Folk Poetry of Modern Greece

FOLK POETRY OF MODERN
GREECE
FOLK POETRY OF MODERN
RODERICK BEATON
Ouranis Foundation Fellow in Modern Greek Language
and Literature, University of Birmingham
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Cambridge University Press 1980
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no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1980

First paperback edition 2004
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Beaton, Roderick.
Folk poetry of modern Greece.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Folk poetry, Greek (Modern) - History and criticism.
I. Title.
PA5255.B4 398.2'09495 79-7644
ISBN 0 521 22853 0 hardback

ISBN 0 521 60420 6 paperback
For my mother
Contents
Preface page xi
Maps xiv
1. INTRODUCTION 1
a. Modern Greece and folk poetry 1
b. Perspectives on Greek folk poetry 3
2. THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: THE SONGS 13

a. 'Mikrokostantinos': style and artistry 13
b. Local function: the Anastenaria 19
c. 'Mikrokostantinos'in the context of the tradition 21
3. STRUCTURE OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: THE 35

FORMULA
a. Composition and transmission 35
b. The oral formula 36
c. Formula systems and the language of songs 38
d. Formulas and formula systems in Greek songs 40
e. The role of the formula 56
4. STRUCTURE OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: 58

IMAGERY AND THEMES
a. Imagery 58
b. Themes 65
c. 'Tradition and the individual talent' 69
vii
Contents
5. THE EMERGENCE OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION 74
a. Origins of the political verse and Byzantine folk song 75
b. 'Diyenis Akritis' 78
c. The song of Armouris 82
d. Folk songs in the Ottoman period 86
6. FUNCTION OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: THE 90

SONGS AND HISTORY
a. Oral tradition and history 91
b. The significance of archaisms 93
c. Songs of the fall of cities 95
d. The songs of the klefts 102
7. THE SONGS AS MYTH 112

a. Diffusion of songs within Greece 112
b. Diffusion beyond Greece 116
c. The ballad The Bridge of Arta' 120
d. The question of meaning 125
e. 'Mikrokostantinos' 128
8. ONE TRADITION OR SEVERAL? 136

a. Ritual and functional songs 136
b. Rhyming distichs 148
9. THE HISTORICAL TRADITION 151

a. The poet 152
b. 'Daskaloyannis' and the songs of the Cretan rimadori 155
c. The Cypriot pyitarides 162
d. Professional composition in mainland Greece 168
e. The emergence of the historical tradition 174
10. GREEK FOLK POETRY AND WRITING 179

a. Writing and oral tradition 179
b. The demotic tradition and writing 183
Contents
c. The historical tradition and writing 185
d. The decline of oral tradition in Greece 189
e. The demotic tradition in the twentieth century 193
Notes 203
Glossary of Greek words transliterated in the text 211
Bibliography 213
Index 223
Preface
There is no lack of terms to describe what I have chosen to call the folk
poetry of modern Greece. Folk songs, ballads, epics, epic ballads, tra-
ditional songs, oral songs, oral tradition, oral poetry, all are widely used
and, at least in a general sense, clearly enough understood. The expres-
sion 'oral literature' has gained ground in recent years through efforts,
particularly of anthropologists, to find a blanket term which would
include all the others, although there are signs now that the general
distinction between 'oral' and other kinds of literature is not as clearcut
as was once believed. (As will be seen later, not all the songs discussed
in this book are unequivocally 'oral'.) The more old-fashioned 'folk
poetry' does not of course cover all types of unwritten 'literary' expres-
sion - the oral poems attributed to Homer, for instance, were surely
sung to entertain the pre-classical Greek aristocracy rather than the
'folk' - but it does truly describe the oral songs of modern Greece, in
that all of them seem to have been produced away from centres of
power and learning. The political and social attitudes they embody are
unsympathetic to authority, whether Greek, Turkish or ecclesiastical,
and in their language and cultural referents they lie at the opposite
extreme from the archaising book-culture of Byzantium which has
dominated religious, political and scientific writing up to the present
day. And I have referred in my title to 'poetry' rather than to 'song'
only because there has been no space here to attempt to do justice to
the vast range of music which is still to be found all over Greece and
which raises a great many fascinating problems of its own. It must not
be forgotten, however, that all of this poetry is in fact song, and that
until the collectors began to write it down, it had no existence outside
the sung performance.
This book is the result of field research carried out in Greece between
1974 and 1977. A fair share of the work was also done in libraries, in
particular that of the British School at Athens and the Gennadion
Preface
Library, Athens - the one especially memorable for its congenial
atmosphere, the other for an outstanding collection of works on
Greece. As far as possible the facts on which I have based my analysis
of folk poetry in Greece come from published sources; but the argu-
ments and conclusions in this book are largely based on experience,
listening to Greek folk poetry and song in tavernas and cafes, at village
weddings and paniyiria, and taking part so far as I was able.
Very many people whose names do not appear in the list of published
references have aided and abetted me in different ways, and I would
like to record my gratitude to Dr Hector Catling, Mr Roderick Conway
Morris, Mrs Litsa Dalla, Mr Markos Dragoumis, Mr Paul Halstead,
Manolis and Renee Philippakis, Miss Domna Samiou, Dr Philip Sherrard,
and the villagers, singers and musicians of many places in Greece and
Cyprus. I am grateful also to Professor Meraklis, Director of the Folk
Museum and Archive, University of Ioannina, for permission to quote
the extracts which appear in Chapter 4; to Dr Ruth Finnegan who very
kindly read and commented on draft sections of this book; to Mr
Yorgos Ioannou in Athens and Mr Theodoros PapadopouUos in Nicosia
for help in specific areas of my research; to Dr Michael Herzfeld and Dr
Michael Jeffreys, both of whom allowed me access to unpublished
material of their own; and, by no means least, to the Scottish Educa-
tion Department, the Greek Ministry of Education, and the Ouranis
Foundation in Athens, who have financed successive stages of my work.
With sadness I have to record the death in June 1979 of Stavros
Papastavrou, who first encouraged me to research in the field of modern
Greek studies, and who was for many years a patient supervisor and
valued friend. This book is offered as a tribute to his memory.
My thanks are due, finally, to Dr Margaret Alexiou, to whose un-
stinting support and generous criticism the appearance of this book in
its final form owes a great debt. Needless to say, all errors, omissions
and misguided flights of fancy are my responsibility alone.
Birmingham 1979 R.M.B.
Xll
A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same
people living in the same place . . . Or also
living in different places.
James Joyce, Ulysses
0 evaq TO Xeet era' 6 dXXoq TO Xeet dXXtcZ?c.

MdoTOpr] TO Tpayovd' 8ev ex'.
That's how one man tells it, another will tell
it differently. In song no one has the last
word.
A singer from Kosti, East Thrace
SERBIA.
B U L G A R I A Y
BLACK
VUG-0 5LAVU/
'Sozoyolis
tJSozopol)
/"x* ^•"•vi 1 CCA
,.s\. . . <&( SEA

CJ^"'^ r v (Edirne) v*v
[\Xythir,
100 agofenu
/[Karpathos
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Map 1. Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Trcbizond
P O N T OS
C A P P A.DOC1 A
0 100 ZpO
ACEDiTf /I
Map 2. Greece, the Southern Balkans, and Asia Minor.
1. Introduction
A.MODERN GREECE AND FOLK POETRY

Folk songs are not generally prone to abide within the boundaries
drawn up by international treaties, and the provenance of many of the
songs discussed in this book is often well beyond the political frontiers
of Greece today. Outside the Hellenic Republic, the Greek language is
spoken in Cyprus, Corsica and parts of southern Italy; before the First
World War it was spoken in parts of Bulgaria, and before the 1922
defeat of a Greek invading force in Turkey it was widely spoken
throughout western Anatolia and in Pontos (north-eastern Turkey).
Since the songs people sing are determined by the language they speak far
more than by the political grouping to which they belong, the traditions
of Greek folk poetry belong equally to the Greek-speaking populations
of all those places and to the refugees who at various times have been
displaced from them. 'Modern Greece', at least where its folk poetry is
concerned, is not geographical. Neither is it only contemporary. Greece
(or to be more precise the Greek language) has a long history, conven-
tionally divided into three periods - ancient (including the classical
period), Byzantine, and modern. Modern Greece therefore begins with
the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, to the
Ottoman Sultan on 29 May 1453. In a sense conveniently, the oldest
dated manuscript of a 'modern' Greek folk song was copied seven years
later (see below, pp. 82-6); and as we shall see there is good evidence
for believing that the songs first systematically collected in the nine-
teenth century and still sung today come of a tradition which has lasted
at least since that time. How much older this 'modern' tradition might
possibly be is another question, to be discussed in Chapter 5.
As soon as one begins to consider folk poems (or songs) in Greek it
is clear that a number of separate kinds are involved. Traditional Greek
scholarship, which is still dominated by the pioneering work of N. G.
Politis at the end of last century, has divided the vast body of sung
Introduction
material into categories based on subject matter. Modern collections of
songs follow a rigid format based on this classification: narrative songs
in which the name Diyenis appears, or which seem to be related to
other songs in which it is found, are known as akritikd, after the epony-
mous hero of the Byzantine epic Diyenis Akritis. Narrative songs in
which this name is not found, but whose subject matter otherwise
belongs to a similar vaguely historical or mythical past, are known as
paraloyes, a word of uncertain derivation, rarely appearing in the songs
themselves, but which has come into its own in the realm of scholarly
taxonomy. Next come songs which appear to relate, or at least to be
connected with, well-known events in Greek history (of which the
earliest is usually taken to be the sack of Adrianople by the Ottoman
Turks in 1361), and include the famous songs lamenting the fall of Con-
stantinople. And the final category of narrative songs is that known as
kleftika, the songs of the klefts, or bandits, who took part in the War of
Independence against the Turks. Songs whose content is primarily lyri-
cal rather than narrative are conventionally grouped under the headings
of love songs, wedding songs, religious songs, lullabies, exile songs,
gnomic songs, dirges and songs of the lower world.
The assumptions which gave rise to this system of classification are
not hard to understand. Each folk song was thought to be the separate
artistic creation of a member of the 'folk', which had been dispersed
and transmitted by his friends and descendants. This archetypal song
was therefore represented in the living tradition by a plethora of
variants, and the original could be approximately restored by juxtapos-
ing the best passages of all the available variants. For N. G. Politis, as
for a great many prominent Greek and foreign scholars who came after
him, each song was a separate entity; there was no question of a fluid
tradition such as that more recently analysed by Milman Parry and
A. B. Lord in Yugoslavia. Another assumption was of the historical
character of the narrative songs. Politis was not alone in supposing that
a single historical referent in the text of a song was a positive clue to
the song's origin, geographically and in time.
In the following pages I hope to show that the internal structure of
song texts, taken in conjunction with what can be deduced about their
social function from internal evidence, may have more to tell us about
the kinds of Greek folk poetry and the differences between them than
the traditional method of extrapolating concrete referents whose occur-
rence is often little more than random.
In Greek folk poetry more than one tradition is discernible, tradition
Perspectives on Greek folk poetry
being defined here and throughout what follows as a series of songs
which show evidence of having been composed and re-composed over
a period of time, and whose internal structure and external function are
consistent. The tradition which I regard as the central one, and cer-
tianly the largest (although it need not be the oldest), may be termed
the demotic tradition, and includes all those songs, both narrative and
lyrical, whose internal structure consists of an interlocking system of
formulas, images and themes, and whose characteristic external func-
tion, so far as this can be determined from internal evidence, can best
be defined as the reflection and expression of cultural values and aspira-
tions.
Although the bulk of Greek folk poetry conventionally grouped
under the heading of dimotika tragoudia (folk songs) belongs to this
tradition, there are, as we shall see, kinds of folk poetry in Greece
whose structure or function diverges from this to such an extent that it
is more helpful to regard them as separate, parallel traditions. Such are
the epic-style, topical narrative poems of Crete and Cyprus, certain func-
tional songs and, up to a point, the flourishing and versatile tradition of
rhyming distichs. The next six chapters will be devoted to what I have
called the demotic tradition, while in the later chapters I intend to dis-
cuss other kinds of folk poetry in Greece. One consequence of this, I
hope, will be to challenge certain easily made assumptions concerning
'oral poetry' and 'oral literature' in general, and Greek folk poetry in
particular.
B. PERSPECTIVES ON GREEK FOLK POETRY

In the past a variety of reasons have been put forward by both Greek
and foreign scholars for studying or collecting Greek folk songs. Some-
times the reasons have been merely implicit, in other cases they have
been explicitly stated. In general, though, it is impossible to separate
the study of Greek folk poetry either from the widespread European
interest in such matters which dates from the mid-eighteenth century,
or from the movement, in Greece and abroad, towards the establish-
ment and consolidation of the modern Greek nation.
In recent years the study of folk or oral poetry has begun to be
recognised as an academic discipline, and I believe it is now possible to
consider the folk poetry of another people apart from the romanticism
or nationalism which provided the initial stimulus for such studies.
Their value nowadays is not confined to particular peoples or nations,
Introduction
but has to do with a more fundamental interest in the nature of folk (or
oral) poetry. Particularly interesting is the relation between written and
non-written poetry, which has an important bearing on the beginnings
of what in Europe we are used to think of as literature, and demands a
different perspective on folk poetry from those which traditionally
have prevailed. A brief historical resume of the development of interest
in Greek folk poetry will, I hope, serve to illustrate the importance of
this change in perspective.
Scholarly and antiquarian interest in folk poetry in Europe seems to
have begun about the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1765 Bishop
Percy published his Reliques of ancient English poetry, based on a
manuscript which he claimed came into his hands in a rather curious
way, and which he evidently edited considerably in deference to cur-
rent literary taste (Wells, 1950, pp. 228-9). In Germany, as early as
1770 the young Goethe had begun to show enthusiasm for the German
Volkslied (Swales, 1975, p. 12), and by the end of the century
Macpherson's supposed translations of the ancient Gaelic bard Ossian
(first published between 1760 and 1765) had become a bestseller all
over Europe, being admired, perhaps significantly, by Napoleon among
others. The debt of many European writers of the Romantic movement
to what they knew of folk poetry was widely, if a little defensively,
acknowledged, for example by Wordsworth, who stated categorically,
'I do not think that there is an able Writer in verse of the present day
who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques:
I know that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy in this
occasion to make a public avowal of my own' (Wordsworth, 1815, p.
78).
But the reasons which have justified the study of folk poetry have
usually been more complicated than a matter of literary taste. Thus in
western Europe romanticism tended to rebel not only against estab-
lished literary conventions but also against the social order, and 'natu-
ral' and 'spontaneous' were terms applied to folk poetry and to the
'folk'. In Germany and eastern Europe the same interest tended to
manifest itself as part of an emergent nationalism, and in many coun-
tries the history of the systematic collection and study of folk poetry is
inseparable from the history of national independence and the establish-
ment of a national consciousness. It is also noteworthy, at least in the
case of Greek folk poetry, that it is the interest of the educated classes
in folk poetry, and very rarely the songs themselves, that appear to have
been inspired by the ideals of modern nationalism.
The earliest signs of scholarly interest in what we would nowadays
call folk culture in Greece come from foreign sources, notably English
and French, and appear to derive from the antiquarian interest in
Greece itself which became especially fashionable towards the end of
the eighteenth century. Not all of the dilettanti who travelled in Greece
at this period were bent on archaeological plunder, and even those who
were frequently give valuable information on the multi-racial society of
Greece in the years before Independence, when the demotic tradition
was flourishing.
Between the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars and the Greek uprising
of 1821, in particular, many visitors to Greece apart from amateur
archaeologists wrote about their travels, and the claim made later by
Claude Fauriel, in the preface to the first published collection of Greek
folk poems, that he was the first to give due attention to contemporary
Greece instead of to the ruins of its past, is also found in many of their
prefaces. Francois Charles Pouqueville first visited Greece by accident
when, taken prisoner by the Turks while serving with Napoleon's army
in Egypt, he was held for a time at Tripolitsa in the Peloponnese before
being taken to Constantinople and eventually released. Pouqueville im-
mediately wrote about his experiences and his knowledge of the
country, which was in fact slight; but largely on the strength of this
publication, he was then appointed Napoleon's consul-general at the
court of Ali Pasha in Ioannina, where he spent ten years from 1806 to
1816. In his later publications about Greece he shows himself conspi-
cuously better informed than in his first (Pouqueville, 1813;
Simopoulos, 1975a, pp. 324-5). Edward Dodwell, although a classical
scholar, recorded much useful information on Greek life at the time of
his visits in 1801, 1805, and 1806 (Dodwell, 1819); William Martin-
Leake, who visited northern and western Greece between 1804 and
1810 on British government service, not only provided a wealth of
topographical information but a grammar of modern Greek and infor-
mation on Greek, Turkish and Albanian communities (Martin-Leake,
1814; Simopoulos, 1975, pp. 314-24). Henry Holland was for two
years the personal physician to Ali Pasha of Ioannina (1815); and we
possess at least two accounts of life in Corfu during the two periods
when there was a French presence in the Ionian islands - between the
years 1797 and 1799 (Bellaire, 1805), and later from 1807 to 1814
(Pernot, 1918). And from Dimo and Nicolo Stephanopoli, Corsican
Greeks sent by Napoleon on a personal embassy to the Mani in 1797-8,
who published an account of their experiences in French (1800), we
Introduction
learn much about the semi-autonomous Greek domain at this time.
From these and other accounts of the period we gain some firsthand
information about the performance of Greek songs and the circum-
stances in which they were sung.
The earliest serious attempts to collect and publish Greek folk songs
were made by a German and a Frenchman respectively, neither of
whom ever set foot in Greece. The sources on which Baron Werner von
Haxthausen (1935) and Claude Fauriel (1824; 1825) drew for their col-
lections were therefore the informal collections of educated Greeks,
at this period either expatriates such as Theodoros Manoussis,
Hax^hausen's main source, or informants like Fauriel's close friend
Andreas Moustoxidis, who came from the western-dominated Ionian
islands. Thus, although the individual interest and the knowledge of
Greek folk song existed for these collections to have been possible,
there was no climate in Greece itself for the publication of folk songs
until the second half of the nineteenth century.
Von Haxthausen, whose collection was abandoned on the publica-
tion of Fauriel's and did not appear in print until 1935, probably began
first. The Baron does not seem to have been either a romantic or a
liberal and, unlike Fauriel, his interest in collecting Greek songs appears
to have come about casually. Encouraged by Jakob Grimm (to whom
he was related) he succeeded as early as 1815 in interesting Goethe in
some Greek poems he had collected, and vague plans were made for
publishing a volume of songs. The prime motivation for this collection
was not the events and repercussions of the Greek uprising of 1821 but
the Romantic swing in European literary taste which, as already men-
tioned, had been gaining ground for half a century. Goethe's reaction to
the poems von Haxthausen showed him admirably typifies the literary
response of the period. 'I was visited by a friend of the modern Greeks',
he wrote in 1815, 'who had with him some folk songs of that people,
the most beautiful of all known to us from the point of view of lyric,
dramatic and epic poetry. Yet these are folk songs!' (Kouyeas, 1932).
Such a combination of admiration for the vitality and spontaneity of
folk song with a civilised, incredulous disdain is characteristic of the
Romantic response to folk poetry at this period.
Claude Fauriel, a man of liberal ideas and friend of the Italian
Manzoni, set out in his preface three reasons for having undertaken the
task of collecting and publishing modern Greek folk songs. Firstly and
chiefly, to pay accurate and deserved respect to the manners, character
and spirit of the contemporary Greeks; secondly, to counterbalance the
exclusively antiquarian studies of Greece that had been published over
the previous four hundred years (a claim which, as we noted, had also
been made by several of his predecessors); and finally because of his
belief that the living heirs of the ancient Greeks might be a source of
hitherto unsought information about their illustrious ancestors (1824,
pp. vii-viii). Whether or not the 1821 uprising provided the initial
stimulus for Fauriel's work, it is certain that its prompt publication and
instant success came largely as a consequence of political events in
Greece.1
Following this publication, the cause of Greek folk poetry and that
of Greek nationalism became inseparably linked. Charles Brinsley
Sheridan, Fauriel's English translator, declared that the songs of the
klefts are Valuable as a collection, not so much of beautiful poems, as
of historical documents, which prove the capacity of the Greeks to
defend and govern their country, and, consequently, the injustice of
shackling their freedom with the condition of receiving a foreign sove-
reign' (Sheridan, 1825, p. xviii). And the question of the most suitable
form of government to be adopted by the future Greek state was also
uppermost in the mind of Sheridan's reviewer the same year. On the
songs themselves, the reviewer had this to say:
To the name of poetry, a great many pieces of the collection have
very little pretension, even that portion which the translator pre-
eminently styles ideal; they are homely, inartificial descriptions of
feelings, sometimes natural, sometimes not. The only sentiments
which appear to kindle the poetic flame in the bosoms of the modern
Greeks, are grief and the thirst of vengeance. Inspired by these, their
bards do give birth occasionally to bold figures. But, upon the whole,
their muse is a very matter-of-fact personage, who talks of balls and
cartridges like a serjeant of dragoons! [Oriental Herald, 1825, p. 605)
In the wake of Fauriel other collectors outside Greece set to work
with varying degrees of seriousness. The following year saw the appear-
ance of Joss' Specimens of Romaic lyric poetry in a bilingual edition
(1826). Many of these 'specimens' are patriotic pieces by writing poets
associated with the War of Independence, but several convincing pieces
of folk poetry are included, many of them apparently derived from
Fauriel. Joss gives no hint of his sources, and the spectacularly appalling
translations he added suggest that this collection was aimed at a popular
market which had sprung up in the wake of events in Greece. And a
year later, in Germany, the first of a series of collections was published
Introduction
by Theodor Kind, in the periodical Eunomia. Like Haxthausen and
Fauriel, Kind depended entirely on educated expatriate sources, but all
five of his collections, published between 1827 and 1861, contain pre-
viously unpublished material and were edited with care and intelligence.
In Greece after Independence it was some time before any advance
was made on the pioneering work of Fauriel. Even Manoussis,
Haxthausen's informant who later became a professor at Athens Uni-
versity, seems never to have published the folk songs that he knew. It is
true that Moustoxidis published two folk songs in the Ionian Anthology
in 1834 (Ibrovac, 1966, p. 235), and an Anthology of heroic and erotic
songs was published by Andreas Koromilas in Athens (1835). But it is
clear from the latter's remarks to the jreader that his interest was pri-
marily in collecting poems, mostly on patriotic subjects, by popular
poets rather than traditional folk songs. A further collection was pub-
lished by a Greek expatriate in Russia (Evlampios, 1843).
But it was in the Ionian islands, where the first modern university
in Greek lands had been founded under the British Protectorate, that
the systematic collection and study of folk songs by Greeks was first
undertaken. The motives for this study were different again. Unlike von
Haxthausen and Fauriel, the poet Dionysios Solomos and his followers
were not interested in folk poetry for itself but as a stepping stone
towards the creation of a national Greek literature. Thus in the Hepta-
nesian school the European trends of a new literary taste and nationa-
lism in politics were combined. In a letter to his friend Giorgios Tertsetis,
dated 1833, Solomos unequivocally stated his own interest in Greek
folk songs. Speaking of his compatriots, who inclined merely to imitate
the songs of the klefts in their poetry, he wrote:
I am glad that they take folk songs as their starting point; but I
should like whoever uses the kleftic language to do so in its essence,
and not formally, do you understand me? And as for writing poetry,
attend to this, my Giorgio; certainly it is well to put down one's
roots upon these traces, but not to stop there: one must rise perpen-
dicularly . . . Kleftic poetry is fine and interesting as an ingenuous
manifestation by the klefts of their lives, thoughts and feelings. It
does not have the same interest on our lips; the nation requires from
us the treasure of our individual intelligence clothed in national
forms. (Politis, L., 1956, p. 32)
Such an interest is by no means that of the antiquarian or dilettante,
and the importance of Solomos' stand for the subsequent development
of modern Greek letters cannot be overestimated. It is largely as a result
of this that the universal propagation of folk poetry in Greek education
from this time onwards has made available to Greek poets, musicians
and even political orators a whole language of associations and refe-
rences, comparable to that afforded in classical times by Homer and in
certain periods of European literature by the Bible. But this perspective
also meant that, while Solomos and his contemporaries collected and
studied folk songs with close attention, it was only as something of an
afterthought that they came to see the songs as worthy to be publicised
in their own right.
It is known that Solomos provided the Dalmatian collector Niccolo
Tommaseo with some of the Greek songs which appeared in the third
volume of his wide-ranging collection of folk poetry (1842), among
which appeared Solomos' own poem 'The Death of the Shepherd'; and
an unauthenticated report states that the Ionian collector and pupil of
Solomos, Antonios Manousos, possessed in 1851 a copy of Fauriel's col-
lection with annotations by the poet (Kairofylas, 1952). It cannot be
established how much folk poetry Solomos knew, or precisely how he
came by it, since he too never set foot in the mainland of Greece; but
Solomos was diffident enough about publishing his own poems, and the
idea of publishing the folk songs he knew seems never to have occurred
to him.
The first major collections of folk songs to be published in Greece
both appeared in Corfu, and both were by younger members of Solomos'
circle. Antonios Manousos, whose National songs appeared in 1850, was
the first collector to engage in field work, and a number of his songs
were recorded directly from singers. Although Manousos was erratic in
acknowledging his sources he was careful to record divergences from
the texts of Fauriel and Tommaseo. Two years later Spyridon Zambelios
published a further volume of songs (1852), which was later heavily cri-
ticised on the grounds that Zambelios arbitrarily 'improved' his texts
(Apostolakis, 1929). It is in fact unlikely that any of the versions of
songs published up to this time corresponds exactly to an oral perfor-
mance, but comparison of Zambelios' texts with those of other collec-
tors of the period suggests that the charges may have been over-zealous.
Many of the objections which were made to Zambelios' texts were
actually based on a literary impression of what the 'true' folk style was,
and these would be poor grounds today for emending texts which
otherwise appear satisfactory.
The second half of the century saw the publication of many collec-
tions from different regions, without significant interference on the
part of their editors, the most important being those by Hasiotis (1866)
Introduction
and Aravantinos (1880) from Epiros, Ioannidis (1870) from Pontos,
Jeannaraki (1876) from Crete and Sakellarios (1868; 1891) from Cyprus.
The same period also saw the publication in Germany of the collection
of Arnold Passow (1860), based largely on texts already published and
the most scholarly edition so far,2 and the development of academic
interest in the historical origins of certain Greek folk songs.
As early as 1866 the German scholar Max Biidinger suggested that
the song 'The Sons of Andronikos' referred to historical events and
characters of the Byzantine period (Biidinger, 1866); and then came the
discovery by George Sathas and Emile Legrand of the Byzantine epic
Diyenis Akritis (first published 1875), which seemed to open out a new
historical perspective on a number of Greek ballads in which the name
Diyenis is found. It may be said that from that time onwards one
branch of Greek folk song studies has had to do with the supposed his-
torical origins of individual songs, placing them in some cases well back
into the Middle Byzantine period; and this line of research, too, was not
without political and cultural implications. It was not entirely fortui-
tous that the interest of Greek and foreign scholars in establishing this
link with Byzantium developed during the decades when the Megali
Idea, the Great Idea of recapturing Constantinople for Greece, became
a serious factor in Greek political life, culminating in the Greek invasion
of Turkey in 1920.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Nikolaos Politis, the
founder of the science of laografia, or folklore, began the enormous
scholarly task of coordinating the material that more than half a cen-
tury of collection, in many different branches of folklore, had brought
to light. In addition to collecting and collating versions of songs, his
work included the establishment of a taxonomy of folk songs and col-
lections of proverbs and folktales, which he classified and published
with commentaries. Politis' work was both meticulous and on a grand
scale, such that all later scholars of the subject owe him a considerable
debt. Unfortunately, however, this very fact and the resultant awe in
which his memory has been held by his successors, have delayed ques-
tioning of his basic assumptions.
Politis' vast labours on Greek folklore were motivated, throughout
his career, by a deep commitment to Greek nationalism, a commitment
which clearly affected his scholarship and to some extent that of his
successors also. One result of Politis' nationalism, as far as songs are
concerned, was determined by the assumption that the modern Greek
state is the direct heir to the Byzantine Empire, with the implication
that songs of other Balkan peoples, when they show any similarity to
10
those of the Greeks, must have derived from them at a time when
Greek culture was disseminated in those areas under Byzantine rule or
influence. Politis did not ignore comparison with the songs of other
peoples; in fact he took a great deal of trouble to collect and study them.
But although his evidence was collected and presented with impeccable
scholarship, his conclusions were inevitably dictated by his original
motivation for research. This was the beginning of a curious 'isola-
tionism' in Greek folklore studies, which has led several fine Greek
scholars to divert valuable comparative studies to the end of demonstrat-
ing the Greek origin of particular songs.
Another consequence of Politis' nationalist convictions can be seen
in his commentaries on the songs themselves. Songs, he tells us, have a
special place in the folklore of
our people; not only insofar as they mightily move the soul in con-
templation of their unsurpassed beauty, unforced simplicity, origi-
nality, force and energy of expression, but because they reveal with
greater accuracy than any other spiritual creation of the people the
unique character of the nation . . . The songs reflect faithfully and
perfectly the life and manners, the emotions and the thought of the
Greek people and rekindle memories, refined by their poetic inven-
tion, of national vicissitudes. (Politis, N. G., 1914, p. 5)
Since he understood the songs in this way, it is hardly surprising to
find that Politis often read into them the kind of historical and social
information he believed they contained, and tended to assume that the
nationalism of his time had also been shared by their composers.
Politis' Selections from the songs of the Greek people (1914) is
notable both for its high quality of scholarship (it contains a list of
sources for every known variant which he used in the compilation) and
for its unusual method of establishing texts. This was to conflate exist-
ing variants of each song, so that gaps or inferior lines in one variant
could be made good by adding or substituting lines from another. As
Politis himself commented, 'My task is like that of the editor of a literary
text who, on the basis of what is written in the manuscripts, refurbishes
it, limiting myself to establishing a text (recensio) only, and not ven-
turing upon correction (emendatioy (1914, p. 7). Politis further believed
that the result of this process would be the closest possible text to the
'original' which a modern editor could achieve.
Politis was attacked for this approach by Yannis Apostolakis (1929),
who nevertheless persisted in applying methods of literary textual criti-
cism without questioning whether they were really appropriate to the
11
Introduction
material; and the editors of recent collections (Petropoulos, 1958,1959;
Academy of Athens, 1963; Ioannou, 1966) have taken this criticism
into account, although in other matters there has still been little serious
reaction against Politis' general approach.
As can be seen from this brief summary, the history of collecting
and studying Greek folk poetry is complicated by several factors. In
particular, the impact of the early collections and the partisanship of
folk song by Solomos and Politis for literary and cultural purposes res-
pectively, have meant that a knowledge of folk culture is a prerequisite
for approaching almost any aspect of modern Greek cultural life. There
are two further factors which have contributed to my own involvement
with the subject. For historical reasons folk poetry in Greece (or rather,
in Greek) has probably been better preserved than comparable tradi-
tions in western Europe, and is still sung in the village setting where one
may fairly assume it used also to be composed. Greek song is relatively
accessible, therefore, through the many published collections of texts,
a few of music and, most important of all, as a living, although declining,
art in Greek villages. And the other factor is the unquestionably high
quality of many songs, both as poetry and as music.
12
2. The Demotic Tradition: the Songs
We have already noted the characteristics of folk poetry emphasised by

