FOLK-SONGS OF MODERN GREECE

Abstract

THE DAY has gone by when in the mountain villages of Greece the traveller could meet with wandering bards who, accompanying themselves upon a five-stringed mandoline or a pear-shaped fiddle held upright on the knee, used to sing interminable klephtic ballads dealing with the long years of warfare with the Turks, which preceded the national liberation. These minstrels were blind, for the most part, and the names of many have been forgotten, though one at least has survived, that of Panagioti Tsopanakos of Dimitsana in Arcadia, who was born in 1789 and died in 1825, and who thus lived through one of the most stirring periods of Greek history. The klephtic songs are written in so-called political verses of fifteen syllables with a casura after the eighth, such as are known to have been used for the popular poetry of Byzantium. Whatever may have been the fate of their music, their words have been preserved in the collections made during the last century by Passow, Fauriel, Politis, and others. Many of them, moreover, are still sung and played, albeit in a fragmentary form, having been put to a different use (though it may well have been theirs when the form first originated), to wit, the dance. In Greece, as elsewhere, dance must have preceded song, and if the klephtic songs are sung in part to a free and highly ornate if somewhat monotonous recitative, their outstanding feature was always the refrain, usually in an emphatic dance-rhythm. Since dancing is still a national pursuit, both words and music of many of these ballads have thus been preserved in the popular tradition. The literal meaning of the word klepht is thief or brigand, but its current acceptation is far wider, and it is applied more particularly to those Greek outlaws who took to the mountains rather than submit to Turkish rule.