee. He was born in a big village in north Cyprus. One day in the summer of 1974 his life changed.

“It was a completely regular day.  I was 10 years old. My father went to his  work in the market, and suddenly we heard shouts -The Turks are coming! The Turks are coming! Harry! Harry!  And within less than an hour we all had become refugees…”

As I used to travel regularly to Cyprus I know many refugees. They are doing economically well. “They took our homes and properties but not our minds”, one of them said, but it is a very painful part of any of them.

“Recently”, Sotiris said, “I had made a visit to my village and my home on the occupied side, and you know how awful the feeling to see others live in your home and you can do nothing about it?”

In August 1996 there was a protest by Cypriot –Greeks in the area which is under the Turkish control. One of the protestors, Solomos Solomou, tried to climb up the flagpole to remove the Turkish flag. He was shot five times by the Turkish guard and had died with a cigarette still in his mouth.

The song “Always joyful” is on this tragedy,with a big  light coming  up at the end.

The sinners of the night and the lonely of the dawn

need heavy Zebekiko and nervy driving

hang around places erased from the map

for a drop of heaven for a false love

Those who became friends to Death

pass away with a cigarette between their lips

in their wild dreams they give themselves

always joyful, always joyful

always joyful and  being deceived

The rout of our youth is Athens-Saloniki

we built a town together and yet I live in rent

I fell into a dream of you on a lime mat

and saw that night produces light  and the shell purple

Dimitris Mitropanos in a beautiful clip:

…..”And I really think that the world is big enough,  there is a place for everyone,  people can get along among themselves…” said Sotiris.

Panta Gelastoi-Always Joyful

Words: Alkis Alkaios

Music:  Thanos Mikroutsikos

Saturday early evening and acetylene lights

in Aristotelous in which you are ageing

I was taking out of my pockets mandarin’s peels

spraying on your eyes to hurt

The smallest were playing Cups and Thieves

and the leader was Argiro

and they were lighting fires up the streets

I think it should had been St. Giannis Day

Veteran soldiers were taking off their cups

the square was covered with children

and there was a green, green moon

to stab you right in the heart

Here is Haris Alexiou singing to Lefteris Papadopoulos in the audience:

Little better sound quality:

In his book “Maties” (Glances, 1983) Lefteris Papadopoulos wrote:

“Every Saturday I am going down to my old neighborhood there, in Kyriakou Square… I went yesterday even though it was Friday. I went yesterday as if something was pushing me, to my childhood haunts. And I met, coincidentally, Fotini, who told me about Argiro and made me very sad…

Maybe you have heard some song of mine with a music by Giannis Spanos which has the title “Aristotelous Street.” In this song, two lines say, “The smallest were playing Cups and Thieves and the leader was Argiro”.

It is time to say that Argiro was not born in my imagination. She existed. She was a girl of my neighborhood.

She was a girl who was dressed as a boy, and she was a shoe-shiner in those years of occupation. One morning as she walked to work, a German car hit her and wounded her seriously. She was taken to hospital .There, it was discovered that the little shoe-shiner was not a boy. The Austrian driver who hit her got shaken. And he decided to stand beside Argiro and her family.

The Austrian said and did. Argiro got well, she grew up, married. But the difficult years of hell which she spent as a child left in her soul their traces. And my neighbor from the old days at some moment was hit by the disease and reached, psychotic, to Dafni. Where, as informed me Fotini, she died few months ago.”

**

When I head read the line “the square was covered with children”, my own childhood square, Dizengof  Square in Tel-Aviv came to life. And suddenly I realized that we, the children, were also lightening fires on a nearby plot, and we played “Hands up” in a yard not far away, and in the next corner to the square a girl broke my heart…. Exactly like in Aristotelous Street in Athens…and, I think in everywhere….Everyone has his own Aristotelous…

Odos Aristotelous-Aristotelous Street

Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos

Music: Giannis Spanos

“Don’t be angry with me, my love” One of the most beautiful Farewell songs, some may call it the song of all songs, was written by the famous composer and lyrics writer Starvos Kougioumtzis, in half an hour, as he was impressed by  a song of the composer Manos  Hatzidakis and felt that “he had to do something about it”. Watch this video in which the composer’s wife Aimilia tells the story:

Don’t be angry with me, my love

for that I’m leaving for foreign lands

I shall be a bird and I will come back

again to be near you

Open your window

my golden basil 

and with a sweet smile

good night say to me

Don’t be angry with me, my love

now that I leave you here

come for a little that I can see you

to say goodbye to you

Open your window

my golden basil

and with a sweet smile

good night say to me

Here is Giorgos Dalaras with a fool version of the song:

Mi mou thimonis matia mou-Don’t be angry with me my eyes (my love)

Words and Music: Stavros  Kougioumtzis

“Zorbas had taught me to love life and not to fear death”, wrote Nikos Kazantzakis in the prologue to his famous novel on the life of his friend Alexis Zorbas.

“….And suddenly when he was losing his voice and words wouldn’t contain him any more, he was rising up jumping on the rough pebbles on the edge of the water and start to dance”

These words somehow had come to me when I was watching a video of the last appearance of the singer Grigoris Bitikotsis.

Gregoris Bitikotsis was one of Greece’s great singers and in the year 2002 as he was in his 80^th year, there was a big concert of honor to him in the Stadium of Peace and Friendship in Piraeus.

Bitikotsis was than many years after his last public appearance on stage, not in a very good health. At the end of the concert the participants call him to the stage:  ”Ella Grigori!..come on Grigoris!”

Being supported he goes up the stage. He begins to sing the following words about the death of the mangas of  Votanikos neighborhood in Athens and all his weakness vanishes… (A mangas was a special man figure in the culture of Greek folk before the war):

The mangas of Votanikos died on Sunday

and the girls and all the friends of his heart cried for him

The mangas of Votanikos, the best guy

In the bouzoukias, in the taverns nobody will see him anymore.

Always he made beautiful celebrations and never was bad

And all loved him in Votanikos

The Mangas of Votanikos, the best guy

In the bouzoukias, in the taverns nobody will see him anymore.

The mangas of Votanikos had a great life

He will be missing now from the feasts and form the mangases.

The mangas of Votanikos, the best guy

In the bouzoukias, in the taverns nobody will see him anymore.

And when words are finished Grigoris begins to dance….his last Zebekiko, his last appearance on stage…..and as you see this  great old man singing and dancing you feel that maybe  Death is less frightening…

Tou Votanikou o mangas-The mangas of Votanikos

Words: Lakis Tswlis

Music: Grigoris Bitikotsis

Ah, in the beginning of the songs

the ah is written

It is sweet it is bitter

 it is dreamy too

Ah where you set out, where are you off to

where you go and wander away

Hours in creeks you lost

and hours, out in the mountains

Ah  the songs are a blessing

so take it with you

In the  sweet smells, in the  colors

in the  music,  gracefully give yourself

Stin arhi tou tragoudiou-In the beginning of the song

Words: Kwstas Goudis and Nikos Ksidakis

Music: Nikos Ksidakis

Singers: Eleftheria Arvanitaki and Nikos Ksidakis