commentators whose inspiration was Romantic or nationalist, or a com-
bination of the two. The Romantic view of folk song as 'spontaneous'
has been considerably modified by modern studies of oral tradition,
and yet the notions of charming simplicity and a hirsute sort of artistry
have by no means been dispelled by the post-war British and American
revival of folk singing. Very few Greek songs, it must be said at once,
are either charming or simple. Most are formal and highly organised,
although as with any well-developed art form, these characteristics are
not always immediately apparent. The ideas they express are complex,
often hauntingly elusive; and alongside their lyricism and fine imagery
there is a violence and an uncompromisingly pragmatic outlook which
are not easily sentimentalised.1 Some of these qualities will be apparent
in the song of Mikrokostantinos, or Little Constantine, which I quote
in full.
A. 'MIKROKOSTANTINOS': STYLE AND ARTISTRY

' 0 KojoTadivos 6 fiucpos /a 6 /xt/cpoKcoaradtôc
liwpb dbv el\ V V>avva dov, yuKpb d" appaficovLaêi,
liuipb dbv fjpre iirjvviia vd nay OTO oeyepi.
Nirxra oeXXcovet r' dXoyo, viyyja TO KaXXiycovei.
Bcu>' dor^fievta neraXa iioXayLarevte^ Xbtipes.
Kai f? KaXri dbv eXeye dirb TO napadvpi.
- 'Eai; buiftaiveus, KcjOTOVTfi, Kai [leva nov fde V
oe npcoTa OTO 0 e o K ' voTepivd OTOVS
oe /a bXovoTepa OTT\V eyXvueux you [xavva.
- Wiavva IJLOV, fiawa fiov KaXrj, [idvva Uov faxapevta, 10
OTTCOC kixeva elxes na&L, va 'XT?C Kai drj KaXrj /xou,
va 'x?K Kai d?? yevaiKa /xou, TT\V ayam}TUiri JJLOV.
13
The songs
, /caj3aXXt/cei//e oav TO yopyb ITOVXCLKL.
"Slore vd try odq ^VCJ yeid, oapapra jUtXXta nr\pe
K t wore pa novpe orb /caXo, dXXa aapa^rarpta. 15
'A/c6jua Kporoq rov j3aara K ' 17 7rtXo7td Kparvobvro
KL airrri 77 oKvXa fj yavoiirj, f? ybfipeooas ^vyarepa
dnb TO xep' TTJP apna%e, OTO iinepidTrepub rr\v irdet.
lid OTO OKOfipi dr? ga&ioe KL OPTp'meta dri |touptfet,
yua goufcXa d ^ k^pbpeoeaaX fiepya dr^ve bivei. 20
T77 bivei 5efca 7rp6j3ara /cat Keira \pcjpytaoideva,
TT\ bivy /cat rptda/cuXtd /cat /cetra Xvooao^xeva.
Trjp napayyeXpei ord yepd, yepd TTJP xcopareuet.
- 0 d Trar^c 7rd^co ard j3owd /cat ard i//r?Xd /cop^ra,
TT'OXOVP rd /cpua rd êpd, rtc Spooepovq TOW yr\OKiovs 25
/ct a 5e da /cd^c e/caro /ct a 5e dd /cdi^^ x^^ 1
/cat rd a/cuXtd pdofirjPTadvb OTO gdfxno jdrj gare/3i?c.
Se ouXouc nbpovs -nave Ta, oe oiiXovs iroTioe Ta
/cat OTO Yiopbcwr\ TTOTO/XO JUT? bd<; /cat rd 7rortar?c,
7tar* exet <pt6ta /ct oxePTpes, dd ££j3ow i;d ae </?dê. 30
- 'EXa,,Xptar€ Kat Ilaâ7td juero Mopoyepfi oov.
lid ard ]3owd noi)fipioKOVixaipa ^propy 17 eikr? aou.
Ilfjpe /cat 7TT776 ard |3owd rd SaKpyaôprco/xe^r?.
*Apm5a!dpm6a yeppr\oe, dppd&a -nePTe 6e/ca,
yip'qKOP x^Xta 7rp6]3ara /cat 7t6 ta nePTOKboux 35
/cat rd a/cuXtd f$8oiir}PTaf>vb, OTLS Kay-novs e/carej3r7
Kat aro FtopS01^77 7rora/x6 Trdet /cat rd araXtfet.
Kt 6 Kcoarai>ru>o<; fipxovpro dnb TOV aeêptoO dou.
Kotrdf' aura rd Trpoâra, /xaXajuo|3paxtoXdra,
KOtrdfet /cat rd aKuXtd darjjuogepdarara. 40
- KaXr)fi€pd oov, Xvyepr). - KaXcoc ro^ Kcoara^rtô.
etât rd 7rpo|3ara, /xaXaMO|3paxtoXdra,
etât /cat rd a/cuXtd, dor\ixogepdapdTa\
- Tou Kcoara^rtôu rou iimpov, TOV IUKPOKCOOTOPTLPOV,
bnov /xt/cpoc 7ra^rpeun?/ce, iiucpbs yvpahca nfipe, 45
/zt/cpo do^ t7pre ixr\pvixa pa nay OTO oeyepi,
TX\ fidppa dov napeyyeike, TX\P /capStowctd rou judwa
/cat aro oKajpvl pk e/carae /ct dprpuieui lie |touptae,
JU' eScoae 6e/ca 7rpoj3ara j^d 7rd j^d rd ifvXdyoj.
("ToTepa avrbs TX\P nfjpe, Tr\p ej3aXe OTO dXoyo, ypcopioTrjKap 50
/cei 7repa TX\P nf\ye OTO onin.)
2,TO dXoyo TT\P /cddtae, OTO on'vn Tr\pe ndyei.
14
'Mikrokostantinos'
Kdrou ri\v iLfTjoe KI auroc 7rd7ei anavou.
BpioKet n? fiawa TOV9 Kparovoe GTX\VfryjcaXidTT?C pcwca.
- Mdwa yf novvat, r? yvvauca JJLOV, itowox KOX f? /ca\7? juoi>; 55
-rvvduca oov bmb&ave, yvuduca aov k^cufm\.
-Iloât, ixawajf TO \xvr\[ia dr?c va nay to va TX\V /<Xdi//co;
-To\ivr\\xa dr?^ xoprdpuioe /cat yvcopvoyib hev exec.
Xrfi iieor\ Ti\v ea/ctae, ar6 JLWXO TT)^ wriyaivei.
(Megas, 1961, pp. 488-90)
Kostantinos the Little, Little Kostantinos

was little in his mother's arms, and little when she betrothed
him,
and little when a summons came to him to go to war.
By night he saddled his horse, by night he shod it.
He put on silver horseshoes and nails of gold. 5
And his beloved called to him from the window,
*You are going, Kostantis, and to whom do you leave me?'
*I leave you first to God and then to the saints,
I leave you last of all to my sweet mother.
Mother, good mother, mother sweet as sugar, 10
as you looked after me as a child, look after my beloved,
look after my wife, my loved one.'
He leapt into the saddle, and rode off like a swift bird.
No sooner had he said goodbye than forty miles went past,
no sooner had they said farewell, than another forty-three. 15
The sound of hooves could still be heard, his voice was still in
the air
when that impious bitch, the child of a Jewess,
seized [his wife] by the hand and took her to the barber,
made her sit upon a stool and cut her hair like a man's,
dressed her in a shepherd's cloak and gave her a staff. 20
She gave her ten sheep and those were mangy,
she gave her three dogs and those were rabid.
She commanded her loudly, and loudly mocked her,
'You shall go up to the mountains and to the high peaks,
where the streams are cold and the shadows cool 25
and if you don't make them a hundred, and if you don't make
them a thousand
and the dogs seventy-two, don't come down to the plain.
Take them to all the fords, at each one water them,
15
The songs
but to the River Jordan do not go to water them,

because there are snakes and vipers there, they'll come out and 30
eat you.'
'Come Christ, come Holy Mother with your Only Begotten Son.
Even in the mountains where 111 be, may your blessing reach me.'
She set out and went to the mountains weighed down with tears.
Lamb gave birth to lamb, lambs in fives and tens,
they became a thousand sheep and five hundred goats 35
and the dogs seventy-two; she came down to the plains
and by the River Jordan went to rest them.
And Kostantinos came by, returning from the war.
He looked at those sheep with their collars of gold,
and he looked at the dogs, with their ribbons of silver. 40
'Good morning, pretty girl.' 'You're welcome, Kostantinos.'
'Who owns the sheep, with their collars of gold,
and who owns the dogs, with their ribbons of silver?'
'Kostantinos the Little, Little Kostantinos,
who was little when he married, little when he took a wife, 45
and little when a summons came to him to go to war;
he left orders with his mother, his own heart's mother
but she made me sit upon a stool and cut my hair like a man's,
she gave me ten sheep to go and watch over.'
[The singer glosses part of the story in prose:] Then he took 50
her, set her on his horse, they recognised one another there
and he took her home.
He put her on his horse and took her home.
He left her below and himself went up [to the house].
He found his mother, with a distaff in her arms.
'Mother, where is my wife, and where is my beloved?' 55
'Your wife is dead, your wife is buried.'
'Where, mother, is her grave that I can go and weep?'
'Her grave is overgrown and can't be recognised.'
He stabbed her through the middle, and took her to the mill.
Regarding this song, for the moment, purely in stylistic terms, a

number of features attract attention. The tale is well told, and there is
no feeling either of 'padding' or of important material being left out.
On the other hand the first part of the song includes much more detail
in proportion to the events described than does the last part, and the
collapse of the metre in several places towards the end, as well as the
16
'Mikrokostantinos'
interpolation of a prose summary of a short part of the story, indicate

that the singer was flagging by this time. This is a problem often encoun-
tered in recording songs, and has less to do with the singer's technique
than with the simple fact that it has become customary at village festi-
vals to sing only the opening few lines of a long song such as this. In
my own experience of the Anastenaria, the festival with which this ver-
sion of the song is associated, I have not heard more than half a dozen
lines sung, although the accompanying music can be kept up for several
hours at a time.
But although the end is telescoped, particularly in comparison with
the first part of the song, the opening lines do not digress from the main
theme. A further look at the opening reveals how this effect has been
achieved. The lines of the song are built up not only in narrative units,
but in balancing verbal patterns. Thus the second half of 1. 1 repeats
exactly the same information as is contained in the first half, but the
different metrical requirements of the unequal halves of the line make
possible the artistic satisfaction, for singer and audience, of an exact
'mirror-image' which is at the same time a repetition and a new inven-
tion. Then the word mikro (little) is again repeated as a key-word,
uniting the three following items of information about the hero - his
closeness to his mother, his engagement, and his impending departure.
In a device very widespread in Greek songs, the third and most impor-
tant of the three facts is given particular emphasis through occupying
a whole line instead of a half-line.
A pattern similar to that of the opening line is created in 1. 5, where
instead of telling us merely that Kostantinos prepared his horse for the
journey, the singer has concentrated on specific details. In 1. 4, two
balancing half-lines united by the repetition of the word nyhta (night)
show us with some immediacy two 'stills' from the sequence of
Kostantinos preparing his horse. Then in the following line (1. 5) the
second detail, of his shoeing the horse, is further elaborated into two
images which are hardly realistic (the silver horsehoes and golden nails)
but form a balance through the repetition of related ideas (silver and
gold, horseshoes and nails). The effect of such repetitions is first to
focus on a single detail in the narrative, then to stop the narrative and
expand upon the chosen detail, by means either of a verbal pattern, or
of a pattern of images. A similar effect is found in 1. 20 (the cloak and
staff), 11. 21-2 {mangy sheep and rabid dogs) and 1. 25 (cold water and
cool streams).
Line 12 is a repetition, completely unnecessary for the development
17
The songs
of the narrative, of 1. 11, but again it serves a double function. Not only
is the patterning of different words for Kostantinos' wife effective at
the level of verbal craftsmanship, but the emphasis that she is close to
him both as a member of the family (his wife) and as his loved one
(agapitikt mou) heightens the effect of the mother's cruelty to her
when he has gone.
The tendency of the singer to dwell on the specific detail, even at
the expense of narrative flow, can be seen throughout this song and is
general in the demotic tradition. The examples quoted from the begin-
ning of the song show how the singer chose to expand his material by
verbal play or concentration on a single image, rather than by adding
incidents peripheral to the story. Later in the song there are instances
of a corresponding economy: in 11. 38-9, for example, the dramatic
effect hinges on Konstantinos returning from the war and coming upon
the healthy flocks and the shepherd who turns out to be his wife, and
no details are introduced to make the coincidental meeting less abrupt or
more natural. Where the singer has chosen to hold up the narrative is in
the balanced questions and answers of Kostantinos and the shepherd,
and the latter's close but not exact repetition of the opening lines of
the song, by which Kostantinos recognises that she is his wife. And a
further, highly dramatic, economy is found in the shepherd's reply to
Kostantinos, where in repeating the first part of the narrative
Kostantinos' wife ceases to be 'she' and silently admits that she is T .
She allows him to recognise her in mid-stream, as it were, and the great
dramatic moment of the song is conveyed by the change of a pronoun.
Characterisation in this song, as in the majority of Greek narrative
songs, is kept simple; and it is quite common for major characters, such
as Kostantinos' wife in this song, not even to be named. Dramatic effect
is obtained primarily by contrast (Kostantinos' faith in his mother, and
his mother's cruel behaviour; Konstantinos' loving references to his
mother and his brutal murder of her when he discovers the truth), and
by hyperbole, often expressed in terms of vivid but non-realistic images
in which the singers obviously delighted. Such are the silver horseshoes
and golden nails, and the few mangy sheep and rabid dogs which mira-
culously multiply and come to have collars of gold and ribbons of silver.
Beyond the style and content of the song, as printed here out of
context, the discussion inevitably leads on to other questions. This ver-
sion of the song has a ritual as well as a narrative function, and how is
one to understand the role of the song in relation to the Anastenaria
ritual in which it plays an important part, as well as to the wide range
of variants existing elsewhere and quite unconnected with any ritual?
18
The Anastenaria
B. LOCAL FUNCTION: THE ANASTENARIA

The festival known as the Anastenaria traditionally began in Kosti on
21 May, and was dedicated to the saints Constantine and Helen, whose
day it is. In the late nineteenth century the festival took place in several
Greek and Bulgarian villages in Thrace, in what is now the south-eastern
corner of Bulgaria, and was dedicated to the patron saint of the village
(Megas, 1961, p. 491). Kosti was the largest and most influential of the
villages, and according to one informant the festivities there used to last
for a whole week. The Anastenaria are still held in Greece, by refugees
who left Kosti in 1914 and their descendants.
The festival begins on the morning of the saint's day, with the sacri-
fice of a young uncastrated bull and ram, which are to be eaten by the
Anastenarides during the three days of the festival. During the sacrifice
and the skinning of the animals the musicians play the lyra and the
daouli, a large side-drum; the sacrifice over, the animals' horns and
hooves are cut off and buried in secret. About noon on the saint's day
and the two following days, the men and women known as Anaste-
narides gather in the konaki, the house of their chief, where the icons
of the saints are kept. During the day the musicians play for spells of
about half an hour at a time, while one by one the Anastenarides begin
to dance. This is when the 'Mikrokostantinos' tune is played, but when I
was there very few lines of the song were actually sung. Towards dusk a
fire is built of logs outside in the square, and when this has burnt down
and the red-hot embers have been raked out to form a large circle, the
dancers, headed by their chief and then by the musicians, come out
from the house, holding the icons of the saints. Since there are not
enough icons to go round, most of the dozen or so dancers carry the
red silk scarves which during the rest of the year are draped over the
icons, and are believed to contain the power of the saints. After first
dancing in a circle round the burning embers, the dancers, now in bare
feet, begin to cross the fire. The fire-dance lasts for about twenty
minutes, until the fire begins to lose its heat, when the Anastenarides
return to the kondki. Sometimes the music and dancing continue there
long into the night.
This festival, with the spectacular element of fire-dancing and the
ability of the Anastenarides, during the dance, to tread on and handle
red-hot embers without suffering the slightest burns, has in recent years
attracted the attention not only of folklorists and tourists, but of scien-
tists from a variety of disciplines, students of the occult and sceptics.
19
The songs
This apparently pagan ritual, which the Greek Church condemns as
idolatrous and orgiastic,2 is also in many respects deeply Christian, in
the intense and visible veneration of the Anastenarides for the icons of
their saints, and their literal belief that Saints Constantine and Helen
are present with them protecting them from the fire. The views of scho-
lars on this complicated question, as well as on other aspects of the
ritual, cannot adequately be discussed here. What is of immediate
interest for our purposes is the part played by the song 'Mikrokostan-
tinos'.
It will be immediately apparent that none of the details of the cere-
monies at the Anastenaria correspond to details in the narrative. The
only exception is the name of the hero in the song, which is also that of
the principal saint honoured in the ritual. But the Kostantinos of the
song is not specifically equated with the saint, nor is there any mention
of the other saint celebrated - St Helen, the mother of Constantine the
Great. The behaviour of Kostantinos' mother in the song, and his treat-
ment of her at the end, surely preclude any identification between her
and St Helen.
Two recent commentators have discussed the song as a source for
information about the nature of the ritual, implying that the one is
integrally related to the other. Maria Mihail-Dede, whose thesis is that
the Anastenaria are an essentially Christian phenomenon, suggests that
Kostantinos in the song is a humanised version of Kostantinos the saint,
and sees him as a heroic moral exemplar (1973). And Professor K.
Romaios, who regards the ritual as Dionysian in origin, has suggeested
that the song was originally not about Kostantinos but about Diyenis,
whose name he attempts to derive from Dionysos (1964, pp. 224-5).
As regards the equation of Kostantinos with the Christian saint, it
seems to me that his final action in the song, that of murdering his
mother, absolutely disqualifies him from this role. Only two other
Christian references are found in the song: at the point where
Kostantinos entrusts his wife first to God and then to the saints, and
later when his wife, cast out of doors with the mangy sheep, prays to
Christ and the Virgin Mary that the flocks may increase, leaving the
implication that it is through divine agency that the miracle in fact
takes place. Both of these themes are found, however, in other versions.
The second, in particular, is subject to an interesting degree of variation.
In Cypriot versions the references to God and the Virgin are more spe-
cifically Christian, and the multiplying of the flocks is explicitly attri-
buted to God's intervention (Pantelidis, 1910, pp. 73-6). In another
20
'Mikrokostantinos' and the tradition
version God and fate together are responsible (Jeannaraki, 1876, pp.
225-6), although in others again the Christian reference is entirely
absent. In other words, the Christian references are not unique to the
Anastenaria version of the song - but neither is their inclusion obliga-
tory in all other versions. This makes it very unlikely that the Christian
references either have special importance in the version of the song used
or composed by the Anastenarides, or are an essential ingredient of the
song throughout all its versions, as one might have expected had its
inspiration been specifically Christian. It would be interesting to dis-
cover whether versions of the song were also sung at villages which cele-
brated the Anastenaria on other saints' days and, if so, whether the
name of the hero was changed accordingly.
The argument of Professor Romaios meets with similar objections.
No other version of the song has any recorded connection with ritual,
Dionysian or otherwise, and although his explanation would account
for the Anastenarides changing the name of the hero to Kostantinos
(since the pagan Dionysos, according to Romaios' theory, had been
superseded by St Constantine in the ritual), it ceases to be convincing
when we consider that the same change must have been made, quite
fortuituously, all over Greece and as far away as Cyprus.
It may be suggested that the song of Mikrokostantinos was adopted
by the Anastenarides, rather than created specially for that ritual. A
superficial reason for this would be the common occurrence of the
name Kostantinos in the song; but it would also be appropriate to con-
sider whether the song, in the various versions recorded from the tradi-
tion, perhaps contains some latent meaning or possibility of interpre-
tation which would further explain its suitability for the ritual of the
Anastenaria. Although in this local variant it is a ritual song, its form
and content have not been dictated by ritual, but may nonetheless have
an actual or potential mythical content which qualifies the song for its
ritual purpose.
C. 'MIKROKOSTANTINOS' IN THE CONTEXT OF

THE TRADITION
It is hardly surprising that, since the variant versions of this song were
collected over a time-span of at least a hundred years and come from
widely separated areas, no two recorded versions are exactly alike. But
the whole idea of Variants' is apt to be misleading. One tends to think
21
The songs
of a Variant* as a song which tells substantially the same story in sub-

stantially similar but not identical words; and many Variants' of 'Mikro-
kostantinos' share this characteristic. But how is one to distinguish
between a 'variant' in this sense, and a song which includes themes also
found in 'Mikrokostantinos', and to which they are no less integral, but
tells a slightly different story? Or which uses common phrases or
imagery for an entirely different purpose? An examination of the
'variants' of this song will serve to show how the one category merges
into the other.
(1) Skripero, Corfu, 1850. Little Constantine, married in May, is
called in May to go on a journey. His wife asks him in whose care he
will leave her, to which he replies that he leaves her to God and the
saints, to his mother and his two brothers. The brothers are not men-
tioned again, having no role to play in the story. As soon as Kostantinos
has gone 'they' (unspecified) make his wife sit on a stool and cut off
her fine hair, give her diseased sheep, goats and dogs and mouldy bread
and send her off to the mountains, with the command not to descend
to the plains until the flocks have multiplied. They do indeed multiply,
thanks to fate, and she descends to the plain to water them under an
olive tree. Here she meets Kostantinos returning from his journey. In a
series of questions and answers he asks her whose are the fine flocks,
but she fobs him off with the reply, 'They belong to the wilderness.'
Kostantinos then rides off home where a further question and answer
series with his mother elicits the information that his wife is dead and
her grave is overgrown and unrecognisable. Kostantinos then asks his
mother what he is to do to her if his wife is still alive, and she replies
that he may cut off her head. Kostantinos rides back to the shepherd,
and repeats his series of questions. This time she replies that she is
under a parental curse not to reveal the truth, but since he has asked
twice she may as well answer. She tells him that everything belongs to
Kostantinos, and he takes her back to confront his mother, who con-
cedes that he may now cut off her head. The editor comments, 'Here
we do not see the terrible act of her murder carried out, and it is better
so', implying that he knew other versions of the song in which it was
described. In some of the following versions, which were recorded sub-
sequently, the matricide is depicted with horrific detail (Manousos,
1850, II, pp. 37-42).
(2) Corfu, 1921. The first part of the story is very similar to example
1. Kostantinos returning from the war meets his wife (dressed as a shep-
herd) at the sea-shore, and the returning husband is compared to the
22
sun, an eagle and a prince. The recognition is quickly effected but then
he rides off to his mother without another word. The dialogue with the
mother is also similar to that of example 1, but after the confrontation
between mother and wife Kostantinos stabs the former, cuts off her
head and chops it into small pieces. He takes the remains of the head to
the mill, and as he grinds the pieces he sings an incantation to the mill
to grind up the head of the evil woman, apparently as an example to
others (Laografia 8, 1921, pp. 523-4).
(3) Nigrita, East Macedonia, 1915. The opening sequence of this song
is similar to that of the Anastenaria version, except that Kostantinos
again leaves his wife in the care of his mother and brothers. There is no
preparation of the horse or description of his departure, nor is there
any prayer or explanation of the miracle by which the flocks increase.
The wife, again dressed as a shepherd, takes the flocks to rest beneath a
great tree 'which had a storm at its top and mist at its root, where
neither birds nor nightingales come and go'. This is where she meets
Kostantinos. The ensuing dialogue is again brief, and she tells him merely
that the flocks belong to Kostantinos. His mother, asked what has
become of his wife, tells him that she has gone back to her own mother.
Kostantinos then goes to his mother-in-law, who tells him that she has
not seen her daughter in the three years that have elapsed since her
marriage. Kostantinos returns to the shepherd, who reveals her identity
and tells him of his mother's action. Leaving her again with the flocks,
Kostantinos goes back to his mother, whom he cuts into small pieces
and takes to the mill. An invocation similar to that of example 2 accom-
panies his grinding up her remains {Laografia 5, 1915, pp. 582-3).
(4) Aegina, 1913. The song begins in the present tense. Now it is
May and the ships are leaving, and Kostantinos has the urge to travel.
Slipping into narrative form, the song goes on to tell how his wife asks
what will become of her, as in the Anastenaria version, and he leaves
her to the care of his mother and brothers. As his wife is sceptical of
the arrangement, Kostantinos gives his mother specific instructions to
treat his wife well in his absence. There is no description of the prepara-
tion or the departure, but we learn that it is by sea. The mother's treat-
ment of the wife follows the general pattern, but there is no prayer.
Unasked, 'God saw the wrong done to her and the great wickedness'
and so caused the flocks to multiply. At length the shepherd-wife des-
cends to the plain and takes her flocks to a well, where she meets
Kostantinos who has just disembarked from his ship. The dialogue takes
a very simple form, Kostantinos inquiring to whom the flocks belong
23
The songs
and the shepherd telling him that they are his. The song breaks off at
this point and the end of the narrative was summarised by the singer in
prose. According to this version Kostantinos then confronts his mother
with his wife, complains bitterly to the former of her behaviour, and
has her torn apart between two horses (Laografia 4, 1913, pp. 77-8).
(5) Crete, 1876. Kostantinos, newly married, is told he must go to
war, and is visibly upset. Asked by his mother what is the matter, he
tells her and entrusts his wife to her care. The narrative then moves
abruptly from a bare mention of Kostantinos' departure to the incident
of the cutting of the wife's hair, thus leaving some confusion as to who
actually does this. The same unnamed person gives Kostantinos' wife a
few sheep and dogs and the usual instructions that they should multi-
ply. There is no prayer, but the miracle is brought about by God and
fate. In addition to the flocks multiplying she herself gives birth to two
soldiers. Finally she meets Kostantinos on the plain and a lengthy series
of questions and answers, in the form of alternate lines, leads to mutual
recognition. The song ends with a brief lament by the girl for the twelve
years she has spent as a shepherd (Jeannaraki, 1876, pp. 225-6).
(6) Mavrokklisi, West Thrace, 1970. The song begins with an intro-
duction: Curses on you, king, for calling up an army of brave young
men, including Kostantinos who is newly married. Kostantinos tells his
mother that he must go and instructs her briefly to take good care of
his wife. The mother, however, either doesn't hear or doesn't listen, and
takes his wife to the barber to have her hair cut (as a shepherd). The
barber, who is reluctant, says a 'good word' for her - a sort of prayer or
incantation to the effect that her flocks may increase. After twelve years
Kostantinos returns and meets her in her shepherd's hut. In a brief dia-
logue he asks whose are the sheep, and she tells him they belong to
Kostantinos. He goes straight home, and is told by his mother that his
wife is out minding sheep. Kostantinos asks why she didn't hire a shep-
herd for the job, and kills her. He then returns to the hut and his wife,
who, we are explicitly told, does not know who he is. He declares his
identity but she is unwilling to believe him and asks to see a birthmark
by which she might recognise him. At this point the song ends (Thra-
kika 44, 1970, pp. 252-3).
(7) Cyprus, 1910. The first part of the narrative is told in the second
person, directly addressing Kostantinos. He goes to his mother, who
asks him why he is sad, and he tells her he must leave. Detailed instruc-
tions follow as to how his wife is to be looked after in his absence. The
mother's behaviour follows the general pattern, except that the wife is
24
dressed not as a shepherd but as a monk. Sent out to look after and
increase the flocks, the wife puts up a prayer to God and Christ, who,
we are told, hear her. As a result the flocks increase and she takes them
to the water-hole where she meets Kostantinos on his return.
Kostantinos first asks for water, then inquires whose are the flocks, but
she rebuffs him and sends him away. He goes first to his mother, who
tells him his wife is away, then to the neighbours, who tell him that
they haven't seen her since he left and finally back to his mother who
tells him to sit down and eat, and then reveals that his wife is dead.
Kostantinos goes to the church to look for his wife's grave and, since he
cannot find it, asks an old priest where it is. The priest instructs him to
go home and call a feast, to whom everyone must be invited including
the monk who looks after the flocks all by himself, and to ask this
monk to sing. All this is done, and the monk sings the whole song up to
this point to the assembled company. At the end of this word-for-word
repetition of the story so far, the mother interrupts and tries to send
the monk back to take care of his sheep, but Kostantinos says that they
are now his reponsibility and ties his mother between two mules which
tear her apart (Laografia 2, 1910, pp. 73-6).
(8) Cyprus, late nineteenth century. This version shares many of the
characteristics of example 7, notably the curious device by which the
recognition takes place and the exact repetition of, in this case, eighty-
one lines of the song.
The opening is in the third person in this version, and Kostantinos,
upset that he must shortly depart, goes not to his mother but to his
wife, whom he commends to his mother's care. In an additional line,
unique to this version, he adds that if she doesn't like his mother she
can go back to her own. Once again there is a substantial prayer and
direct divine intervention. Then, in response to her wish, the wife, once
again dressed as a monk, meets her husband returning from the war.
The ensuing dialogue is simple. On his asking whose are the flocks she
replies that they are his. Without another word he goes home to his
mother, who tells him that his wife has gone back to her own mother
(thus picking up the suggestion earlier that she might do so). The wife's
mother has not seen her since the day she married, so Kostantinos
returns to his mother who now tells him that his wife is dead. As in the
previous version Kostantinos goes to the church and receives similar
instructions from the priest, except that the request that the monk
should sing is not included. The instructions are carried out and the
company asks the monk to sing. The monk/wife then sings the whole
25
The songs
story up to this point, where this version breaks off (Papadopoullos,
1975, pp. 178-82).
(9) Pontos, 1946. The hero in this version is called Marandon. The
story begins with Marandon's night-time preparation of his horse which
is interrupted by his wife calling to him to ask where he is going. There
follows a long dialogue in alternate lines, in which he offers to leave her
in the care, first, of his patron saint, St Constantine, then of 'my
mother, the Holy Virgin', and finally of 'my brothers, the twelve
Apostles'. All of these she rejects, so in the end he says he will leave her
his golden-belled ram, five sheep and fifteen lambs and tells her they
must multiply while he is away. He also leaves her a silver ring to sell for
food and a golden cross to pray to. No sooner has Marandon left than
'they' (unspecified) cut his wife's hair, give her a little bread, five empty
walnuts, five sheep and fifteen lambs, with instructions to take care of
them and never return. (In all other versions, it will be remembered,
the instruction was merely not to return until the flocks had multi-
plied.) The flocks increase miraculously, and after seven years Marandon
returns and meets his wife 'on the ridges'. He asks who she is and whose
are the flocks, at which she orders him back from her and threatens to
have the dogs tear him in pieces. Then she says that her flocks belong to
Marandon, but it's been seven years since he went. 'If he comes, he
comes,' she says, 'if not, I'll take the veil.' The scene then cuts to his
mother's house, where Marandon is told by his mother that his wife is
dead. The final line is cryptic, but probably contains an ironic threat
(Lampsidis, 1960, pp. 40-3).
Despite considerable variation in detail and emphasis, all of these ver-

sions, even the enigmatic example 9, tell a similar story to that told by
the Anastenaria song. In the two examples which follow it could still be
maintained that the story is the same, but the extreme brevity of both
songs (eleven and eight lines respectively) and paucity of narrative infor-
mation relate them far more to those lyrical songs whose theme is
lamentation for the plight of the exile.
(10) Sarakatsan nomads, Epiros, 1928. Yannis was born in May,
married in May, and in May a message came to him to go abroad. He
then 'unleashed' his wife, gives her rough shepherd's shoes to wear, and
the usual five sheep and five goats. The lambs and goats multiply a
thousandfold and she give her shepherd's stockings (tsorapia) to her
dogs to wear as ribbons (giortania) and her keys to the sheep for bells. 4
Yannis is seen returning from 'wretched foreign parts', asks whose are
26
the flocks and is told they belong to Yannis who is lost (Tziatzios,
1928, p. 31).
(11) Epiros, 1866. The weather is bad and my loved one wants to
travel. The rest of the song is in the form of a dialogue. She asks him in
whose care he will leave her, to which he replies that he leaves her to
God and his friends and finally to his mother who will feed her. She
replies that she doesn't want his mother to feed her but only to go with
him and prepare his meals for him. In form this song, like the previous
one, is a classic lament for exile, but in terms of the situation it describes
and even some of the wording, it must equally be regarded as a 'variant*
of'Mikrokostantinos' (Hasiotis, 1866, p. 77).
All the songs we have so far considered can be regarded as 'variants'
insofar as they tell all or part of the same story, although it is clear in
the case of the last two that the story has been subordinated to a non-
narrative purpose. In the examples which follow, we have to consider
songs built out of some or all of the essential ingredients of 'Mikro-
kostantinos', but which tell significantly different stories. These songs
cannot strictly speaking be regarded as Variants', since they are well
attested in their own right, yet it is possible to see how a series of small
variations may produce a graded series of songs which by the end have
no visible point of contact with the first. In all this it is important to
remember that all these songs span the same period of time, and there
is no reason to believe that one song is necessarily derived from another.
Rather we must suppose that a range of different songs may be com-
posed out of common elements.
(12) Makri, Asia Minor, 1910. Mikrokostantakis, married in May, is
summoned in May to go to war. His wife comes out and asks him where
he is going and who will look after her. He replies that he leaves her in
the care of God and men, and finally of her father-in-law (r* apxovro-
'neddepov oov). She asks how long he will be gone and he answers that if
he is not back in twelve years she may remarry. After twelve years,
when he has still not returned, the 'evil parents' decide that the girl
must remarry, and she, in her grief, takes a silver jar to the well to fill
it. On her way she prays to the Virgin that Mikrokostantakis may
appear with his troop. Mikrokostantakis and his troop then ride up, and
he asks the girl for water for his horse and his men. He notices her state
of grief and is on the point of taking offence, when she replies that she
is unhappy because she is waiting for someone to come back from
abroad. He asks for a sign by which the man can be recognised, and she
holds up a ring which has his name on it. He takes her by the hair,
27
The songs
mounts her on his horse and carries her off to his palace (Laografia 2,
1910, pp. 177-8).
The story is no longer the same as that of the Anastenaria song,
since the themes of the ill-treatment of the wife by the mother, the
multiplying of the flocks and the hero's revenge are all absent. But not
only are parts of this song verbally close to versions of the Anastenaria
song, but many of the themes are common. The differences between
the two are not as great as at first sight appears. The wickedness of the
girl's in-laws is not so strongly emphasised, but is still present in the
phrase 'evil parents'. And in this song Kostantinos leaves his wife not to
the care of his mother but of his father, since the threat has changed
from that of minding sheep to remarriage against her will, and this is
the responsibility of the father as head of the household. And another
difference, really only a change of emphasis, lies in the increased weight
given here to the recognition scene. But the main ingredient of this
scene here, the asking for a token as proof of identity, was also found
in example 6.
Taking this song now as a starting point, it is possible to list a series
of versions of a similar story, some of which can be related back to
'Mikrokostantinos', while others, according to the traditional classifi-
cation into songs and variants, can only be regarded as separate songs.
(12a) Hios, 1949. Mikro Konstantaki, while still very young, is sum-
moned to the war. His wife treats him with great affection and asks
how long he will be gone. He says that if it is one year, he will return, if
two, she is to wait for him; if he. is away longer than that she mustn't
expect him back. Fifteen years go by and his wife goes to the dyer and
comes out dressed all in black - a sign of voluntary mourning, which in
its imagery and verbal expression is reminiscent of the compulsory cut-
ting of the girl's hair in 'Mikrokostantinos'. She goes to the well for
water and there meets Konstantinos. A dialogue ensues, in which he
asks for signs by which her lost husband may be recognised. She tells
him and he at first pretends to her that her husband is dead and that it
has been decreed she must marry him. She replies that she would rather
die or turn Turk than marry anyone but Konstantinos, so that he
rejoices in her fidelity and the song ends (Argenti and Rose, 1949, pp.
732-3).
(12b) Region unknown, 1844. A beautiful girl is weaving at a golden
loom. A merchant reins in his horse as he passes and greets her, asking
why she doesn't get married. She replies that she has a husband who has
been away twelve years and that if he does not return she will become a
28
nun. First of all he tells her that her husband is dead, and that before
he died he recommended the merchant to ask his widow to repay the
favours he had done the dying man. Then he reveals that he is in fact
her husband and she asks him to tell her specific signs about the house
and her person before she believes him. At the end of a long dialogue
the recognition takes place (Passow, 1860, pp. 321-3). Passow also
noted a variant (pp. 323-4) in which the story is told by the man in the
first person. He is not specifically a merchant, and the encounter takes
place at a well, where he asks the girl to draw him water. To this may
be compared the meeting by the well in examples 4, 7 and 12, in the
last two of which Kostantinos also asks for water; the lengthy dialogue
leading to recognition (examples 5, 9, and 12); and the demand for a
token in example 6.
(12c) Sozopolis, 1909. A man complains that someone has got him
drunk, and that he slept outside the door of his loved one's house. He
bends down to kiss the keyhole and prostrates himself before the door,
begging the girl to open it. She asks who he is and he replies that it was
he who sent her a number of gifts. She doesn't accept this as proof that
he knows her and asks for signs about the house and her body. Finally
convinced she allows him in to sleep with her (Laografia 1, 1909, p.
615).
(12d) Cyprus, 1868. Yannis, three days married, goes on a journey
which is supposed to last thirty days. He is gone for thirty years, how-
ever, during which time his armour rusts, his house is shuttered and
barred, and his wife is to be remarried. His father goes out and prays
that Yannis might return. The hero returns and asks the old man if he
will be in time for the wedding. The two do not recognise one another,
and the old man tells him that if his horse is fast he may just be in time.
Yannis rides on, arrives at the bride's house and identifies himself to his
wife's mother by a series of signs (Sakellarios, 1868, pp. 14-15).
(12e) Sozopolis, 1909, and Crete, 1876. A galley slave sighs and the
ship comes to a stop. Asked by the captain why he sighed and caused
the ship to stop he replies that he was married only a very short time
before becoming a slave. Twelve years have now passed and he has seen
in a dream that his house (Sozopolis) or his clothes and weapons (Crete)
are to be sold off and his wife remarried. The captain sets him free and
leaves him on the shore, where he mounts his horse and heads for home.
On the way he meets an old man (his father) and, in the Thracian ver-
sion, an old woman (his mother) whom he asks if he will be in time for
the wedding. The reply is standard - if your horse is swift enough you
29
The songs
will just be in time. He arrives at the crucial moment, and his wife
recognises him by the whinnying of his horse (Laografia 1, 1909, pp.
600-2; Jeannaraki, 1876, pp. 203-4).
Another version tells how a hero is seated at table when his horse
whinnies and his sword breaks. This is a sign that his wife is being
remarried in his absence, so he chooses his fastest horse and rides at
miraculous speed to the wedding. His wife recognises him by his horse's
whinny, and before the threatening father-in-law can stop her she joins
him on the horse, which rides away, again at miraculous speed (Fauriel,
1825, p. 140).
(12f) Published in Constantinople, 1891. Three lords are sitting in
the prow of a ship, when one of the slaves sighs and the ship comes to
a stop. One of the lords asks who has sighed and caused the ship to stop,
and the slave replies that it was he. Asked the reason, the slave says that
he was married for three days and then a slave for twelve years, and
now he has seen in a dream that his wife is being married off to his
enemy. The master sets him free (Zografios Agon 1, 1891, p. 73).
(12g) The Song of Armouris, fifteenth century. This is a long ballad
which tells of the recognition and rescue of a father by his son.
Armouris, the father, is imprisoned in a tower and his son takes on the
whole Saracen army in order to rescue him but is eventually unseated
from his horse. The horse goes straight to the tower, or castle, where
Armouris is imprisoned, arriving before the son, who in fact is un-
harmed. Recognising the horse, Armouris thinks his son must be dead,
and sighs deeply, causing the whole castle to shake. In words very simi-
lar to those of the ship's captain and the lord in examples 12e and 12f,
the Emir, his gaoler, gently asks him what is the matter: is he not being
treated well in captivity? Armouris replies that he has recognised his
son's horse and believes his son to be dead. The Emir promises to find
the son and not to harm him and the story ends happily (Destouny,
1877).
This chain of variants has now been followed to the point where the
last few songs summarised bear no direct relation whatever to 'Mikro-
kostantinos' as sung by the Anastenarides. There is no sense in which
'Armouris' can be usefully described as a variant of 'Mikrokostantinos'.
But at what point in this chain are we to draw a firm line, and say, up
to this point all the songs are variants of 'Mikrokostantinos', beyond it
they are something else? To speak of variants presupposes a belief that
there exists an archetypal or original version of each song, from which
individual versions diverge. But to assign many of the 'variants' I have
30
mentioned to particular archetypes (whose existence and form must
inevitably be only theoretical) would be largely arbitrary. The evidence
so far considered suggests that, rather than being grouped as variants
around a hypothetical archetype, the narrative songs we have looked at
should be considered as independent creations drawing on a common
body of themes, imagery and even verbal expressions.
The final set of examples consists of songs in which themes from
'Mikrokostantinos' are used to tell a different story, not just by com-
bining with other themes, but through internal change or inversion. We
have already seen one example of this in example 12, where the evil
mother-in-law was replaced by an evil father-in-law, and the replace-
ment was followed by a corresponding change in the subsequent theme
of ill-treatment.
(13) KarpathoSy 1928. A girl goes to a festival and then to church.
On her way she is stopped by a shepherd who says he has been waiting
for her and is going to marry her. The song is very brief and contains
little narrative detail (Mihailidis-Nouaros, 1928, p. 272). The meeting
between a girl and a shepherd on the road corresponds to that between
Kostantinos and the shepherd who is in fact his wife, and the statement
that he has been waiting for her is reminiscent of songs in which a girl
whose husband has been absent a long time meets him by chance on
the road or at a well. The theme of the meeting is a simple inversion of
that found in 'Mikrokostantinos'. (It is also noteworthy that, insofar as
this story corresponds to that of 'Mikrokostantinos', it relates only to
the last part of the narrative, so that this 'deviant' version cannot be
accounted for by the frequent habit in recent times of truncating nar-
rative songs and performing only the first part.)
(14) Pontos, 1946. Exile, death and parting are weighed in the
balance and exile is found to be the most grievous. Curses on you, exile;
if one becomes an exile one is lost. The story begins, and the narrative
is in the first person. The hero went abroad an orphan and stayed there
in a foreign family who finally reject him. So he returns home and
meets his mother, all in black, at the crossroads. He declares his identity,
they embrace and go home together. Then he asks her about his wife,
whom his mother says is dead. Asked about the grave, she says it is over-
grown. Finally he tells his mother to light a candle and put it in the
lamp, then whips up his horse and rides off (Arheion Pontou 12, 1946,
p. 141).
(15) Pontos, 1946. Mikro Kostantinon goes off for a short journey
and is gone for thirty years. He arrives back, and Eleni, to whom he
31
The songs
had been betrothed or married before his departure, tells the story in
the first person: she addresses him first as 'my eyes', a term suitable to
a husband or a lover, and he does not answer. She then addresses him as
'brother' and he turns and tells her to be quiet. He has fallen in love
with someone else, he says, and tells her to dress in black and come to
the wedding. She replies in obscure terms, interpreted by the collector
of the song as a curse. Eleni builds herself baths of gold, washes and
changes her clothes, clothing herself with the dawn and the day and on
top she wears the cloak of the sun. She wears the moon in her face and
the stars for rings, and the brightest star of all is on her breast. When
she appears at the church for Kostantinon's wedding, everyone is
amazed, and Kostantinon faints. He then changes his mind and tells the
priest to marry him to her instead of to the intended bride (Arheion
Pontou 12, 1946, p. 93).
This song includes themes that we have already encountered, such
as the long absence of the hero and the threat of remarriage, although
in this song inverted. The returning hero, instead of preventing his
wife's remarriage against her will, himself wishes to remarry and is pre-
vented by his former wife or mistress. But the crux of the story, to
which these themes have been integrated in this song, is found in a great
many other songs usually entitled by editors, 'The Bridesmaid who
Became the Bride' (Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 107-9). In these songs a
rejected mistress or fiancee dresses herself in a hyperbolic manner to go
to her lover's wedding, and there creates such an impression that she is
at the last moment substituted for the bride.
(16) Karyes, district of Kavakli, 1903. Kostantinos is ordered to
turn Turk. As he refuses, he is forced to part from his wife and go to
gaol. In gaol his hair grows (a direct inversion of what happens to his
wife in 'Mikrokostantinos'). He is subsequently sold as a slave (cf.
examples 12e and 12f) and set to work in the vineyards, while his wife
is forcibly married to his master. The theme of the wife's remarriage is
also found in examples 12d, 12e and 12f, while being set to work on
the land as a mark of indignity is also found in those songs where
Mikrokostantinos' wife is put to minding sheep. Kostantinos is redeemed
through recognition by his wife, as Mikrokostantinos redeemed his wife
from the role of shepherd or from a threatened second marriage, and
she takes him to the barber to cut off the unseemly long hair he has
grown as a slave. In the 'Mikrokostantinos' songs also, the cutting of
hair accompanied an explicit change of status, from wife to shepherd.
Here the change is from slave to free man (Louloudopoulos, 1903, No.
50).
32
These last examples, unless one is prepared to dismiss them, on arbi-

trary grounds, as 'deviant', suggest that themes integral to a given song
(in this case 'Mikrokostantinos') can be used not only in a new context
to create a 'new' song (such as examples 12-12g) but can also be in-
verted to create 'new' themes. This was undoubtedly an important pro-
cess in the composition of Greek folk poetry, and examination of a
wide enough range of 'variants' shows how new variants and entirely
new songs could be created out of the same traditional material. The
use of the word 'new' in this connection is purely relative of course: the
dates at which the songs I have quoted were first collected, although
spanning a considerable period of time, give no evidence of a simple
progression from one type of variant to another; and it is reasonable to
suppose that different songs (and 'variants') drawn from the same fund
of thematic material have always coexisted, as indeed they do in modern
collections.
As a final example of the important common ground between songs
whose local function is quite different, it is interesting to compare the
lines in 'Mikrokostantinos' where the returning husband asks whose are
the sheep with golden collars, with a rhetorical question in a praise-song
(painema) for Epiphany recorded in Macedonia.
Tivoix; eivai TCL npoPara,
TIVOIK eivai nai TCL OKVXIA, aarqiiogepdavaTa', (11. 42-3)
Who owns the sheep, with their collars of gold,

and who owns the dogs, with their ribbons of silver?
- To TWOS elv TCL np6(5aTa r* apyvpOKOvdcjv&Ta;
- T' d<t>evTrj Mac TCL npoPctTCL r' apyvpOKOvdoovaTd.
(Abbott, 1903, p. 89)
'Who owns the sheep with their bells of silver?'
'Our master owns the sheep with their bells of silver.'
Perhaps the most important fact to emerge from this examination

of a single song, both in its local context and in relation to the song
tradition, is that the factors governing both content and expression do
not seem to be much affected by the song's apparent function. The pro-
cess by which songs come to be repeated in different versions appears
to be common to the Greek-speaking world and to apply equally to
songs dealing with a wide variety of subject matter. This common pool
of themes and expressions cuts across the scholarly boundaries which
demarcate categories of songs, and also across local classifications, which
33
The songs
are often mutually contradictory. In different areas versions of the
ballad 'The Bridge of Arta' are sung as a dirge or a dance tune; versions
of 'Kitsos' Mother', a song of the klefts published by Fauriel and accord-
ing to him already widely known and sung all over Greece (1824, p. 96),
are sung as a kleftic song in Epiros, a 'table song' in Karpathos, where it
is sung by men only, unaccompanied, after the psalms with which a
wedding feast traditionally begins, and as a lullaby in Thrace (Thrakika
11, 1939, p. 205).
In these cases it is impossible to tell whether this diversity of appa-
rent function for versions closely enough related to be regarded as 'the
same song* is a recent phenomenon. In the case of 'Mikrokostantinos'
and its association with the Anastenaria, it almost certainly has a long
history, and it is especially significant to note how little divergence
there is between versions from the Anastenaria and others from quite
remote areas, despite what must be a long-standing difference in func-
tion. To understand these similarities in content and structure and the
differences in function, it is necessary to look beyond either the local
or the scholarly classification of particular songs to a deeper, more
generalised function which underlies very many songs of different types,
rendering them suitable to be adopted, rather than adapted, for a speci-
fic purpose, whether for ritual or for entertainment.5
34
3. Structure of the Demotic Tradition: the Formula
A. COMPOSITION AND TRANSMISSION
We cannot know for certain how Greek folk poetry was composed. It is
clear, however, that by the mid-nineteenth century, when songs began
to be written down and published in large numbers, a corpus of songs
already existed which must have been composed without the aid of
writing and in which variations occurred which could not be explained
by any process of transmission applicable to a written text. The ques-
tion of the origin of the song tradition, which it may as well be admit-
ted at once is probably insoluble, will be discussed more fully in Chap-
ter 5; here it is enough to mention that songs roughly of the type
recorded during the past century and a half appear to have been sung in
Greek-speaking lands for at least four hundred years before they began
to be collected and edited. The evidence of the variants discussed in the
last chapter suggests that, although the singers may have been conserva-
tive in introducing radical innovations into songs, there was never any
particular insistence on the exact repetition of an established text.
This is a point worth making, since oral transmission, in the sense of
handing down 'texts' without the use of writing, can take different
forms. In Yugoslav tradition, for example, it has been shown that singers
substantially alter songs which they have heard. But they are not con-
scious of doing so, since the story remains the same. In other parts of
the world, however, there is evidence that word-for-word accuracy in
transmission has been actively pursued. The most famous case of this is
the oral transmission of the Indian Rgveda (Finnegan, 1977, pp. 135-6),
but traditions are also known from Africa, New Zealand and Polynesia
in which systems of rewards and sanctions were used to encourage as
exact a repetition as possible of oral 'texts' (Vansina, 1973, pp. 33-4);
and a recent article on an epic tradition from India shows how in one
35
The formula
instance the use of a formulaic style coexists with deliberate memori-

sation (Smith, 1977). That this is not the case with the Greek tradition
is clearly indicated by the variants discussed in the last chapter.
The introduction of published texts of songs into Greek primary
school education has undoubtedly affected modern practice regarding
composition and the transmission of songs. But a hint of what may be
an older attitude was given by the informant who provided the version
of 'Mikrokostantinos' cited above:
O erac TO Xeet era* 6 dXkoq TO Xeet OXXCCJC. Mdaropr? TO Tpayovd'

8ev ex'! (Megas, 1961, p. 490).
That's how one man tells it, another will tell it differently. In
song no one has the last word.
Clearly this singer did not consider transmission to be the same thing as
exact memorisation, a discovery which leaves the way open for the kind
of composition-in-performance which was found, at least until relatively
recently, to have been practised in parts of Yugoslavia. But this is a
comparatively rare instance, and external evidence for this kind of com-
position is not easily found in Greece today. In my own experience,
aside from the improvisation of rhyming distichs, I found no indication
that singers took an active part in reshaping the words of songs. Some-
times an informant would insist on writing down the text of a song
before singing it, so as not to forget the words; and on one occasion a
recording session was interrupted by a twelve-year-old boy just back
from school, who tried to correct his elders' version of a song to that
which he had been taught in class.
Oral composition-in-performance cannot be proved in the case of
Greek songs, although it can certainly be inferred from the variations
in recorded texts. In the absence of external indications to the con-
trary, one may suppose that, before they came to be written down by
collectors and published, Greek demotic songs were indeed composed
and transmitted orally, in a manner analogous, but not identical, to that
found in Yugoslav epic poetry.
B. THE ORAL FORMULA

The existence of frequently recurring phrases in Greek songs was first
remarked by Fauriel (1824, p. cxxix), and throughout the nineteenth
century was generally recognised as a characteristic of all folk poetry.
36
The oral formula
But the full significance of these recurrences was not really understood
until Milman Parry first applied the findings of Yugoslav and Russian
scholars on contemporary oral heroic poetry to the study of Homer,
and developed the theory of the oral formula. A formula, according to
Parry's now famous definition is 'a group of words which is regularly
employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essen-
tial idea' (Parry, 1930, p. 80). The theory goes on to assert that the oral
poet, who unlike his literary counterpart does not have time to reflect
upon what he is going to say and find a new and satisfying means of
accommodating it to the requirements of his verse, has no choice but to
create his whole poem out of a reservoir of formulas, in which com-
monly recurring ideas have already been tailored to fit the verse. This
reservoir of formulas, and not whole 'texts' of songs, is what the
apprentice guslar, the Yugoslav epic singer, learns, and having acquired
a working knowledge of a set of formulas, his task is then to work with
them flexibly, readapting and varying them to fit the requirements of
the poems he sings (Lord, 1960, pp. 13-29).
The studies of Yugoslav oral poetry by Parry and Professor A. B.
Lord, in particular, give due attention to the subtleties involved in this
method of composition and have gone a long way towards dispelling
the erroneous impression of many critics of the theory, that composi-
tion using formulas must be a dull, mechanical business, devoid of
genuine artistry. In their work on Yugoslav oral epics, Parry and Lord
have convincingly shown how the 'formulaic style' works, and that, at
least as employed by the Serbian guslari, its final product is readily dis-
tinguishable from a poem composed by more familiar methods. Since
the late fifties, however, the 'oral-formulaic theory' has had many
repercussions in fields not directly related either to Yugoslav epic
poetry or to Homer. (The impact of the theory on Homeric studies, to
which it was originally intended as a contribution, has rightly been
enormous, and need not be gone into here.) The most significant fea-
ture of recent developments of the oral-formulaic theory is that it has
been applied almost exclusively to works of literature. A great deal of
ink has been spilt in efforts to identify formulas in poems such as
Beowulf the Chanson de Roland and Greek vernacular poems of the
late middle ages, which do not at first sight appear to be oral poems, in
order to show that, like the Homeric epics, they are the products of
oral tradition (Haymes, 1973; Lord, 1975). As a result, the term 'for-
mula' is now frequently understood in such a narrow sense that one
may question whether it any longer means anything at all.
37
The formula
Under the banner of objectivity, some adherents of the oral-formulaic
theory now believe that the percentage of formulas in a poem of some
length can be used to determine whether the poem was originally oral
or written. Lord has claimed that the Yugoslav epics he has recorded
and studied are '100 per cent formula or formulaic', while the Homeric
poems are 'around 90 per cent' (Lord, 1960, pp. 47, 144; 1968, p. 19).
As a contrast to these examples of oral poems, Lord further states, 'So
far, I believe, we can conclude that a pattern of 50 to 60 per cent for-
mula or formulaic, with 10 to perhaps 25 per cent straight formula,
indicates clearly literary composition. I am still convinced that it is
possible to determine orality by quantitative formulaic analysis, by the
study of formula density' (1968, p. 24).
In order to be analysed in such*terms, the formula, from being an
adaptable poetic tool, has had to be defined, implicitly or explicitly, as
nothing more than a repetition. Only exact verbal repetitions are sus-
ceptible of the kind of rigorous quantitative analysis advocated by Lord;
but exact verbal repetitions are not formulas. Parry himself was quite
clear on the point: 'It is important to remember that the formula in
Homer is not necessarily a repetition, just as the repetitions of tragedy
are not necessarily formulas. It is the nature of an expression which
makes it a formula' (Parry, 1930, p. 122). Parry adds that, in this par-
ticular article, he was 'taking up the problem of the Homeric formulas
from the side of the repetitions' because repetition makes a formula
easier to identify. But two things are clear: a formula according to
Parry may be used only once; and must be qualitatively identified
before there is any purpose in quantifying its occurrences.
In seeking to apply the theory of formulaic composition to Greek
folk poetry, I am not concerned to prove that the tradition is oral. What
will be of greater interest will be to examine how formulas are used in
the structure of folk songs. Since the application of the theory to the
material needs no special justification, it is to be hoped that this discus-
sion of formulas in a non-literate tradition may provide further qualita-
tive insight into their nature and possible use.
C. FORMULA SYSTEMS AND THE LANGUAGE OF SONGS

The problem of how a formula may be identified except through its
repetitions was not fully solved by Parry. While it was unavoidable that
frequently recurring phrases in Homer should be singled out in order to
make the whole theory objectively impressive, some of the most
38
Formula systems
interesting parts of Parry's seminal essays are those where he discusses
phrases which are metrically identical and syntactically parallel, but
which do not repeat the same words. Such a series of parallel phrases
Parry called a 'system of formulas' (1930, p. 86), and their significance
became clear in the part of his analysis where he discussed the way in
which an oral poet could use formulas. Starting out with easily demons-
trable formulas (repetitions) Parry concluded that 'in showing the use-
fulness of the repeated expressions we did nothing more than find the
systems of formulas to which they belonged' (1930, p. 132).
Despite opposition from Lord on the grounds of subjectivity, a few
scholars recently have taken Parry's lead and some theoretical work has
been done on the formula system. The most important development
which they have brought about is that the formula system is no longer
thought of as deriving from an archetype by a process of analogy (Parry,
1930, p. 145). J. A. Russo maintains that an 'oral formulaic style may
depend . . . on structural repetitions as well as on literal ones' (1966,
p. 233), and his 'structural repetition' is different from Parry's 'system
of formulas' only in that it does not imply the multiplication of a single
literal formula by analogy. Where two non-identical phrases have the
same metrical and syntactical structure, Russo maintains, this does not
mean that one has been created on the analogy of the other, but that
the recurring structure is itself formulaic.
More important still is the position taken up by M. N. Nagler (1967),
which consists 'in looking vertically to a deep structure underlying the
production of two similar or identical phrases rather than horizontally
from one phrase to the second'. Nagler had the advantage of Parry in
that the terminology and concepts of Gestalt psychology and struc-
turalism were available to him, thus offering a model capable of illustrat-
ing, in modern scientific terms, how identical, related or merely struc-
turally similar phrases could be created without dependence on a small
number of archetypes. Nagler's 'generative' view of the formula
demonstrates what Parry and Lord had always emphasised - that for-
mulaic composition is a creative process. But he was able to go beyond
Parry and show that it is creative not merely in the continual reshaping
of stories out of existing formulas with the occasional 'new' formula
thrown in, but in the capacity of the system itself for renewal through
the generation of new formulas. As Nagler sums up, 'oral-formulaic
composition is a language . . . the training of the oral bard is more like
the acquisition of a linguistic skill than the memorization of a fixed
content'.
39
The formula
This conclusion was also borne out by an examination, in terms of
linguistic theory, of the songs of the Todas, a south Indian community.
In an article on style and meaning in oral tradition, M. B. Emeneau
analyses the difference between the structure of the Toda spoken lan-
guage and that of their songs (1966). In the case of the Todas, both
expression and content in song are far more restricted than in any Euro-
pean parallel, but in such an extreme case it is possible to analyse, rela-
tively simply, how the two kinds of expression, song and speech, differ.
Emeneau discovered that the linguistic restrictions imposed by the tra-
ditional structure of their songs meant that the sung language of the
Todas is a closed system in which the range of expression, although
large, was theoretically limited in extent. Drawing his conclusions not
from oral-formulaic theory or from counting repetitions in Toda songs,
Emeneau found that 'the song language is in theory completely for-
mulaic' (my italics). The discovery is not an empirical one but derives
from a fairly formal proof that Toda song language is different in struc-
ture from any spoken language. Emeneau goes on, The formulaic cha-
racter means, in theory, that no song-unit can occur that does not occur
elsewhere in the corpus, nor can a combination of song-units in a sen-
tence occur that does not occur elsewhere.'
From this account it is evident that the song language in question is
different at least in the degree of restriction involved, from that of
Greek songs, Yugoslav epics, or Homer. But Emeneau's study is most
valuable in that it suggests very forcefully that when we speak about
oral composition as a 'language' this is probably more than mere
analogy. And it is worth considering the more general implications: that
a similar qualitative, but objectively demonstrable, distinction separates
the language of traditional song from that of speech.
D. FORMULAS AND FORMULA SYSTEMS IN GREEK SONGS
It has been emphasised by Lord, in particular, that each oral singer has
his own repertory of formulas. Although the bulk of these will presum-
ably be traditional, and common to a number of singers in a locality, it
is to be expected that an individual will both add formulas of his own
and perhaps alter some existing ones (Lord, 1960, p. 49). This has led
to the common practice, in identifying formulas, of restricting oneself
to a single poem or at most to a group of poems which there are grounds
for regarding as the work of a single singer. In dealing with an epic tra-
dition where songs run to many thousands of lines, or with a written
40
Formulas in Greek songs
text of comparable length, this is both feasible and desirable. In the
Greek tradition, however, the most that we can ever attribute to a
single singer is a single version of a song. Many of the songs which are
purely lyrical are extremely short, and even narrative songs in the Greek
tradition rarely run to as many as a hundred lines, with the very longest
just over two hundred.
First of all, what evidence have we that these rather brief songs are
formulaic? An analysis of a version of the ballad 'The Dead Brother'
(Passow, 1860, pp. 394-6) according to Lord's quantitative system
reveals that of the sixty-seven lines of the song, thirty-seven half-lines
are exactly repeated, while a further sixteen half-lines occur more than
once with slight variations. In quantitative terms this would yield
approximately 38 per cent formula or fomulaic, with 27 per cent
straight formula, a result which falls just short of Lord's requirements
for an oral poem. Are we then to fly in the face of probability and such
evidence as we have, and declare that this version of 'The Dead Brother'
was originally written? Surely not.
If formulas can be identified in a tradition of this kind, I do not
believe that they are to be found in the repetitions and near-repetitions
which occur in individual songs. Instead we must look at the tradition
as a whole, or at least at a cross-section of it, in order to recognise for-
mulas as the variable manifestations of underlying patterns in the minds
of singers, which shape all songs sung in the same tradition. This sounds
rather less objective than the procedure recommended by Lord and
students of the oral epic, but if Nagler's view of formulaic composition
as a generative process is accepted, then it may be that a formula is the
more readily identifiable if it is found to exist in a series of variations.
While exact repetition can be explained in a number of ways (one re-
calls Parry's remarks on the repetitions in ancient tragedy) the frequent
recurrence of the same patterns in phrases which are structurally similar
but not identical in content can only be put down to the operation of a
common system of formulas in the minds of all the singers involved.
Something of the range of variation to be expected within such a
system can be seen from the following:
(1) Et5a TCL <p£S UL orajopoyra K ai ric bx&s K ovpapia

I saw snakes crossed and vipers wound into balls
(2) nov 'TOP TCL yi&ia orcwpoxra KCLL oi dxtec n\eyneves
where snakes were crossed and vipers twined
41
The formula
(3) f?j3pa rd yi&ia nXexrapiA KOX rk oxtec yaiTavi
I found snakes [like] twine and vipers [like] braid
(4) 0 d j3pe& rd ipi&i dyKaXvaord, oxtec nepinXeyiieves
you'll find snakes embracing, vipers intertwined
(5) KL OKOUCO depeq nob rpafiobv KOLI rd oroixevd nob OKOVÔVV
and I hear winds blowing hard and ghosts howling
(6) 'AKOLJOJ r' depc noonovt;e, /cat rte 6£ue? Trot; Tpiôov
I heard the wind howl, and the beech trees creaking
(7) '/coiryco rd 7rei)/ca feat fipovrobv KOLI rec 6£uec ra rpiôvv
I hear pinetrees thundering and beech trees creaking
(8) KOX f$pioT% dflpojTTOj fceâXec Kat yvvaucoj nXeôvdeq
and finds men's heads and women's tresses
(9) duovGJ rd ^Kuipia nob fipovrobv KOX rd roa-nvd nob onaftovv
I hear shovels thundering and pickaxes digging
Examples 1-4 can easily be seen to belong to a formula system such

as those described by Parry in Homer and by Lord in the Yugoslav epics.
In each case the first half-line (one formula) describes snakes, while the
second (another formula) describes vipers. In the first half of each line,
the verb form filling the first metrical foot varies so that the formula
can be used in a number of grammatical contexts. Similarly with the
adjectives which replace stavrota (crossed, examples 3 and 4). Not only
do they occupy the same number of syllables, but their meanings are
similar and their final sounds (the accented a at the mid-line caesura)
are the same. So much can also be said for the second half of the line
in examples 1-4. All the words used to describe the vipers share the
same general meaning. The verb form introducing the first half-line in
example 2 requires i ohies (nominative) in the second half of the line,
which under stricter rules of elision would have disrupted the metre.
But it is a feature of oral composition that once a singer has begun a
line in a certain way it is too late to go back and change it: since this
adaptation of the formula in the first half-line posed no problems, it
would be natural for him to continue the line in the way he was used
to, even though the grammatical change in this second formula means
that it no longer quite 'fits'.
In the remaining examples the syntactical and architectonic pattern
by which the two half-lines are joined is constant. But there are other
42
factors which show that despite their different words they belong to
the same formula system. In examples 5 and 6 the first half of each line
begins with the same words, and the meaning of the verb which com-
pletes the half-line is roughly similar in each case, because of its context.
That is to say, travo and skouzo do not in everyday speech mean the
same thing at all, but travo applied to the wind means -blow hard', thus
bringing it close to the meaning of skouzo (howl). Vrontoun (thunder,
examples 7 and 9) shares this general meaning, and example 7 is further
related to examples 5 and 6 by the opening word 'hear'. Only in example
8 do we find no familiar words in the first half of the line, although
their syntactical arrangement is the same as in the other examples; but
the word plexoudes (tresses) in the second half of the line strikes an
echo with plegmenes (twined, example 2), periplegmenes (intertwined,
example 4) and plehtaria (twine, example 3). A similar echo arises in
the second half of the line in examples 6 and 7, where ohies (vipers) has
been replaced by the similar-sounding oxies (beech trees). This device
of substituting a word of different meaning but similar sound in a
formula is one of the most obvious indications that we are dealing with
oral composition, and it is interesting to notice that although the
meaning of the words in examples 6 and 7 is quite different from those
of examples 1-4, they are used to create a similarly sinister effect. It is
probably no accident either that all of these examples come from songs
which refer in one way or another to the theme of death and the lower
world.
What these examples suggest is that formulas in Greek songs are not
fixed and memorised units but may be derived by the singer, perhaps
during a performance, from a system, or a series of systems, of stylised
language and syntax. Considering formulaic composition in this way, it
may be difficult to fix the boundary of a formula system without seem-
ing to be arbitrary. Starting from any given formula in a Greek song, I
believe it is possible to identify other formulas which belong to the
same system, expanding outwards from the original formula in such a
way as quickly to overlap with what seem to be other systems, rather as
we found variants of a song expanding outwards from our chosen start-
ing point until they began to overlap with other songs. Clearly the
Greek singers did employ memorised phrases or 'straight formulas', but
these relatively stable formulas must also at one time have been derived
from the underlying system, which can be more generally defined as a
stylisation of language according to fixed patterns. In adapting the pos-
sibilities offered by this system to the requirements of performing a
43
The formula
song, I believe we can detect three main factors which, consciously or
unconsciously, determine the singer's choice of expression. These are
architectonic patterns, syntactical patterns, and sense.
(i) Metrical and architectonic patterns

A formula in the Greek tradition is never more nor less than a half-line.
By far the most common metre in Greek folk poetry is the 'political
verse' (politikos stihos) of fifteen syllables, which contains two half-
lines in the following metrical pattern:
The stress patterns in the first and second feet of the first half-line and
in the first foot of the second may be inverted, but the mid-line caesura
is always clearly marked. There is practically no enjambement and both
caesura and the end of the line regularly coincide with the end of syn-
tactical and sense units. An invariable metrical rule is that the first half
of the line should have an iambic ending (w' or 'wl(,)) while the second
half always ends in a trochee (r\j). Since each half-line comprises a self-
contained unit, in terms of syntax and sense, it is natural to find that
songs are constructed out of architectonic patterns, often of consider-
able complexity. As a general rule, a line of political verse consists of
two units, or formulaic expressions, whose arrangement in the line is in
some sense symmetrical.
The architectonic patterns open to the singer of folk poetry were
clearly very many, and frequently encompass many lines of a song.
Considering for the moment only the more limited case of the single
line, we notice that these fall into two broad types: those in which the
two half-lines establish an architectonic balance - by repetition of the
general sense, or of one or more words in both halves of the line, or by
an exact parallelism of expression, where the sense of the second half-
line may be either complementary or antithetical - and those in which
the second half-line adds new information rather than establishing a
pattern.
The different types can be seen in the opening lines of the ballad
'The Bridge of Arta':
(10) ZapavTcnrevTe naoropoi K I e%r\vra jJiaBrjTdd ec

rpetc xpovov^ k&ovkevave TT?S 'Aprac TO yuxpvpt.
exri^cwe KI and j3pa5l y/cpejuierat.
44
Motpwikoyovv ol judaropec KCLLK Xaiv' ol jua0i?TdS ec:
- 'AXyxopo OTOUS K&novs na<z, KpJp.a ores 5ouXei//ec
dXriiiepk va xrtf cojLte, TO tfpa&vva 7/cpejtuerai.
Kat TO OTOtxevb noupWriKev air' 777 Se£id Ka/zdpa:
-*Ap8e arotxetcbaer' dvdpcoiro, rotx<K be SeneXicovei'
KCU /X77 arotxetciaer* bpyavb,i±ri %evo,iir\ 5taj3dn?,
Trapd rou npoyroiiaoTopa TT\V copia TTJ ywauca, 10
7r6pxer' dp7a r' airoraxid, nbpxeT* dpyd OTO yu)[ia.
Forty-five master-craftsmen and sixty apprentices
for three years worked on the bridge of Arta.
All day they would build, and in the evening the work
fell down.
The master-craftsmen lamented, the apprentices kept
weeping:
'Alas for our efforts, alas for our labours, 5
all day to build and in the evening have the work fall
down.
And the spirit [of the river] spoke up from the
right-hand arch:
'Unless you sacrifice a human, no wall stands firm;
and don't sacrifice an orphan, nor a stranger, nor a
passer-by,
nor anyone but the master-builder's beautiful wife, 10
who comes here slowly in the morning, who comes here
slowly at mealtime.'1
Lines 1, 4 and 5 are built out of parallel expressions where the words
are different in each half of the line but the sense is repeated. Lines 3
and 6 are built in a similarly parallel way but the two halves of the line
are antithetical. Line 11 is an example of parallel phrases introduced by
the same initial word. The remaining lines belong to the second type, in
which new information is provided by the second half of the line.
It is interesting to note that so strong was the instinct of the singer
for establishing patterns rather than adding narrative information in the
second half of the line, that just under half of the total number of lines
in the song are of the patterned type. Lines 8-11 are an example of a
larger, more complex pattern, based on what K. Romaios has termed
the 'rule of three' (1963). Line 8, of the non-patterned type, states a
simple condition: if someone is not sacrificed no wall will stand firm.
The next line as a whole establishes a pattern by the repetition of the
45
The formula
verb of the previous line, so that the two lines now form a structural
pattern similar to that which we saw between the two halves of 1. 11. In
the next line, 1. 9, a pattern of three is established (orphan, stranger,
passer-by), which is then resolved, by the addition of 1. 10, into a larger
pattern of three, in which the two halves of the preceding line are
'capped' by the whole line in which it is spelled out that the person to
be sacrificed must be the master-builder's wife. And the final line, 1. 11,
with its additional description of the master-builder's wife alters the
balance again, so that the two lines of build-up (11. 8-9) are balanced by
the same number of lines (11. 10-11) actually devoted to the victim
herself.
The fact that the singer was evidently constructing such patterns as
he went along, both at the level of the two halves of a line and on a
larger scale, clearly affected the formula systems available to him in
each case. The first line, for example, belongs to a formula system in
which the first half-line very frequently evokes the second. Thus we
find,
(11) I,apai>Tan€VT€ Kupuwc ec K L e%rjvTaf> vb Aeurepec
Forty-five Sundays and sixty-two Mondays
(12) lie %riVTamkvTe Karepya, lie iftVTa&vb yepyabes
with sixty-five galleys, with sixty-two frigates
(13) lie TerpaKoowL dvb yXovptd, i± efrvrafivb poviimeSes
with four hundred and two florins, with sixty-two gold
coins
(14) Troxei TpuucbouL 8vb ipkojpta KCLL irevTCLKboui ypboia
who has three hundred and two florins and five hundred
groats1
It is much more common to find these two formula systems together

in a line, balancing one another, than to find them used with other for-
mula systems, but examples are found which show that the whole line
does not represent a single formula system but a pattern set up by two
such systems:
(15) XapapranevTe Xefiovieq OTOV dfifio

Forty-five lemon trees planted in the sand
(16) Tpanooi dpKo65ta OKbrcoaa K L e^rjmaJSvb Xeovrdpui

Three hundred bears I killed and sixty-two lions
46
(17) va aov xapiaco rd <pXoupid, e^maSvo povumeSes
I'll give you the florins, sixty-two gold coins1
These examples serve to show that the first line of The Bridge of Arta'
is made up of two component parts. A count of repetitions would have
suggested that the whole line was a formula but what in fact has hap-
pened is that two formula systems, which may exist separately, have
become a relatively standard pair because of the architectonic pattern
set up between them.
The second line of the same song is of a different type. The formula
systems which make up each half of the line do not form a pattern and
are connected only by their sense. It would be a reasonable prediction
that the pattern of the whole line in this case will be much less often
repeated than that of the previous line. And this is in fact the case.
There is no difficulty, though, in finding the formula systems to which
the two halves of the line belong. For the first half-line we find,
(18) Tpefc xpwovs kirep'n&r'qoa ytd V biiop^po Kopiroi

For three years I went on foot [to find] a beautiful girl
(19) Tpefc xpwO(> Kwe orinepo, reooepK: nopnaTOVve

Three years have gone by today, and rising four
This analysis is not intended to be quantitative and these examples

do not represent the whole extent of a formula system. But in these
first half-lines we find the same pattern as is found in the line we are
considering. The change of 'years' from the accusative to the nomina-
tive affects the formula not at all, and in both examples the rest of the
formula is made up of a verb or a verb and a predicate which is metri-
cally and syntactically parallel to that of the half-line in The Bridge of
Arta'. It is also especially interesting to note that in example 19 the
half-line is followed by an exactly balancing complement to create a
whole line in the same architectonic pattern as the first line of The
Bridge of Arta'. Here we have a good example of the choice facing the
singer in shaping the patterns of his song. He could have continued his
line with a formula introduced by the word 'four' and completed by a
verb which repeated the general sense of 'worked'. That the singer did
not choose to do so (in this version at least) was probably determined
by the consideration that, following a patterned elaboration of the
number of people working on the bridge, a similarly weighted descrip-
tion of the length of time involved would be anticlimactic. The singer
in this version evidently preferred to keep the parallel effect for the
47
The formula
succeeding line, in which the antithesis between building the bridge by

day and its falling down by night has a far greater dramatic effect.
The second half of the line falls into one of the commonest formulaic
patterns in Greek song, a syntactical arrangement of two nouns des-
cribing either where something is, whose something is, or who some-
one is. In variants of the same song Artas (of Arta) is replaced by any
two-syllable place-name which was considered to fit the context. In
other songs, denoting place we find,
(20) orov dpaxoda rr\v nbpra at the dragon's door

(21) orris 'ApaTTid? rbv Kay-no on the plain of Arabia
(22) orr)<z Xel'fiovids rb yvWo among the lemon leaves1
There are very many examples of each type, but taking just enough to
illustrate the principle, we may note derivatives of the same formula
system denoting ownership,
(23) orov mroaxror) r% atibvi on the knife-grinder's whetstone

(24) Td npoPara 'rat rr}<; f3povrr)q, rr)s aarpaTrffo ra yiBui
The sheep belong to the thunder, the goats to the lightning 1
and to indicate who a person is,
(25) rob Mavpoet&fi rr\v Kakqv Mavroidis' beloved

(26) yuas XVPaS Svxarepa a widow's daughter
(27) rov Kcbora rj yvva'ma Kostas' wife 1
There is scarcely any restriction on the content of the first half-line

where this formula system is used, apart from the obvious constraint
that the line must make sense. But there are certain ideas, particularly
in setting the scene at the beginning of a song, which naturally combine
with this formula system. Examples 28-37 are all opening lines of songs:
(28) Mavpo novXt, eKadovvrav orov Mirepartov rb naorpo

A black bird was sitting on the castle of Berati
(29) Mavpo novX&Kt KaOerai orris Kaooq rf aypiopowt
A black bird sits on the wild mountain of Kasos
(30) "Era? curbs nadbrave orov uA8rj rb nepfioki
An eagle was sitting in the garden of Hades
48
(31) "Eva novXani uddovvTav OTOV Z'lbpov

A little bird was sitting on Zidros' head
(32) Tpta novXatua KOBOVVTOV orr\ p&xn orb Xruxepi
Three little birds were sitting on the ridge in the bandit's
lair
(33) T do Ktra' f? ixdvva mQovrav OTT\V oKpr}
Kitsos' mother was sitting at the river at its edge
(34) Tpta TtovXaKUL KaBovvrai OTOV

Three little birds sit on Olympos on the ridge
(35) Tpetc nepdiKovXes nadovvTai OTT\V anprj OTO Aej3t6t

Three little partridges sit on the summit on Levidi
(36) Tpta TTOVX&Kui KOOOVVTCLI, TCL Tpta dpdSa -apdda

Three little birds were sitting the three all in a row
(37) Tpta novX&Kta KOBOVTOV fcdrco OTT}V 'AXaiiava
Three little birds were sitting down at Alamana1
Looking first of all only at the formula systems occupying the second
half of each line, we can see at a glance that examples 28-31 conform
to the pattern of 'on the bridge of Arta'. In the case of examples 32-5
it may be argued whether the system is the same or different: the met-
rical pattern remains the same but the syntactical pattern changes so
that the two nouns have equal weight. The meaning is not really dif-
ferent, however, since 'at the river at its edge' means the same as 'at the
river's edge'. This is evidently a closely related formula system.
Examples 36-7 show how different formula systems can also be used in
combination with the same first half-line system. Turning our attention
now to the first half of each line, it can be seen that all the examples
with the exception of example 33 belong to the same broad system:
that is to say, they are alike in metre and syntax, the word nearest the
caesura does not change (although its grammatical form does), and the
meaning is constant in all except examples 28 and 29, where the adjec-
tive 'black' adds something to the meaning not found in the other
examples. Once again, example 33 has a different system, also very
common, which can be combined with the second half-line systems we
are considering.
How architectonic patterns are built up by juxtaposition of formulas
49
The formula
is not difficult to see from these examples. Within this sample the com-
monest pattern is formed by the juxtaposition of the 'bird(s) sitting'
with one of the two formula systems of place which are practically
interchangeable. There must be very few places 'generated' by this for-
mula system where one could not imagine a bird or birds sitting. Con-
sequently there is a large number of formulas of this type with which
the first half-line system may be combined. The first half-line system,
'Kitsos' mother was sitting', could also be followed by most of the
second half-lines in the examples, with one exception - 'on Zidros'
head', which would obviously be absurd. Thus there is a slightly greater
limitation on the number of formulas deriving from the 'place' system
with which the 'person sitting' can be combined, and we find this
balanced by the correspondingly frequent substitution of a different
system in the second half of the line, where the first includes the name
of a person:
(38) T' 'A^Spoura' rj [iax>a 0X£j3ercu, r' Av&powo* r? iiava /cXaiei
Androutsos' mother grieves Androutsos' mother weeps
(39) T' 'kvbpowo* fi \xax>a xatperat, r' A^Spoura' r\ \iava Kkaiei

Androutsos' mother is glad, Androutsos' mother weeps1
The wording in the first half of the line is different in these two cases,
but the syntactical pattern is maintained, and in each case a second
half-line system is used which forms a symmetrical pattern with the
first.
In a similar manner the use of the formula 'the three all in a row' in
the second half of the line (example 36) is restricted to those deriva-
tives of the 'bird sitting' system in which the number three appears. On
the other hand, if the analysis so far is correct, it should be possible to
predict that this limitation will be compensated by the use of 'the three
all in a row' to follow any first half-line in which the number three
appears, irrespective of formula system. And this is precisely what
happens:
(40) Tpta VTOvyema T68GJKCLV, TCL Tpia &pd5' -dpdSa

Three rifle-shots they fired at him, the three all in a row
(41) Tpia 'Sep^ckta upeiiaoav, TCL Tp'C dpd5' dpdSa
Three brothers were hanged, the three all in a row
(42) Tpia /i7ratpd/cta nipr}o<w TCL rp'C dpd5' dpdSa
Three banners set out, the three all in a row
50
(43) ' 2 r' 'AXT? naod ra eyepav, ra e£' apd5' apaba
They took them to Ali Pasha the six all in a row
The ability to predict combinations of formula systems through an

analysis of architectonic patterns in songs suggests how it may be pos-
sible to approximate analytically to the intuitive processes of the tradi-
tional singer.
One final prediction. The examples of first and second half-lines we
have been looking at suggest a large number of possible substitutions
which would probably be legitimate so long as the rules of pattern and
congruity were not violated. To bring this discussion back to its start-
ing point, the ballad 'The Bridge of Arta', I wish to suggest only one:
(44) Tpia TTOvX&Kta KOBOVVTOV OTT\S 'Aprac rb yuxpvpt

Three little birds were sitting on the bridge of Arta1
This is in fact the opening line of a kleftic ballad.
(ii) Syntactical patterns
We have already looked at cases where the repetition of a syntactical

pattern, in a fixed place in the metre, seemed to suggest the existence
of a formula system. It might be argued of course that such syntactical
repetitions are merely the result of using a relatively inflexible metrical
scheme. But (although I can provide no quantitative data) it is my
experience that the writing poet is normally as assiduous in avoiding
such repetitions as in varying his diction. The writing poet is keenly
aware of the dangers of monotony, and has the means at his disposal
to prevent his verse from falling into too much of a set pattern. The
folk poet, in Greece at least, was probably conscious of this danger, but
the means available to him for circumventing it were different.
Certainly there are enough examples of the literary use of the poli-
tical verse in which syntactical repetitions of this kind do not occur, or
are found only rarely, for us to regard them as a characteristic of folk
poetry. That such repetitions are indeed the product of formula systems
can most easily be seen by looking at examples where a balance of two
syntactical patterns forms a whole line - for example, in the line,
(45) MotpvoXoyovae KL eXeye, iioipuoXoyaei /cat Aeyei

He was lamenting and saying, he laments and says.1
Here the pattern of half-lines is one of verbal repetition, with the verb
51
The formula
tenses changed in the second half-line in accordance with the metrical
pattern. There are many lines in Greek folk poetry whose syntax and
pattern are parallel to this - for example,
(46) Kal TOV TiavvaKri ixCkqoe nai TOV FuwvaKr] Xeet

And he spoke to Yannakis and to Yannakis he says
(47) 1>TOV VTWO noi) Koqioiiovva, orbv vnvo noi) KOLndnai
In my sleep as I was sleeping, in my sleep as I sleep1
Given these examples it is easy to conceive of two formula systems,

each the length of a half-line, the first of which is determined by a verb
in the past tense, the second by a verb in the present. The tendency we
have already observed, for about half of the total number of lines in a
song to establish a pattern of complementation or antithesis, would
naturally result in the frequent occurrence of lines such as this, where
the verb of the first half-line is repeated with a change of tense in the
second. In this case the selection of formal systems and the balancing
of one by another is dictated purely by the requirements of the pattern
in the singer's mind, and not by the sense of the song; since in none of
these cases does the second half-line add anything to the information
conveyed by the first.
There are instances, too, of substitution of words in what looks like
a relatively fixed formula, while the syntax remains unaltered. In the
line,
(48) K ox nfjpe 8 inXa TCL fiovvd, 6 i7r\a rd K opyofiovvui

and he took to the mountains, to the mountain peaks1
often repeated in kleftic songs, it can be seen that the first half of the
line has 'generated' the second as a suitable and relatively invariable
complement. Verbal changes, which quite alter the sense of both halves
of the line, produce the following:
(49) KaX PyfiKa vv\Ta OTCL /foura, i/zryXdord Kopipo&ovvua

and I went out at night to the mountains, high among the
peaks1
What has, presumably, determined the expression here is the syntacti-

cal structure which underlies both the formula system of each half-line
and their combination to make a whole line.
As a final example of a repeated syntactical pattern, we may consider
52
the description of a girl dressing for a special occasion, which is repea-
ted with only minor variations in many narrative songs:
(50) Bai>€iTOP 97X10 npoocono /cat TO <peyydpi

She wears the sun in her face and the moon in her breast
This can be varied to describe a beautiful girl irrespective of occasion:
(51) "Eaet yeyyapiv TTpdocono, TOP rfkio jurjXo/fourata

She has the moon in her face, the sun in the apples of her
cheeks
But the same syntactical pattern also underlies the line, unrelated in
terms of sense,
(52) /fyfy/ce KL 6 f?Ato<; KOKKLVOS /cat TO yeyyapt fxavpo

The sun came out red and the moon black1
(in) Sense
Parry originally defined the formula as 'a group of words which is regu-
larly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given
essential idea* (my italics). Most of the examples of formula systems
we have so far considered in Greek folk songs do not conform exactly
to this definition, since in many cases we dealt with syntactical and
architectonic arrangements rather than with groups of words expressing
the same idea. But formulas in this narrower sense are frequent enough
in Greek folk poetry - obvious examples would be the 'bird sitting'
(examples 28-32, 34-7) and examples 1-4 describing the snakes in the
lower world. Since there are many recurring ideas in Greek songs it is
natural that we should find formulaic expressions, repeated from song
to song, which are specially designed to handle them. In the series of
songs where a galley-slave sighs, miraculously stopping the ship, versions
from different parts of Greece have virtually identical lines describing
the event:
(53) 6 onXafioq aveoTevaê /cat OTOBTIK 1? yipyaba

the slave sighed and the frigate stopped
(54) F etc OKXafioq araoreVa£e /cat ord07?/c' r\ ypiya&a

a slave sighed and the frigate stopped
(55) Kt 6 a/c\dj3oc araoreraife KL eoTaBr\ TO /capd/3t

And the slave sighed and the ship stopped
53
The formula
Perhaps one should suspect memorisation of a fixed text at this
point; but the evidence that the line does not belong to a memorised
text but is formulaic comes, not from the many cases of repetition, but
from an instance of significant variation. In a manuscript of the oldest
surviving Greek folk song, 'Armouris', a comparable incident occurs in
which someone sighs and provokes a sympathetic reaction from inani-
mate nature:
(56) j3apea $apeaavaoTeva%ev /cat eoelorri 6 iwpyos 6\(K

Heavily heavily he sighed and the whole castle shook1
With the exception of the key-word * sighed' the words are not the
same in this example. But the essential idea is certainly the same, as is
the syntactical pattern.
This is an example of conservative use of the formula system in
Greek folk poetry, where the use and repetition of the formula are dic-
tated by the meaning. Here we have a formula which corresponds
exactly to Parry's definition of the epic formula - and yet we could not
be certain that it was truly a formula, and not a memorised catch-phrase
or part of a fixed text, until we had found a significant variation of its
most common form.
The following are examples of formulas defined by their sense:
(57) Sev eniXaqdeie TO nouXl cbc KeXarjdowe f dXXa,

ixbvo KiXdSete /a eXe7e (TOT) vb^/t
the bird did not sing as other birds sing,
but sang and spoke (the bride's lament)
(58) Aev &K(,\ar]8e TO rrovXi cbc Kt\ar}8ovv r' a
libvo KiXdrjde KL rjXeye (71a TCL i-ewre/iera)
The bird did not sing as nightingales sing,
but sang and spoke (about those in exile)
(59) Ae^ eXaXovoe oav irovXl, odv 6Xa TCL novXama,

liov* eXaXovoe KL eXeyev avdpcomvri XaXtToa
It did not give voice like a bird, like all the little birds,
but gave voice and spoke with human speech1
The 'essential idea' in each case is that the bird did not sing as birds
normally do, but spoke instead, and the words used to describe this are
similar in all three examples. But the second line in each case shows
54
how even a use of formulas determined by the 'essential idea' can be
fitted into different architectonic patterns. In examples 57 and 58 the
second line begins with part of the 'essential idea', but the singer has
the choice in the second half of the line of either adding new informa-
tion {what the bird said) or of spelling out how it spoke - with human
voice. And example 59 gives a hint of what we can expect to find in the
following examples - that when the sense is fixed the syntactical
pattern of the words is likely to vary. 'It did not sing like a bird' in
example 59 belongs in terms of words and general sense to the same
system as 'the bird did not sing' but is syntactically different and
requires a correspondingly different second half-line.
It is not surprising to find that the same idea may be expressed else-
where by formulaic expressions which belong to quite different syntac-
tical and architectonic patterns:
(60) a. /a evanovXi, xpvob irovXi b. airavoodib /cat Xeyei

a. and a bird, a golden bird b. [in the air] above says
(61) a. OKOVV irovXia KOX neXadovv, b. CLKOVV novXtd /ecu Xeê

a. they hear birds sing b. they hear birds say
(62) Uavra KeXari&vav KL eXeyav . . .

[The birds] would always sing and say . . .
That these lines are also formulaic is not hard to demonstrate, but there
is no question here of 'the same group of words' being used to express
a given idea. Example 60a belongs to the pattern also found in
lt
(63) Ev(w TTOvXXiv, naXbv novXXiv, kfiyaiv anb TX\V WOKIV
A bird, a good bird, came out from the City
(64) Mcope fiouvU KOKO fiovvi, novTava KarafioOpa

Mountain, evil mountain, you whore Katavothra
Examples 60b and 61b seem based on a common pattern, while example
61a belongs to the system shared by examples 5, 6, 7, and 9. And
example 62 belongs to the same system as we saw in examples 45-7.
This half-line could either be followed by what the bird said (as is in
fact the case) or by a repetition according to the pattern of examples
45-7, for example, with the final verb repeated in the present tense.
55
The formula
E. THE ROLE OF THE FORMULA

From what has been said it will be evident that the formula, or formula
system, in Greek folk poetry has more than a mnemonic purpose. Cer-
tainly it has some mnemonic function. One has only to become familiar
with a number of folk songs to recognise recurring patterns, and it is
surprisingly easy, when in doubt of the exact words of a song, to recon-
struct a credible version by substituting words of one's own so long as
the pattern of the lines has been remembered, or (as must surely be the
case with an experienced singer) internalised to the point where cons-
cious remembering is not necessary.
But what is most striking after even a brief analysis of Greek formula
systems is their complexity. A single formula can be related to several
formula systems at once - in terms of the architectonic pattern set up
by its relation to other formulas, and in particular to the formula which
complements it to fill a line; in terms of its syntactical arrangement;
and in terms of the actual words used or their general sense. If a
mnemonic purpose was all, surely we would have found a far more eco-
nomical system in operation, even allowing for the diversity of regions
and the number of singers involved in the tradition? In the Yugoslav
tradition Lord identified a principle of 'thrift', which is also found in
Homer, according to which a singer will tend to use one formula and
only that formula to express his given essential idea (Lord, 1960, p. 53).
The formula systems we have looked at frequently do share an
'essential idea', but not necessarily a group of words. In attempting to
understand the extent of variation found in Greek formulas we should
not be tempted to impose too inflexibly the conclusions reached by
Lord in analysing another tradition. The aims of the Greek singers can-
not have been the same as those of the guslari, who sang on an epic
scale, and consequently they may have solved the same problems of
oral singing in a different way. It seems that the complex interlocking
structure of formula systems in Greek folk poetry has been developed
not simply to fulfil a functional role (as a mnemonic system) but rather
as a formal system capable of affording satisfaction to singers and their
audiences. The patterns underlying formula systems provide the singer
not so much with a poetic 'language' as with a poetic 'syntax' which
obeys its own rules and, like the 'syntax' of musical phrases, affords
pleasure to singer and audience quite apart from the meaning conveyed
by the words. In this way a technical device which seemed at first sight
56
The role of the formula
to serve only a rather mechanical function in the composition and
transmission of oral poetry is central to the structure of Grek folk songs
and also enables the singer to communicate at a different level from that
of ordinary conversation - that is, to express himself in what we would
call poetry.
57
4. Structure of the Demotic Tradition: Imagery and Themes
A. IMAGERY
One of the most immediately striking features of almost any Greek folk
song is the prominent role of imagery. In the majority of cases this
imagery is neither merely decorative nor does it offer a pictorial repre-
sentation of the natural world. Frequently the architectonic patterns
of a song or the progress of a theme are worked out in terms of images,
and these images often invoke the natural world as a reflection of
human emotions or attributes, and also perhaps as an arbiter of order.
Although many images of this sort tend to recur with predictable regu-
larity and seem to fulfil fairly standard functions, the range and subtlety
of detailed imagery which we find in the songs show that the ability to
create and vary images must have been a highly prized aspect of the art
of composing and singing. It is this ingenuity in handling imagery, and
the ability to develop a lyrical theme almost entirely through images,
that most readily distinguishes the demotic tradition of folk poetry in
Greece.
This can be seen by comparing two poems, one from a popular reli-
gious text of the twelfth century, the other a folk lament.
'E/iei>' oi) npenei vd XaXco, ovde vd OVVTVXCLLVCJ,
ov -npe-nei ejiev vd j3\e7rcojuai, ovde HCLKLV vd ^Xencj,
ovSe vd rpe^co/zai rpo^prjv TTJV npenovoav dvOpconois.
'Efjteva npenet vd dprjvcb, rjfdepav e£
I ought not to speak, nor to converse,
I ought not to be seen, nor yet to see,
nor to eat food that is fitting to men.
I ought only to lament, day after day.
Aev npenet eycb vd xcupco/xa^ ovde Kpaoi vd nivco'
{JLOV1 npeir' eyco va[i o% eprnxud a' eva iiapiiapofiovvi,
58
Imagery
va Keirojiiat ra moTOfxa, va yvvoj fiavpa Saupva,
va yivco XijJiPrj HOI yvaXi, va yivco upva Ppvorj.
I ought not to be happy, nor to drink wine,

I ought only to be on a desolate marble mountain,
to crouch down head forwards, to weep black tears,
to become a lake, a piece of glass, to become a cool spring.
(Alexiou, 1974, p. 180)1
The Byzantine poem is a consecutive rhetorical composition, while the

folk song expresses the same theme by an accumulation of images. The
theme as such is stated in the first half-line; from there the imagery
takes over. From 'drinking wine', an image whose associations are with
happiness, we are plunged into a succession of images for grief: this pro-
gression provides the means for the singer to build up his song in balanc-
ing half-lines and patterns. It is also, as a result of this use of imagery,
psychologically much more subtle than the Byzantine text, as each
group of images reflects a different stage of grief - shock and depriva-
tion in the second line, a violent outburst in the third, and calm resigna-
tion in the last.
This is by no means an isolated example, and many lyrical songs are
constructed in this way from a pattern or series of images, which express
the meaning of the song through associations rather than by direct state-
ment. Sometimes the effect seems to be deliberately cryptic, as in
example 1.
(1) 0 TJAICX; fiaoikevei ora napaOvpui oov
/cat oi), dia&oXoKopri,fiayeisTCL ypv&va oov.
The sun sets in your windows

and you, devil-girl, paint your eyebrows.2
The tone is clearly one of bitterness, but the first line also expresses
admiration. The meaning seems to be both that the sun 'rises and sets'
only for the girl, and at the same time that the girl herself is the sun for
the singer. The second line is probably a deliberate anticlimax, but we
are left with a rather sinister impression created by the association
between the perhaps garish light of the setting sun on the window pane
and the girl's make-up, strengthened by the vituperative epithet - devil-
girl. A whole emotional tangle of admiration, bitterness, attraction and
perhaps fear is concisely expressed by this juxtaposition of images.
59
Imagery and themes
A highly sophisticated play of associations occurs in a line which
appears from time to time in narrative songs:
(2) Mavpos eioat, naiupa ipopeis, fxavpo naaXfoKevyeis

You are black (unhappy), you wear black, you ride a
(black) horse2
To say that someone is black is a normal Greek idiom meaning that he
is unhappy; to be dressed in black is a sign of mourning, thus adding to
the total effect; and then follows a pun, since mavro (black) as a noun
means a horse. And as we learn from the end of the song, Kostantinos
in this line is advising his comrade Andronikos to forget the woman he
loved and go to war instead: by a series of images the singer has sug-
gested, with some subtlety, both Andronikos' state of mind and what
the speaker, Kostantinos, thinks he ought to do about it.
The same idea (one might say, the same formula system) is also used
in a number of dirges where the figure of Haros (Death) is described:
(3) Mavpoq eivai, ficwpa yopei, navp' elv /cat r* akoyo rov
He is black (unhappy), he wears black, his horse is black too 2
The images are the same but the associations, although less subtle since
there is no pun on 'black' and 'horse', have been shifted to allow for the
difference of context. To describe Death as 'black' is a common enough
image, but the extra connotation that the image has, of wretchedness
and unhappiness, adds an element of poignancy to this humanised figure
of Death. Similarly, to describe him as wearing black is again common
enough, but the extra connotation of'mourning' is both apt and ironic.
That he also rides a black horse intensifies the general impression, but
does not add further to the subtlety of the image.
It is interesting in this case to see how the associations of the same
image can vary in different contexts. Equally important is the tendency,
which seems to be general, for different images to be used in the same
context when it recurs in a number of songs or versions. This can be
seen in versions of the ballad 'The Dead Brother'.
The story, briefly, is of a mother of nine sons and a single daughter.
The youngest son, usually called Kostantinos, persuades the mother to
allow his sister to marry a suitor from abroad, by vowing that at need
he will fetch her home. Kostantinos and his brothers all die of the
plague, leaving their mother all alone in her extremity, and calling for
her daughter to come back from abroad. The dead Kostantinos, still
bound by his oath, rises from his grave and brings back his sister.
60
Imagery
Mother and daughter are reunited and, in most versions, die in one
another's arms. One of the most graphic and dramatic parts of these
songs is the description of the ride home, with the girl sitting behind
her dead brother in the saddle. As they ride a bird sings with human
voice, warning the sister in cryptic fashion that all is not well. In this
fixed context there frequently follows an exchange between the
brother and sister, in which she recognises some unnatural aspect of his
appearance or demeanour and becomes afraid, while he attempts to
reassure her. This theme obviously requires imagery for its expression,
and of seventeen versions published by N. G. Politis (1885) just under
half include this type of question and answer.
(4) - 0appco, 0appco, Kvp Kcooravrri, ncoq xuiiaTLas ixvpfteis.

- '2 rr\ OTpara nov epxovixave ix emaoe yuA (SpoxovXa
mi fipaxQKcw ra povxa l*ov Kai xcojuarid? /xuptf to.
- Sappcb, dappto, Kvp Ktooravrrj, nebs Xtjte>idc juuptfetc;
- '2 T77 orpara nov epxbâve 'iinfiKa \ eprmoKKkr\oi
Kai oreyvoooa ra povxo* l*ov nai Xipavuic;
T m sure, I'm sure, Kostantis, that you smell of earth.'
'On the road as I was coming I was caught in a shower
and my clothes were soaked and I smell of earth.'
T m sure, I'm sure, Kostantis, that you smell of incense?'
'On the road as I was coming I went into a chapel
and dried my clothes and I smell of incense.'
(5) - Ktoora fiov, ri eloat Kirptvoq Kai ri eioai

-'Aperco IJLOV, ruxow appojoroq, rcopa itevr1 eift
'My Kostas, why are you yellow and why are you soiled?'
'My Areto, I've been ill, five or six years since.'
(6) - TTOOV ra %avBa oov ra fiaXXtd, K ' 77 fdavprj oov yevaba;
- '2 rr\v dppooorid 11 kitkoave rcopa oapavra //epcu<:.
'where is your fair hair, and your black beard?'
'They fell off in my illness, forty days since.'
(7) - Kai vr* evades, vai abeXye ju\ KOX aoixpavav r' ejinara a';
- Tcoynxard n' enoixpavav one rr\v aypvnviav.
- Kai vr* enades, vai abeXipe ju', KOA Sayntooav ra ybbvrva a';
- Td 'bbvrua nov e^dyKtooav dq rr\v dvoyay'ww.
- Kai vr* enades %av\ aSeXye JJL\ Kai veXXaêv rb
- Aro '8ev '/c ev' eXeptooa dc or\v dvaifkv Kodbav.
61
Imagery and themes
'And what's happened to you, my brother, that your eyes are
hollow?'
'My eyes are hollow from not sleeping.'
'And what's happened to you, my brother, that your teeth are
stained?'
'My teeth are stained from not eating.'
'And what else has happened to you, my brother, that you've
changed colour?'
'That's not so; I'm dirty from not washing.'
(8) - 3>oj3o0jua£ o\ abepyaKi fiov, nai Xifiaviaiq ixvpi$etc!

- 'Exrec Ppafiix; em\ycnxe nepa \ TOV ar\ Yiavvr],
K ' edvjitaoe jiaq 6 nandq fxe nepioob Xifiavt. . .
- Tlec TTOD, TTOV elv% TCL LXOXKOKVOL OOV, TO nriyopb JJLOVOTOKI\
- Meyakri dppcoorva /x' evpr\Ke, ju' epprjê TOV davaTOV,
IJtov nkocw TCL izapOa fxaXKud, TO nriyopb JJLOVOTOKL.
'I fear you, little brother, you smell of incense!'
'Yesterday evening we went over to St George's,
and the priest sprinkled us with too much incense . . .'
'Tell me, where is your hair, your bushy moustache?'
'I've had a long illness, that brought me to death's door,
my hair fell out, and my bushy moustache.'
(9) - 'lie / i \ adepye JJLOV KCOVOTCLVTT},

- Ilpoxrec rd/i7reXt eoKcupTa
- Fid Ve IJLOV, afiepipovkr} JJLOV, TL \i$aviais
- 'Ei//ec riiiovv \ TT\V €KK\r}ouiKOX
- 'A//' cjpaq cbpaq, KcooTawn, tivpfteK; KCU KrjptKatq.
- 'Ei//e<; Xa/iTrdSe? eyvva, \ivpi$io /cat fcr
'Tell me, brother Konstantis, why do you smell of earth?'
'The other day I was digging the vineyard and I smell of earth.'
'Come tell me, little brother, why do you smell of incense?'
'Yesterday I was in church and I smell of incense.'
'But now and then, Kostantis, you smell of candle-wax too.'
'Yesterday I was making candles, and I smell of candle-wax too.:
(10) - KCOOTCL iiov, TCL Tzarckia oov TTOXV KOKKivio[ieva.

- TT) OTpajav OTTOV epxbfJiovva, eKel ytoiiioav
<&voae aepas KCLI /topiok yio[xioav TCL OKOVTLCL JJLOV.
62
Imagery
'My Kostas, your little eyes are very red.'
'On the road as I was coming, they were filling compost;
the north wind blew and filled up my clothes.'2
Three further examples from the University of Ioannina Archive

might be added:3
(11) - Kcbara ytov ri eioai Klrpivoq, /xupif etc
rpek iirfveq appcooToq, rpetc ixr\ves
'My Kostas, why are you yellow, and smell of earth?'
'I've been ill for three months, for three months I've been
lying down.'
(12) - KtOOTCL / i ' 1TOV TOX€t£ TOP TOaflTTa, TO(ppi)bl, TO jJLOVOTCLKL;
- A&SOKCJ fxov dppcooTVoa KCU ti'eoav TCL /xaXXtd juou.
'My Kostas, what have you done with your hair(?) your
eyebrows, your moustache?'
'My Avdoko, I was ill and my hair fell out.'
(13) - Kcoara ix\ juuptfei? xâ-T^ ^vpiêtq TOV
- "ALVT€'Aperco ii di'VTe OTTI [xdvva pax,
'My Kostas, you smell of earth, you smell of the soil'

'Come, my Areto, come on, let's go to our mother.'2
It seems that in a case like this the singer was relatively free to use
his ingenuity and that, in a tradition which is in many ways conserva-
tive, the detailed imagery employed to express a given idea is one area
where quite radical changes do take place from one recorded version of
a song to another. But the freedom involved is a good deal less than the
freedom to improvise. Quite apart from the need for the singer, in con-
tributing images of his own, to do so within the stylised patterns of
language and syntax which govern all songs in the tradition, he seems
also to have been bound to keep his originality within the limits set by
a given theme or context.
Within these restrictions the presence or absence of this creative
contribution makes a considerable difference to the impact of a song.
In example 13 the imagery in question has been determined by the most
obvious association and the simplest balancing pattern. The earth asso-
ciation is the one which would spring to mind most easily, and whereas
in most versions the association is double (with the fact of Kostantinos'
being dead, and with an ironic excuse) here the singer has left out
63
Imagery and themes
Kostantinos' ironic answer altogether. Similarly, the antithetical pattern
set up by the question and answer is avoided, and the internal pattern
of the image is one of the simplest kind - a verbal balancing repetition.
By contrast example 7 shows, in its use of imagery, a full develop-
ment of the dramatic possibilities of the theme. Here both the associa-
tions and the structural patterns are more complex. The singer plays
first of all on the double association of the hollow eyes of a skull and
the 'hollow' eyes caused by lack of sleep. The associations perfectly
balance one another in the sister's question and Kostantinon's reply. A
further level of irony is added by the basic truth of his reply. Since the
dead don't sleep, his condition is in a sense the result of sleeplessness.
In the same way the image of his stained teeth has a double association
- with the decay of the grave and with lack of food. The balance is
formed in the same way, and Kostaninon's reply contains the same
ironic truthfulness. And in the final exchange the ironic use of imagery
is sustained by Kostantinon's emphatic denial that he has changed
colour. 'It's only that I haven't washed', he snaps back, still with sinis-
ter truthfulness.
In the case of these three images, each occupying two lines balanced
by ironically related associations, a larger cumulative pattern can also
be observed. Kostantinon's hollow eyes can be truly explained away
with the least alarm; the state of his teeth is also truly explained, but
taken together the two explanations now begin to point to the real
truth, that his sister Erin is riding with a dead man. Kostantinon, in his
attempt to hide this truth from her, has to deny her third hinting sug-
gestion, that his colour has changed, but cannot deny its implication:
he has still to make a true admission. The cumulative effect of these
answers is exactly the opposite of what is said in each. It is the pattern
of question and answer as a whole that reveals the real truth behind the
individual statements. One may also note the internal structure of the
lines, with Erin's interrogative first half-line repeated in each case, and
the pattern of Kostantinon's repetition of the last, key word of the
question as the first word of his answer, which is suddenly broken in
the last case where he tries to avoid picking up Erin's implication. And
in this version, the whole sequence is balanced by Erin's apparent accep-
tance and the journey which follows, the final part of the song exploit-
ing a see-saw effect between her alternately growing realisation of the
truth and regained faith in her brother.
64
Themes
B. THEMES
A. B. Lord defined themes in the Yugoslav context as 'groups of ideas
regularly used in telling a tale in the formulaic style of traditional song'
(1960, p. 68). The implication of this statement, which also holds good
for Greek narrative songs, is that the song tradition is thematically as
well as verbally stylised, and that many songs and variants will be made
up of a relatively small number of component themes. We have already
seen how songs which tell different stories are nonetheless related by
the use of common thematic material, and that songs in the tradition
are interrelated as much through the recurrent use of a restricted range
of themes as through the all-pervasive formula systems.
As we saw in Chapter 2, there are two ways in which a theme can be
transferred from one song, or context, to another. Either the same
theme may be combined with a differnet set of themes so as to tell a
different story, or a different song may be built up by transformation,
or reversal, within particular themes. The first may be seen in these
examples, taken from a group of songs which include the same theme,
that of a girl pursued by a Turk or Saracen and given refuge by St
George in his church. This theme remains invariable in combination
with any one of three other themes, describing a denouement, which
may follow it: the Turk may offer to turn Christian, so that St George
gives up the girl and the two are married; St George may give up the girl
to the Turk unconditionally; or St George may keep the girl hidden and
punish the Turk.
(14) -va (kupnoTcb OTTI X&PW aov £7& Ka<> TO TraiSl /ZOU,
kjie va fiyakovv Kcoarctt>T7? nai TO na&i JJLOV Ttawq.
Fid va nepdior) rec \pv\es dupevrqs at Ticopyrjc:,
avoigave ra judpjuapa nal (}ya\av TO Kopdot.
'[St George,] I'll be baptised for your sake, and my child

as well,
I'll let them call me Kostantis, and my child Yannis.'
So that St George could win souls
the marble [of the chapel] opened and disgorged the girl.
(15) - lAt ixov Ficop/CT?, apanrj JJLOV, KOL va oe TTpoonvvrioco,
ipavepojoe JJLOV TTJ Pco/iid nai va oe Xovrovpurjoto.
NoixTTjuaoi Ta fidpfdapa KL r\ Koprj fieoa ^dvrj.
'ATT' TOL ixaXkui TT\V eniaoe nai OT' dXoyov 777 j3dXXei.
65
Imagery and Themes
e, Toi)pK\ an* rdjuaXXid Kal maoe JU' an-' TO xepi,
/a av elvai Qekriiia Seov, 6e vd yevovfie raipi.
'St George, my Arab, if you want me to worship you,

reveal the Greek girl and I'll say a liturgy for you.'
The marble [of the chapel] opened and the girl was revealed
inside.
He caught her by the hair and set her on his horse.
'Let go, Turk, of my hair and catch me by the hand,
and if it be the will of God, we'll marry.'
(16) Kc 6 TovpKoq d.7r' TOV "Ar\-Ti6jpyr} ire pace Kal TO OTCwpo TOO
KOV6L
-Bo7?0a ix\ vAr\-Ti6opyri ii\ P&qOa jue TT\V Kopr\ yid vd mdooo.
Sou rdf CJ ifdpTcofia Kepi /cat ôprcojua dvidiaida,
KL eva PooPaXoroiiapo vd oov yeiiioco Xd5t.
Kt 6 uArj-Ticopyr}(; PyfjKe amoTOs, TT\V eScoae OTOV TOVPKO.
And the Turk passed by St George's and made the sign of the
cross.
'Help me, St George, help me catch the girl.
I promise you a load of candles and a load of incense,
and a buffalo hide I'll fill for you with oil.'
And St George broke faith, he gave her to the Turk.
(17) Ilouk eldev "AyLO xl/evrtKO Kal
7td vd Trpodiv' TOVS XPWTUWWS OTa TOVPKLKCL rd
Who ever saw a Saint play false and a Saint a traitor

to betray Christians into Turkish hands?
(18) AKOVOT€ X < ^ P ^ KM xoipia 'K/cXâtec KaliiovaoTriput,

TTOV $yr\Ke ayevTris npodoTriq Kal UavaytayKOWTOOTa,
Kal npoSoooav JJHA xXcopaatd juea' TCJV TOVPKCJV rd
Hear this, towns and villages, churches and monasteries:

a saint has turned traitor and the Virgin Mary a betrayer (?)
they've betrayed a young girl into the hands of Turks.
l
(19) Ai" Ticopyri JUT) moTebeTe KI UA'( Ttcopyrj JUT) npooKVvaTe,
l
Ai" Ttcopyriq PyqKe amoToq Kal ju' eScoae TOV TOVPKOV.
Don't believe in St George and don't worship St George,

St George broke faith and gave me to the Turk.
66
Themes
(20) 'AKoOare oei<; Xpioruivoi, KOX oeis /xd?p' $Qj#rio\xkvoiy
OTTOUX; Sev moTevet oe TOVTOV, TOP °Ayvo Tetopyrjv.
[The Turk takes hold of the girl: ]

Hear this Christians and you who have been baptised,
whoever doesn't believe in him, St George.
(21) KL 6 "Ari-Titopyriq rbv rovpKO yK&fiojoe KOX yXvrcjae rr\v nopr}.
and St George blinded the Turk and saved the girl.
(22) - "Avoi%e Ayitopyri, dvoiê rr\v KOpr\ yua. vd ndpcj.

Mid KdT&pa TOV8GXJ€ Kai net TOP ejiapfidpcjoe.
'Open up, St George, open up and let me take the girl.'
A curse he put on him and turned him to marble on the spot.2
Example 14, which comes from Lefkas and was published at the end
of last century, reveals a rather naive piety and chauvinism which is
markedly absent from the others. In example 15 the final theme is
ambiguous. St George gives up the girl in response to the Turk's pro-
mise to say the liturgy and the girl's final words suggest that the Turk
will indeed have to change his religion if he is to have his way with her.
But in examples 16-20 St George appears in a very bad light indeed. In
all of these the theme is constant - the saint gives up the girl in his pro-
tection to her pursuer - but the singer's comment on this behaviour
varies. In example 16 it is matter-of-fact, in example 17 it is expressed
in the manner of a traditional adynaton, or paradox, while in example
18 the singer clearly wished to proclaim the saint's shortcomings to the
world. The singer in example 19 tells his story from the girl's point of
view, and thus was allowed greater rancour, and example 20, by a
curious reversal, presents this instance of treachery on the saint's part
as a proof of his power, and a reason why he deserves to be revered.
And in the last two examples the final theme is quite different.
This grouping of themes, in which a Christian girl is pursued by a
Turk, often attracts another theme whose separate existence in other
contexts is well attested. This is the theme of the 'valiant maiden', the
girl who joins a battle or fights alongside the klefts in man's attire. In
the common context of this theme, the girl's sex is accidentally dis-
covered by one of her comrades, whom she may marry or kill or bind
by oath of silence. In example 14 the theme of the 'valiant maiden' and
that of the girl pursued by a Turk and given refuge by St George have
been placed together to form a different context. The resulting song
67
Imagery and themes
cannot be considered simply as a variant, and still less as a 'confusion'
between preexisting songs. In combining the two themes in question,
which for the sake of argument we will suppose a singer took from two
distinct, preexisting songs, the bard if he is talented enough may give
the themes a new significance, by playing on some aspect of the rela-
tion in which they now stand. This was done most effectively by the
Cretan singer who began with the theme of the Valiant maiden', using
a formulaic opening and the form of the adynaton, or paradox, com-
monly associated with the theme:
(23) Uovoq elde Kopriv bôp^n \ r* akoyo /c
Who ever saw a beautiful girl riding on horseback?
and at the end of the song, after St George has betrayed the girl, com-
ments on the saint's behaviour by drawing attention to the symmetry
between the two themes: both involve a contradiction of expected roles,
something, in fact, paradoxical, and the singer plays on this to point his
moral:
(24) Uo(M elde redouov ay to oav nai rbv at Ticopyr\\
Who ever saw such a saint as St George?
Here a singer has combined themes which in other songs are indepen-
dent of one another, in order to create a new context and a new mean-
ing by exploiting the symmetrical pattern set up between them.
This symmetry is an important feature of Greek narrative songs,
even of those whose narrative sequence seems confused or incomplete,
and suggests that at the broader level of grouping his themes in a song,
the singer was accustomed to express himself in the same kind of archi-
tectonic patterns as govern his diction.4
The second way in which themes may be transferred from one song
to another is by transformation or inversion. Such a transformation or
reversal may be in response to a different context, as in the case of
example 12 in Chapter 2, where the evil mother-in-law becomes a
father-in-law to suit a changed set of circumstances. But there is a signi-
ficant number of examples in which such a transformation seems quite
gratuitous, at least as regards the architectonic pattern of the song. The
most striking examples of this, which must be put down to a single
singer's exercising his ingenuity, occur where a well-known theme takes
an unexpected twist. This happens in a relatively small number of ver-
sions, but often with a powerful dramatic effect. In one out of the
68
'Tradition and the individual talent'
seventeen versions of The Dead Brother' published by Politis, Areti,
instead of dying with her mother, becomes a bird (Politis, 1885, No. 4);
in a few versions of the 'dying hero' theme, the hero on his deathbed
is resurrected (Zambelios, 1852, pp. 700-1; Romaios, 1958); and in
one version of a song where a husband returning after a long absence is
recognised by his wife, which usually ends happily with the couple
going to bed together, a simple transformation in the last line is used
with electrifying effect. The wife wakes up:
(25) Fupifei j3Xe7ret biifkriv ror\ TO X&P0 K ' e/coi/zdro

She turned and saw beside her Death as he slept5
C. 'TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT'

In discussing the composition and structure of Greek songs we have
been obliged to return again and again to the question of variation. At
the levels of formulaic diction, imagery and themes, we have noted
situations where the individual singer was most likely to substitute
something of his own for what he had heard, and those where in the
majority of cases he has been content to repeat a phrase, image or
theme in exactly the form in which it had been used by other singers. It
is unfortunate that we know so little about the processes of composi-
tion at a time before written versions of songs began to circulate. But
from the internal evidence of the songs we can say with absolute cer-
tainty that they were composed in quite a different way from that in
which a poem or narrative is written in the western literary tradition.
'Composition', as we can see from these songs, involves two apparently
separate processes. Firstly there is the formation of the relatively stan-
dard groups of formulas, image-patterns and narratives which are so
consistent all over the Greek-speaking world that we cannot suppose
that they were independently arrived at by singers even working within
a restricted traditional framework. And the second process, which must
follow it in time, concerns the inventiveness of the individual singer in
choosing among these traditional elements and varying them within
certain limits.
It is unhelpful to equate these two processes respectively with the
older notions of original or archetypal composition and the corruption
and confusion which for some scholars is still implied by oral transmis-
sion. Rather, in the second process, which is closer in time to the
recording of the particular version or variant in which it results, we can
69
Imagery and themes
detect the operation of a selective principle: the singer 'composes' his
version of the song by selecting from a wide range of elements which
he knows to be part of the tradition. It is to be expected that most of
these elements will be formulas, images and themes which he has actually
heard from other singers; but if, as I have suggested, the formal struc-
ture of the tradition is generative, he has in theory also to select from a
wide range of possibilities which he has never heard. In this sense he
will be composing, in the more usual sense of the word, and it is to be
expected that a proportion of his song, probably not a very large one,
will consist of material that has never previously been actualised. But
we can go on to imagine a further step. A particularly fine version of a
song is actualised in this way and contains a number of formulas, uses
of imagery and perhaps a theme or two either rearranged or internally
transformed. In discussing the artistry necessary to create successful
architectonic patterns (at all three levels) we have already suggested
how, within the terms of the tradition, an individual version of a song
may be superior in quality to another. It is to be assumed that this, in
conjunction with external factors such as the personality and prestige
of the singer, will influence his hearers also. For a subsequent singer,
when he comes to make his selection of actual and potential elements
for his song, these 'original' elements are already actual. They will
therefore come to mind more easily, particularly if the first singer's
version has been admired and praised, and so far as he is able (he may
be more or less skilled in combining the elements of tradition to make a
song) he will tend to repeat the 'new' version of the song, which now is
no longer new or original but has become part of the received tradition.
Clearly this process can be endless, and by extending it backwards
instead of forwards we can just as well use it to explain the first type of
composition mentioned. We need not suppose that all the traditional
material which is relatively invariable has been composed by a different
process as an 'archetype', but that this too is the result of selection and
endorsement.
Although writers on folk poetry, perhaps because of a traditional
education in literature, are usually hesitant to admit the role played in
composition by the fluidity of the 'texts' with which they have to deal,
this approach to composition and transmission has more readily been
adopted by their colleagues on the side of folk music. The Hungarian
composer and collector of folk songs, Zoltan Kodaly, said in 1941,
In folk music, a new transcription, a variation, is produced by the
singer on each occasion. An essential trait of folk song is this power
70
of unconditional ownership; but this used to exist also in high art -
Shakespeare, Bach, Handel. At first it seems that the mode of pro-
duction is entirely different: here we have a process of individual
creation, there a slow variation of existing material leading to a new
work through tiny changes. But let us look closer at musical history.
Do compositions of such individual character, showing no likeness
to anything already in existence, spring from the heads of composers
like Minerva from the head of Jupiter? (Quoted in Lloyd, 1975, p.
64)
Kodaly suggests that the art-composer is no less dependent than the folk
musician upon his tradition and that the development of musical style
is not necessarily any more rapid for the former. 'A new type of folk
song develops from existing forms by slow variation, but hardly at a
slower pace than that discernible in art music'
The International Folk Music Council definition allows for a similar
process: 'Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been
evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape
the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present with the past;
(ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual
or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines
the form or forms in which the music survives' (I.F.M.C., 1955, p. 23).
Both of these are fair and accurate accounts of the process of trans-
mission, but the role and meaning of originality in oral tradition still
require discussion. Again in an article on folk music rather than on
poetry, Bertrand Bronson makes the suggestive point:
The folk-memory does not recall by a note-for-note accuracy, as a

solo performer memorises a Beethoven sonata. Rather it preserves a
melodic idea in a state of suspension, as it were, and precipitates that
idea into a fresh condensation with each rendition, even with each
new stanza sung. There is no correct form of the tune from which to
depart, or to sustain, but only an infinite series of positive realisa-
tions of the melodic idea. (1954)
The originality of the individual singing within a tradition is con-

fined to the exercise of selection and judgement in the combining of
elements given by the tradition, the majority of which have themselves
become relatively stable parts of tradition as a result of a similar process
of selection and endorsement. Expressed in this way, especially nowa-
days when the emphasis in many branches of art is on the discovery and
71
Imagery and themes
exploitation of new forms and materials, the creative role of the
traditional singer may sound quite insignificant. But we must be careful
how we use the term 'original'. Even in English and European literature
the meaning given to 'originality' has not always been what it most
often is today.
We should also not forget the comment of Kodaly, who suggested
that musical styles, conventions and thematic material change no more
rapidly in art music than in traditional folk music. It may be suggested
that the role of tradition and the proportion of original innovation that
is really acceptable in sophisticated art music or literature is not so very
different from what we find in folk poetry. In this connection it is
interesting to note the opinion of T. S. Eliot in the essay whose title I
have borrowed (from tradition) as the heading for this section. Eliot
was of course writing about the English literary tradition, which he saw
as part of a larger tradition, that of European literature from Homer to
his own day. And yet his remarks hold surprisingly true for folk poetry
as well.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the
dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set
him, for comparison, among the dead . . . The necessity that he shall
conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a
new work is created is something that happens simultaneously to all
the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form
an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduc-
tion of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The exist-
ing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to per-
sist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must
be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions,
values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this
is conformity between the old and the new. (Eliot, 1932, p. 15)
Eliot's contention here may be perhaps the harder to grasp, although
no less justified, as he was speaking of literature and not of traditional
folk poetry. In an oral tradition, of course, there are no monuments of
the past which directly invite comparison. Rather, as we have seen,
these monuments are the selections made and endorsed by long-dead
poets and repeated by later generations in their songs. The equivalent
of literary monuments in folk poetry are the creative possibilities
allowed by the stylised language, patterns and thought of the singer's
72
culture that have already been actualised by older singers. And the
modification of these past monuments which is effected by each new
work is much more immediate in its impact on folk tradition than on a
literary tradition: since the new work is itself the modification of the
old. While both kinds of tradition are continuously modified by a similar
process, it is only when written monuments survive that this develop-
ment can be charted. In folk tradition the elements selected, endorsed
and retained over, say, two hundred years, are bound to be extensively
modified and updated in response to changes in circumstances and taste;
but the singer, unlike the writing poet, cannot know this. He is not
required to respond to song texts which are two hundred years old, but
merely to those elements which seem to him timeless but which may in
fact have been continuously changing.
There is indeed an interesting and important difference between oral
and written traditions, but it does not concern the relation of indivi-
dual creativity to tradition. As Eliot said elsewhere, 'The poem which is
absolutely original is absolutely bad; it is, in the bad sense, 'subjective'
with no relation to the world to which it appeals' (Eliot, 1928, p. 10);
and this is precisely true for folk poetry as well. The significant dif-
ference lies in what Eliot called the 'historical sense':
Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we
know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that
which we know. (Eliot, 1932, p. 16)
They are just what the folk poet does not know, and therein lies the
largest single difference between oral and literary traditions. The folk
poet has no historical perspective beyond the previous generation from
which he has learnt his songs. Although both types of tradition develop
diachronically, the writing poet is conscious of the fact and has to
measure himself against works which are no longer 'living'. For the folk
poet only what is 'living' is handed down to him: in his eyes his tradi-
tion is synchronic and the songs he sings are ageless. He is unaware of
his own creative contribution, and untroubled by the idea, because he
has no monuments of the past against which to measure it.
73
5. The Emergence of the Demotic Tradition
It has generally been the practice, among scholars seeking to unravel

the historical problems associated with Greek folk songs, to treat indi-
vidual songs as special cases and either to extrapolate a hypothetical
archetype for the song, or to discover ancient or medieval parallels from
which songs are supposed to be derived. If the analysis of the nature
and structure of the tradition in the last two chapters is accepted, the value
of this line of arguing is limited. The songs of Yannis, reprieved from
death on condition that his bride will lend him half the years of her life
(Politis, N. G., 1909, pp. 250-1), and of Mavrianos, making a wager on
his sister's chastity (Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 110-12) are most likely
related respectively to the Alcestis story and a tale in the Decameron.
But each of these stories has been retold by (presumably) generations
of singers whose thought and expression were governed by considera-
tions quite different from those which affected Euripides and Boccaccio.
The point is that if a folk tradition is admitted to have been a creative
process involving its own conventions and expectations, then we can no
longer regard transmission as the progressive corruption of an original
text. This is as true if the original is supposed to have been borrowed
from literary tradition or to have been invented. Thus the appeal to
Euripides or Boccaccio in these instances, and a great many similar
appeals in more doubtful cases, brings us no nearer to the archetypal
first version of the folk song. From a discussion of archetypes, the
argument becomes one merely of sources. And the sources of folk
songs no more help to explain the nature and quality of the song tra-
dition than the sources of Shakespeare explain Shakespeare's qualities
as a dramatist.
Levi-Strauss' famous image for the savage, or mythical, mind, as a
bricoleur is probably applicable to the folk poet or singer. He is pre-
pared to use anything that comes to hand, provided it conforms to a
type of thought-pattern, but without regard for what it is or where it
74
Political verse
comes from (Levi-Strauss, 1972, pp. 16-22). The tradition is this pro-
cess, or technique, of bricolage, and it is the rise and development of
the tradition in this sense, and not the origins of particular songs,
themes or 'motifs', that I wish to chart in the present chapter.
A. ORIGINS OF THE POLITICAL VERSE AND

BYZANTINE FOLK SONG
It would be optimistic to suppose that the origin of the predominant
metre of Greek folk poetry, the fifteen-syllable 'political verse', would
necessarily shed any light on the origin or antiquity of the modern folk
song tradition. In fact the range of theories which have been proposed
to account for the appearance and popularity of this metre from the
twelfth century or earlier makes it practically impossible even to form
hypotheses on the subject. However, the recently published view of
Michael Jeffreys (1974) must be mentioned as he has produced a con-
siderable amount of suggestive evidence for the use of political verse
as a popular or folk metre much earlier than is often supposed.
Jeffreys believes that there is a continuous line of descent from the
Latin versus qJadratus, used for mainly satirical purposes during the
triumph of a Roman general, through the later Byzantine 'acclama-
tions' to the Emperor in the Hippodrome, to the political verse which
by the twelfth century was firmly established as a medium for popular
or low-brow didactic literature. Whether or not the connection with
Latin accentual verse is finally accepted, Jeffreys has offered evidence
for the attitude of the earliest literati known to have used political verse
to the medium in which they were working. Direct comments from
Planudes and Eustathios of Thessalonike, and attitudes extrapolated
from the voluminous writings of Tzetzes and others reveal a consistent,
almost standardised attitude to the fifteen-syllable accentual metre.
Such verses, according to these authors, are playful, common, rustic
and trite (Jeffreys, 1974, p. 161).
This attitude on the part of the literati, usually combined with a
grudging acceptance that the 'vulgar' metre had come to stay, and
coupled with the lack of any single author or text to which such an
important innovation could be attributed, suggest that the metre had
previously been established at a non-literate level. As Jeffreys sums up
this part of his argument,
Just as nobody would now dispute the fact that Demotic Greek,
bearing a surprising degree of resemblance to the modern language,
75
Emergence of the demotic tradition
was spoken in Constantinople in the twelfth century and before, so
there is, I think, little more reason to doubt the existence at that
date of the vernacular political verse as a major medium of expres-
sion for the illiterate and half-literate members of Greek society -
verse written, spoken, and sung by them and for them'. (1974, p. 161)
The rest of Jeffreys' argument is concerned with showing how the
old Latin versus quadratus may have been preserved at least until the
tenth century through the medium of popular acclamations chanted in
the Hippodrome in praise of members of the Imperial family. The sup-
porting evidence here is very scanty and the main difficulty with the
argument, for our purposes at least, is that, since the versus quadratus
was not the same as the political verse, Jeffreys has still to allow for an
intermediate stage in the evolution of the latter. Thus the hypothetical
derivation of the political verse from the Roman metre does not alter
the fact that most of the acclamations and such fragments of apparently
popular poetry as we have dating from before the tenth century are in
mixed eight- and seven-syllable lines. For this reason, although I am
inclined to accept Jeffreys' argument for the popular origin of the
metre, its immediate derivation, and the evolution of the folk song
style and structure which depend on it, must be the result of a syste-
matic combination of existing eight- and seven-syllable units, probably
no earlier than the ninth or tenth centuries.
A further point about the acclamations: although these tend to be
in a markedly popular language for the period (fifth-tenth centuries),
such accounts as we have of their performance in the Hippodrome
point to something much more official and less spontaneous than
could possibly be associated with folk song (Cameron, 1976, pp. 231-
2). The singing was accompanied by large groups of wind instruments
and at least two portable water organs (Cameron, 1973, pp. 33-4, plate
19) and was antiphonal in the organised manner of church music
(Wellesz, 1949, pp. 103-4). Such music for them as survives (solely for
acclamations with a religious purpose) is entirely within the tradition of
Byzantine church music (Wellesz, 1949, p. 120; Tillyard, 1912, pp.
240-1) which, with its probable origin in middle-eastern religious chant,
can have had little or nothing to do with folk music of the same period.
Far from being a manifestation of folk poetry or reflecting its trends,
the acclamations from the Roman period onwards are thought to derive
from religious traditions of the middle east which go back to the Old
Testament and Babylonian ritual (Wellesz, 1949, pp. 49, 365;Kraeling
andMowry, 1957, p. 290).
76
Political verse
Other evidence that the folk tradition, in something resembling its

present form, may have existed before the twelfth century is rare and
in my opinion worthless. Apart from the controversy surrounding the
epic Diyenis Akritis and the 'akritic' folk songs, which will be discus-
sed in the next section, the information that we possess tells us no more
than that folk songs of some kind existed - as, indeed, it would be sur-
prising if they had not. In a now famous comment, one Arethas,
Bishop of Caesarea, referred in the early tenth century to 'the cursed
Paphlagonians who compose odes containing the deeds of famous men
and sing them for an obol at every house' (Kouyeas, 1913, p. 239). But
there is no evidence for this practice in the modern demotic tradition,
which seems never to have been the province of professionals and is as
summary in its dealings with historical characters as with historical
events and places. Nor can we be certain that these Paphlagonians even
sang in Greek.
One of the oldest surviving examples of political verse is a fragment
of a dance-song sung in the Hippodrome of the Butchers at Constanti-
nople, celebrating the return of spring and dated to the early tenth
century:
'16e TO eap TO JXVKV nakiv £navaTeWei,

Xapop vyieuiv /cat fcor)^ /cat TTIV evruiepuw,
av8payaJdicw e/c Seov Tdlq (Saoikevoi Fconaiojv
/cat v'uir\v deodcjprjTdu Kara Ttbv noXefiiojv.
(Jeffreys, 1974, p. 168;Politis, N. G., 1911, p. 649)
Behold sweet spring returns again,
[bringing] joy, health and life and well-being
valour and might from God to the kings of the Romans
and God-given victory over their foes.
The first two lines are quoted in two different places in the same manu-
script and show the sort of variations one would expect in a song writ-
ten down from memory. But the language, which is probably not quite
the spoken language of the time, and the formal references to God and
the Emperor suggest that this is a ceremonial rather than a folk song.
Nor does it seem to be based, even remotely, on structural features
similar to those of the modern demotic tradition.
The earliest surviving example which convincingly reflects the exis-
tence of a tradition such as that of modern folk songs is also reported
by Jeffreys (1974, p. 160), and was recorded in Cyprus in 1180:
77
Uore vd vndycjo kni TCL e^d, -nine vd enavakvoGjl . . .
6 Zevos ndvTa dXifteTai, 6 %evo<; ndpra nXaiei,
6 %evoq TTavTore dpr\vei irapafxvdixiv ow exco^.
(Tsiknopoulos, 1952, p. 49)
When shall I go home, when shall I return! . . .
the exile ever grieves, the exile ever weeps,
the exile laments for evermore, having no consolation.
It comes as no surpirse to learn that the monk who recorded these lines
as they stood, and later worked them into a didactic poem of his own
in popular style, had heard them sung by a man who knew them by
heart. Both the sentiments expressed and the patterning of half-lines
belong without question to the later song tradition.
B. DIYENIS AKRITIS
At about the same time as they collected a number of folk songs in

Pontos whose hero was named Akritas, George Sathas and Emile Legrand
discovered the first manuscript of the medieval Greek epic Diyenis
Akritis in a monastery in Trebizond. The coincidence between the
names of the two heroes, and a very sketchy similarity of theme, sug-
gested to the two scholars that the hero of the medieval epic and the
hero of the ballads were one and the same. Consequently, when they
came to publish the manuscript of the epic in 1875, they tacitly changed
the name of the hero on the title-page from Akritis ('A/cptTT??), as it is
in the medieval text, to Akritas ('A/cptrac), as it is in the modern songs.
From such a small beginning a highly complex situation has deve-
loped. Over the next fifty years another four metrical versions of the
epic were discovered, as well as a prose version in Greek and others in
Russian. During the same period the number of recorded folk songs
multiplied, but practically nowhere outside Pontos had Akritas sur-
vived as the name of a hero. In a folk song discovered in a manuscript
of the seventeenth century, it is true, the name Diyenis Akritis occurs,
and one Cypriot song known to me ends with the declaration that its
hero, Dienis, is worthy to be the son of Akritis. But none of the evi-
dence really supported the assumption, general among scholars at the
beginning of the century and still remarkably prevalent, that the folk
songs which mention Diyenis belong originally to the period of the
events described in the medieval epic - that is, to about the ninth cen-
tury. These songs have come to be known as akritikd.
78
'Diyenis Akritis'
The epic tells the story of the abduction by an Arab Emir of the
daughter of a Byzantine general, the efforts of her brothers to recap-
ture her and the Emir's conversion to Christianity in order to marry
the girl. The result of this union is the prodigious Basil, called Diyenis
(born of two races) and later Akritis (frontiersman) because he chooses
to live on the turbulent border between the Byzantine and Arab Em-
pires. His exploits include killing wild beasts with his bare hands,
abducting and marrying a girl who has been shut away in an impregnable
tower to prevent just this eventuality, defeating several armies and
miraculous monsters single-handed, and waging continual war with the
bands of outlaws who roam the frontier area. Finally he settles down
with his wife and builds a palace, in which shortly afterwards he dies,
in one version as a result of taking a cold bath, in the others from un-
specified but natural causes. It must be mentioned that Diyenis' role as
a frontiersman does not seem to be to guard the frontier from Arab
incursions so much as to glory in his own prowess in local feuds. Al-
though a Christian, he is in no sense a defender of the faith, and the
story has surprisingly little to say on the conflict between Christians
and Moslems.
Even from this brief summary, it is evident that this Diyenis is at
best a very distant relation of the Diyenis of the folk songs. Apart from
the appearance in songs of a number of personal and geographical names
belonging to the epic, the common elements are only three: Diyenis'
abduction of his bride, the building of his palace and the fact of his
death, although the most striking feature of the songs dealing with the
death of Diyenis, the hero's single combat with Haros (Death), is en-
tirely absent from the epic. All of these are themes common to many
literary and folk traditions, and there are few immediate grounds for
believing that the epic and the songs belong to a common tradition.
The story of the epic undoubtedly belongs to the eighth and ninth cen-
turies, but the often-repeated view that the songs must therefore be
equally old has no easily observable basis in fact.
The detailed arguments and discussions concerning the precise rela-
tion between the hero of the epic and the hero of the folk songs have
for the most part been scholarly, but their impetus comes from outside
the field of objective research. With their slight change of the hero's
name on the title-page of the Trebizond manuscript of the epic, Sathas
and Legrand, probably inadvertently, gave birth to a modern myth
which in the hundred years since has far outstripped that of either the
epic or the folk songs. The hero of the modern myth is the composite
79
Diyenis Akrito, who has become a symbol of attitudes and values
prized by Greeks today and also of the uninterrupted existence of these
values from a remote past. This is the Diyenis who appears in the poems
of Palamas, Sikelianos, Ritsos and other prominent Greek poets, and
who was to have been the hero of Kazantzakis' projected companion
volume to his Odyssey: a modern sequel. This is not the place to dis-
cuss the significance of this modern myth, which fully deserves atten-
tion in its own right, but only to distinguish it categorically from the
epic and the folk songs from which it originates and which at the same
time it necessarily reinterprets.
This Diyenis, who is at once the borderer of the epic and the shep-
herd or brave young man (pallikari) who challenges Death to single
combat in the folk songs, is depicted with complete seriousness in a
recent article. The writer says it is his intention to talk about
the Diyenis who was the champion of Hellenism and Christianity
and became an everlasting symbol of youthful bravery, dignity and
honour. This first Diyenis (who gave his name to today's Diyenis),
Diyenis Akritas, together with all the other heroic frontiersmen,
fought to preserve the Hellenic Christian state of Byzantium from
the ceaseless incursions, raids and oppression of harsh tyrants and
brigands of another race, to uphold and extend freedom and justice
for the people, to bring security and happiness to the lives of men.
His struggles became a legend, his life an epic, his passage through
villages and memories indelible. (Prousis, 1972)
It is immediately apparent that this Diyenis, far from being the 'first'
Diyenis, is quite different from the hero either of the epic or of the folk
songs. But since attributes of the two are woven together into the fabric
of this modern myth, it is not surprising that the close relation between
the two traditions of epic and folk song, which has little objective basis,
should so often have been assumed as a starting-point for the study of
either.
The present position is most rationally summarised by John
Mavrogordato in his bilingual edition of the Grottaferrata manuscript of
the epic (1956) and by Professor L. Politis (1970). Mavrogordato's
comments on the folk songs are curiously biased in favour of the epic
(which not even in the Grottaferrata version can be regarded as a work
of literary stature), but he clearly and rightly states that the common
ground between the epic and folk songs is very small. Unfortunately
his work has not provoked a reappraisal of the system of classification
80
'Diyenis Akritis'
used by Greek scholars for the songs, nor has it scotched the notion
that many of these 'akritic' songs existed in the eighth or ninth centuries
in a form recognisably similar to that in which they are found today.
This proposition was first seriously formulated by N. G. Politis
(1909), although he qualified it with the view that the existing songs
must be fragments of much longer pieces. His successor Stilpon
Kyriakidis repeated this view in his standard work on folk songs (1965,
pp. 100-3), but elsewhere he implied that songs may have existed in
their present form in the eighth and ninth centuries (1934, p. 6). Henri
Gregoire, whose frequently far-fetched attempts to tie down people,
events and even monuments in the epic to historical origins seem to
have been widely accepted, carried this view to extreme lengths (1942).
On the one hand, he seems to maintain, persons and events in the songs
as well as in the epic are closely related to those of Byzantine history;
on the other, the epic was edited and expanded from versions of folk
songs which still exist. It requires little understanding of the oral pro-
cess to realise that proper names and historical events are the first
things to be obscured and conflated, and that the sole case for the his-
torical veracity of the epic rests on its composer having known his
history from some more reliable source than present-day folk songs (cf.
Politis, L., 1970, p. 552).
At this point a further complication arises. The discrepancies between
versions of the epic found in the manuscripts are so great that they
cannot be explained in terms of normal scribal transmission. Part of
Gregoire's theory is therefore that the epic was orally transmitted, and
more recently A. B. Lord has attempted to show in terms of formula-
density that one or more of the versions conform to the rules of oral-
formulaic composition (Lord, 1954; 1960, pp. 207-220; 1977). We are
now faced with a question of probabilities. It is possible that the epic
was at one time composed and/or transmitted orally. But none of the
extant versions reveals consistently oral characteristics. Furthermore,
the earliest of the manuscripts in date is that of Grottaferrata, which
maintains a consistent, if scarcely distinguished, literary style. The
manuscript dates from about 1300 (Politis, L., 1970, p. 554), while the
events described belong definitely to the eighth and ninth centuries,
since they take place on the Byzantine-Arab frontier in Mesopotamia.
Whatever kind of transmission was involved in the case of the epic, it
is not until at least seven hundred years later, in the manuscripts of the
sixteenth century, that we find a significant number of elements in
common with folk poetry. The most likely conclusion is that the folk
81
song tradition only began to influence the texts of the epic at a very
late stage of their transmission and in a correspondingly superficial
manner.
In the later manuscripts of Diyenis, dated to about the sixteenth
century, there are many signs of borrowing from folk songs, and a piece
of rhyming doggerel included in the Athens manuscript seems to be a
confusion of a love song and one in which the Valiant maiden' theme
occurs (Kalonaros, 1941, I, pp. 25-6, 11. 261-77). And in the Escorial
manuscript there are many demotic formulas scattered among direct
borrowing from literary texts, but no sign that they fulfil any integral
function. This tendency shows a degree of give and take between the
epic and folk song traditions, although at a late stage; and the shadowy
awareness in folk songs that Diyenis and Akritas (or Akritis) are related
names and suitable for a hero can be accounted for in the same way. It
is also significant that akritis in the songs never has the significance of
'frontiersman' which is an integral part of the epic, nor do the songs
ever include any play on the words Diyenis (literally, of double birth)
and monoyenis (only-begotten son), which in the epie represent para-
doxical aspects of the hero's dual nature.1
C. THE SONG OF ARMOURIS
Up until the fifteenth century any attempted reconstruction of the

song tradition can only be conjectural. At that date the song of
Armouris was recorded in two manuscripts, one said to date from the
fifteenth century, the other dated 1461.2 These are without doubt the
oldest texts of a complete folk song, and although they show a number
of features which are no longer commonly found in the song tradition,
the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that 'Armouris' represents a
slightly earlier stage of the same tradition. The narrative is simple, with
many repetitions, and tells the story of a young man, Armouris
Armouropoulos, who, although under age, accomplishes the feats of
strength required by his mother before he can ride out against the
Saracens single-handed, to rescue his father who is their prisoner. In his
battle against the Saracens he is victorious, but is unhorsed in an am-
bush. His horse reaches the captive father first, and the latter assumes
that his son is dead. The Emir, whose chivalry is exemplary through-
out, orders a search to be made for the missing son. The Saracen who
had laid the ambush then tells his story, in almost exactly the same
words as those used in the original episode, and the Emir reproves
82
The song of Armouris
Armouris pere for the rampages of his son. The father writes to the son,
asking him to cease slaughtering Saracens, but the latter haughtily re-
fuses unless his father is freed. The Emir, impressed, agrees to let his
prisoner go and offers the young Armouropoulos his daughter in
marriage.
It has been suggested that the song 'refers not to Armouris, that is
to the Emir (Amiras), but to his son, that is to say, to Diyenis'
(Kalonaros, 1941, II, p. 213 n), but this wilful attempt to relate the
song to the 'akritic cycle' is based on a misunderstanding of the text.
In the song Armouris, far from being an Emir (as was Diyenis' father in
the epic) is the captive of one; and his son is also called Armouris. The
hero of the song is 6 'Apjuoup^ 6 "ApidOVponovXcx; (11. 75, 142), or
Armouris, son of Armouris.
Most of the themes of the song are found in the demotic tradition;
in more recent times variants of the initial theme have been recorded in
Karpathos (Mihailidis-Nouaros, 1928, p. 56) and other songs deal in a
similar manner with the theme of rescuing a father from foreign captors.
The song contains many repetitions, sometimes consisting of several
lines, and this is a device more commonly associated with oral epic than
with the ballad style of the Greek song tradition. The closest modern
parallels for 'Armouris', in fact, are the long Cypriot ballads, which
combine a number of epic features with the style and structure of shor-
ter Greek songs. Indications that the folk song structure exists, fully
developed, in 'Armouris' are too numerous to quote in detail. A num-
ber of examples will suffice.
ovpavfc, orjuepov aXXri fîepa,
&e\ovv Kaf3aXXucevoei'
\xovov TOV Kvp 'Apjuoupr? 6 vhbq ovbev naPaXXtKevei.
(Destouny, 1877, 11. 1-3)
Today the sky is changed, today is another day,
today the nobles' sons will ride out;
but the son of Armouris does not go riding.
This is how the song begins, and the interlocking structural pattern can
be exactly paralleled in modern examples. The cumulative repetition of
'today' is a frequent device at the opening of a song, and this overlaps
(in 11. 2-3) with another structural pattern where the content of two
lines is contrasted, as in the demotic lines beginning a song,
OuXe<; ol xcjpec xa^P°VVTa{-K^ ouXec KaXr\v napdui \ovv,
r? P66o f? /3api6jUOipT? are/cet a-nooyaXioiievri. (Kriaris, 1920, p. 44)
83
All the towns rejoice and all are of good heart,
[but] ill-fated Rhodes stands beleaguered.
Equally certain examples of structures and ideas common to the
folk songs are:
avcufiaipet rr\v OKakav, yeXcburac; K

(Destouny, 1877, 1. 16)
weeping he climbs the stairs and laughing comes down again
wore va elirfi on exere vyelav, £6iej37? TpuxvTa n'Ckta,
chore va rov £m\oyr}&ovv, eSte/fr? e^f}vra nevre.
(Destouny, 1877,11. 29-30)
no sooner had he said goodbye, than he travelled thirty miles,
no sooner had they replied, than he travelled sixty-five.
The first, which shows the standard structure of contrasting half-lines,

may be compared with the demotic,
HafioyeXtovraq 'vefiaive, KXCLIVTCK;

(Perdika, 1940, p. 197)
Playing and laughing he went aloft, and weeping came down
again,
and a close parallel to the second can be seen in 11. 14-15 of the song
'Mikrokostantinos' quoted on pp. 13-15 above.
In 'Armouris' there is a sufficient number of examples of structural
features of the folk song tradition fulfilling the same structural role that
one can fairly ascribe this song to an earlier stage of the same tradition,
and contrast it decisively with the sixteenth-century Escorial manu-
script o£ Diyenis Akritis which it superficially resembles.
This resemblance between two roughly contemporary manuscripts
is nonetheless an interesting phenomenon which, if correctly under-
stood, may help us to appreciate the confusing relation which must
have existed at that period between oral and written traditions. First of
all, both 'Armouris' and the Escorial version of Diyenis contain many
unmetrical lines and unattached half-lines; and in neither, despite a
popularising tendency, does the language correspond exactly to the
vernacular of the day. In the Diyenis manuscript, these features have
often been accounted for by the supposition that it was written down
more or less directly from oral recitation. According to Gareth Morgan,
84
The song of Armouris
the Escorial manuscript is in Cretan dialect and reflects features of
present-day Cretan rizitika songs (1960, p. 54). On this analogy Morgan
accounts for the unmetrical lines by the practice of modern singers of
interjecting proper names or exclamations into their lines in singing,
and he quotes a number of irregular lines in the manuscript which can
be regularised by removing vocatives of this type. But interjections are
comparatively rare in Cretan folk song and in any case the sort of emen-
dation advocated by Morgan only works for a small number of the irre-
gular lines in this version oiDiyenis. While it is true that oral recitation
(particularly in Cyprus) can produce a high proportion of unattached
half-lines, the analogy with the manner of singing Cretan rizitika, in
which at least half of each line is sung twice and always very slowly,
cannot reasonably be applied to a poem of 1,867 lines.
Although the language of the Escorial manuscript includes more
popular features than any earlier or contemporary version of the epic,
it can also at times be just as literary as any of them. It has been shown
that of all the versions, this is the closest to literary sources (Kalonaros,
1941, I, p. xxx; Politis, L., 1970, pp. 573-6), and I have already poin-
ted out that many obvious demotic features are borrowings, at a super-
ficial level, from the song tradition. Both the similarities and the dif-
ferences between the Escorial Diyenis and 'Armouris' are, I believe, due
to the effects of memory. In the case of the former the scribe was
remembering something he had either read or heard, but which con-
tained many unquestionably literary elements and direct quotations,
and filled out the gaps in his memory with phrases vaguely remembered
from current songs. His versification was inaccurate because he remem-
bered the sense of a line but not the wording, the exact opposite of
what the oral singer does in adapting his thought to formalised patterns
which already fulfil the metrical requirements of lines and half-lines.
In the case of 'Armouris' it seems likely that a scribe who was not
himself an oral singer was attempting to record a song in traditional
style which he had heard, and many minor irregularities of the metre
can be restored by substituting the modern demotic form of the words.
Such has been the literary tradition in Greece from late antiquity on-
wards that anyone educated enough to be able to write at all would
have come in contact with the conservative, purist notions inextricably
bound up with the art of writing, and would probably, without perhaps
even being aware of it, have made morphological changes in recording
an oral song. Taken together with natural lapses of memory, this would
drastically have disrupted the metre and sense of his text. In a number
85
of cases in 'Armouris', in contrast to the Escorial version of Diyenis
Akritis, the formulaic wording has been remembered accurately but
confusion has arisen because the formulas, as reconstructed in the writ-
ten language, are no longer metrical. Not all of the lines can legitimately
be restored according to this principle, since in a number of cases the
precise sense is dubious, and in the case of the unattached half-lines
something has, probably been lost; but a proportion of the metrical
irregularities disappear if the words are rewritten or pronounced accord-
ing to demotic morphology.
D. FOLK SONGS IN THE OTTOMAN PERIOD

Between the date of the song of Armouris and the early nineteenth cen-
tury we have very little direct evidence for the folk song tradition. The
only texts we possess from this period are a group of thirteen songs,
most of them very brief, from a manuscript of the seventeenth century
(Bouvier, 1960, pp. 86-9). These have been recorded with greater accu-
racy than 'Armouris' and are accompanied by musical notation. Evi-
dently a scribe who was also a musician was recording songs which he
knew well, and since the texts are so short (the longest contains only
seventeen lines) he would have had little trouble in remembering them.
Some of the songs are lyrics - laments for the plight of the exile - of
which all but one (No. 1) can be paralleled by modern examples. The
others appear to be the opening sections of ballads, for which, again,
close modern parallels can be found. No. 3 is a song of a hero in prison,
lamented by his wife, and may have ended either with the hero break-
ing out and recovering his wife just as she is about to be married to
someone else, or in a lament for the impossibility of his doing so. The
next song, whose hero is Diyenis Akritis, describes the preparations for
a wedding feast and ends with a sequence usually found in songs of the
'Bridesmaid who Became the Bride'. (This is the only folk song known
to me in which the full name of the hero Diyenis Akritis occurs.) No. 6
apparently begins the story in which a young man is taken to church by
his mother, but is rebuffed by a voice from heaven because he is guilty
of the sin of necrophilia, while No. 7 is a lament in a well-known style
for the fall of the island of Paros.
In terms of themes and style all of these songs belong without doubt
to the demotic tradition, although it is not surprising to find a number
of old forms which have not survived into the nineteenth century.
Some of these concern details of spelling which would not affect an
86
The Ottoman period
oral rendering, and which must be the work of the scribe. But others,
such as
KOX bev evpioKOJ 'Se nvav and I find no one

va 'aej3co etc nepifioXi to enter into a garden,
show that gradual changes in the spoken language have necessitated

changes in the formulaic diction of the tradition. The modern song
tradition does not show the same tendency to preserve archaisms as the
ancient tradition of the Homeric poems, and this is only to be expected
since the political verse is far more adaptable than the complex hexa-
meter of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But, despite the evidence of a small
number of phrases that the formulaic language of Greek songs was
changing between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the
language and formulaic style of these thirteen songs are remarkably
close to what we find in the nineteenth-century collections and even
today.
Aside from this manuscript, there is a wealth of circumstantial evi-
dence for the existence and wide popularity of the song tradition from
the fifteenth century onwards. In Crete, which was not captured by the
Turks until the second half of the seventeenth century, the great lite-
rary renaissance under Venetian rule shows many influences from folk
songs, not least in the widespread use of the political verse, although
generally with the addition of rhyme. The late sixteenth- or early
seventeenth-century verse romance Erotokritos, although the work of a
single author and based ultimately on a French source, contains many
stylistic features of the folk songs, as do other works of the period. It
is impossible to say whether this reflects the rise of the folk tradition
itself or merely of a type of literature in which, for the first time, a
truly vernacular style was acceptable to a reading public, although the
latter is the more probable. Certainly after the fifteenth century there
are clear signs that literary writers were aware of folk songs such as we
know today and were to a greater or lesser extent influenced by them
in their writings.
Other kinds of evidence, although tantalisingly few, suggest that the
tradition during this period was creative. F. E. de Lusignan, in his des-
cription of Cyprus prior to the Ottoman conquest of 1570, distinguished
between the musical entertainment of the ruling class, which must have
been largely western, and that of the people. On the latter he has this
to say:
87
Le peuple, & bourgeois, & autres de mediocre condition, apres le
manger estoient tousiours en recreatio dedans leurs iardins, amateurs
des ieux & danses: & ont vn si enclin a la poesie, qu'ils composent
gentiment, sans en avoir toutefois aucun art ou precepte. (De
Lusignan, 1580, p. 220)
A hundred years later, in 1675, a group of Maniots led by the power-

ful Stefanopoulos family received permission from the Genoese to set
up a small colony in Corsica on condition that they helped the Genoese
to hold down the local population (Vayakakos, 1970, p. 152). Their
descendants are still there, after three hundred years of virtual isolation
from Greece. The songs that have been recorded from them (Fardys,
1888, pp. 169ff.) have the same structure as those found in Greece,
and the same themes, although these are sometimes combined in
unusual ways. This evidence suggests that the form and structure of the
folk song tradition had become stabilised before the migration to
Corsica. But the fact that the Corsican songs are often conspicuously
different from the Greek, and the existence in Corsica of formulas not
found in Greece, tends to confirm the view that the songs themselves
did not have a fixed form and that the tradition has continued to deve-
lop in both places.
An account by the French traveller Tournefort, who visited Greece
in 1700, tells us that songs were also composed to commemorate events
which caught hold of the popular imagination. In Mykonos Tournefort
was told the story of a vrykolakas, or revenant, who had recently
plagued the islanders. This revenant created such havoc on the island
that finally the authorities were obliged, contrary to Orthodox custom,
to exhume the man's remains and burn them on the shore. After this
there was no more trouble, and Tournefort concludes his story, 'and
some Ballads were made to turn him into Ridicule' (1713, p. 107).
A century later, several European travellers provided useful infor-
mation on the performance and composition of songs. Julius Griffiths,
who was violently prejudiced against the music and songs he heard in
Greece, quotes (and derides) the clearly more perceptive comment of
an earlier traveller, a Mr Dalloway:
They reject notes [i.e. written music] - depending entirely upon

memory; but are notwithstanding guided by strict rules of compo-
sition, according to their own musical theory. (Griffiths, 1805, p.
116)
88
The Ottoman period
And Pouqueville, in the condescending manner of the period, praised
the inventiveness of Greek singers and musicians in the following terms:
Notwithstanding their ignorance of the principles upon which the
arts of poetry and music are founded, impromptus in both may
occasionally be heard from the Greeks, which would not disgrace
countries where the rules of these arts are better understood.
(Pouqueville, 1813, p. 149)
His English contemporary Martin-Leake was more appreciative when he

observed of the songs of 'the common people' that,
as they are not printed, there is found an infinite variety of words,
adapted to the same air; the lively imagination of the Greeks, their
versifying talent, and the remarkable facilities of the language,
readily supplying matter for the occasion. (Martin-Leake, 1814, p.
157)
One thing that is constant in almost all of these accounts is that
songs were composed and performed in what we would nowadays call
an oral manner. And another point that is frequently emphasised is
their popularity. A not untypical case is that of Edward Dodwell, who,
setting out from Athens for a tour of the Peloponnese in 1805, imposed
on his guides and interpreters the firm condition that no singing should
take place on the journey, commenting in his memoir of the trip that
'The traveller is sometimes tormented in this manner by his attendants,
from sun-rise to sun-set!' (Dodwell, 1819, II, p. 18).
89
6. Function of the Demotic Tradition: the Songs and History
From the very beginnings of European interest in folk, or oral, poetry,

it has been a common assumption that poetry or song which has been
recorded from non-literate tradition is of ancient origin and preserves
relics of a remote past. For Bishop Percy, the first English editor of
such material, this claim to antiquity was clearly intended to justify its
publication, as is evident from his title, Reliques of ancient English
poetry. In the case of Greek folk poetry this notion that oral tradition
preserves elements of a distant and perhaps glorious past was often the
prime motivation for collecting and studying songs, and in particular,
folk songs were used to provide evidence for racial and cultural con-
tinuity from classical times to the present day. As a result, scholars such
as N. G. Politis, Kyriakidis, Gregoire and, sometimes, K. Romaios have
sought in the songs for confirmation of known historical events with a
view to establishing both the antiquity of the tradition, and its con-
tinuity from the time of the events in question.
I have already tried to show that isolated historical references in
songs are not sufficient to demonstrate the antiquity of the tradition or
of particular songs, and that the beginnings of the song tradition as we
know it can only be dated by the occurrence of manuscript recordings
of songs or quotations from songs which show the recognisable struc-
tural features of the tradition today. As we saw in the last chapter, the
folk song tradition which we know in Greece today was definitely
established by 1461, and there is reasonable evidence to suppose that
it had also existed, perhaps in embryonic or transitional form, some
three hundred years before that date. References or apparent references
in song texts to historical events of an earlier period cannot be taken as
evidence that the songs in which they occur were composed at that
time.
The folk song tradition does however include a range of real histori-
cal references. Excluding the dubious significance of proper names
90
Oral tradition and history
associated with historical events before the fourteenth century, the
earliest direct historical reference in a song is to the sack of Adrianople
in 1361. Other songs refer to sieges and captures of cities from that
time up to the present, while songs relating to the klefts describe con-
flicts which are sometimes historically documented. In this chapter I
wish to discuss the significance of historical references, not as a possible
source for historical information, but in order to gain some insight into
the Greek singer's attitude to the past, which may in turn help us to
understand part of the function of the song tradition as a whole.
A. ORAL TRADITION AND HISTORY

The view that oral tradition may contain useful historical information,
either where no other sources exist, or as a supplement to written
sources, is implicit in the traditional approach of many scholars to Greek
folk songs, and in particular in the work of Henri Gregoire. This view
has also been supported by students of oral traditions in other parts of
the world. Jan Vansina has made the claim, based largely on his ex-
perience as an anthropologist studying non-literate societies in Africa,
that historical information can indeed be gleaned from oral tradition,
so long as the many possible types of distortion (from the historian's
point of view) are fully understood. This claim has not been universally
accepted, but Vansina's work is especially valuable in that he distin-
guishes different types of oral tradition and suggests ways in which
their relative historical accuracy may be tested. Vansina is careful to
insist, too, 'that, in a last analysis, every tradition exists as such only in
virtue of the fact that it serves the interests of the society in which it is
preserved' (1973, p. 78) - that is to say, that it has a synchronic func-
tion - and points out that all involved in the transmission of a tradition
will be 'influenced by . . . their private interests and the interests of the
society they belong to, the cultural values of that society, and their
own individual personalities' (p. 76). Traditions, according to Vansina,
have different functions in a society, and the historical veracity of a
tradition can to some extent be determined by understanding its func-
tion.
That oral traditions of the type classified by Vansina as 'poetry' are
not principally motivated by the desire to record historical facts seems
to be generally agreed. Vansina himself points out what should perhaps
already be obvious to the student of oral poetry, that in poetry the
'formal expression of the content plays as great a role as the actual
91
The songs and history
content itself (p. 147) and that, by its very nature, 'its psychological
function and its aesthetic qualities distort the facts described' (p. 148).
For our purposes, the 'distortions' which occur will be of greater
importance than the facts 'distorted', since it may be hoped that they
will lead us to identify something of the 'psychological function' and
'aesthetic qualities' to which they are due.
A specific case of such 'distortion' is quoted by Jack Goody and Ian
Watt in a non-literate society in Nigeria (1968, pp. 31-3). Legal dis-
putes in this society were settled by reference to orally transmitted
genealogies which detailed the rights of each family. This tradition
seemed at first sight to have a historical function, in that its apparent
purpose was to preserve information from the past as a means of arbi-
tration in the present. Since these genealogies played such an impor-
tant part in ordering the affairs of the society, the first British colonial
officials went to the trouble of recording them in writing. Within little
more than a generation, however, a new source of conflict arose, as the
oral tradition and the written version no longer corresponded exactly.
What had happened was that the oral 'historical records' of the tribes-
men were continually updated as the fortunes of families changed. In
other words, history was being 'rewritten'; and the function of this
tradition turned out not to be the recording of information about the
past, but the selection or invention of such information to provide a
seemingly historical sanction for the contemporary (and changing)
status quo.
According to Goody and Watt this is an instance of a phenomenon
very commonly found in non-literate societies, and the writers suggest
that this may be a general feature of traditions in such societies. As
they summarise this and other cases,
Myth and history merge into one: the elements in the cultural heri-
tage which cease to have a contemporary relevance tend to be soon
forgotten or transformed; and as the individuals of each generation
acquire their vocabulary, their genealogies, and their myths, they are
unaware that various words, proper names and stories have dropped
out, or that others have changed their meanings or been replaced.
(Goody and Watt, 1968, p. 34)
Even where an oral tradition has the apparent function of recording
information about the past (as, with Greek songs, is assumed by the
scholarly classification istorikd tragoudia, historical songs) it may be
that the 'distortions' from which Vansina hoped to free them are the
92
The significance of archaisms
real determinants of the nature and function of the tradition, to which
the seemingly historical content is only incidental.
B. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ARCHAISMS
One of the most curious features of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which
led Milman Parry to formulate his theory of oral composition, is the
'mixed' language of the texts. In these poems linguistic features of
several distinct ancient Greek dialects coexist, as do words and gramma-
tical forms which had disappeared from speech long before the poems
were first written down. Parry explained this by reference to his theory
of the oral formula, according to which the poems had been composed
orally over a period of several hundred years, during which the bards
who sang them had evolved and refined a complex system of formulas,
suitable to be repeated or adapted to fulfil the requirements of metre
and sense in rapid composition. As the prosody of the Homeric hexa-
meter is highly complex, and as the language at that time required
many times the number of inflections found in later vernacular Greek,
the difficulties of composing a poem orally must have been enormous.
The problem was eased, according to Parry, by the retention of formu-
las even after their characteristic words or inflected forms had fallen
out of use. The language of the songs became a specialised language,
whose features were determined not so much by the spoken usage of
any one time or place, but by the existence of traditional formulas
suitable for expressing particular ideas according to the requirements
of the metre. Thus archaic and newer forms exist side by side in Homer,
as do dialectal features characteristic of different geographical areas.
One effect of this was that isolated pieces of historical information
were 'embedded' in the Homeric texts, and have in many cases been
confirmed by archaeology.
Parry thought that this principle, although with variations of degree
according to the nature of different traditions, must be universal in
traditional poetry (Parry, 1932, p. 12). It is not, however, found in the
contemporary Yugoslav oral epics, whose style and structure are in
many respects analogous to those of the Homeric poems, and it now
seems that the historical archaisms preserved in the texts of Homer are
an extreme and unusual case.
The erroneous impression that the language of modern Greek folk
songs is similar to that of the Homeric poems in this respect probably
93
derives from Fauriel. In his introduction to the first published collec-
tion of Greek songs Fauriel echoed the view fashionable among educa-
ted supporters of the demotic, or vernacular, Greek language, that dia-
lectal differences in modern Greek are not strongly marked: 'On peut
done considerer la langue dans laquelle sont ecrites les pieces de ce
recueil, comme une langue reguliere et fixe, une et homogene . . .'
(Fauriel, 1824, pp. cxii-exxiii). There is no reason, however, to believe
that the language in which the songs are written in Fauriel's collection
is identical to that in which they were originally sung. We must remem-
ber that Fauriel himself had no first-hand experience of Greece, so that
his information about the lack of dialectal differences must have been
taken on trust. And we know that informants such as Moustoxidis, who
was a friend and admirer of the poet Solomos, were actively promoting
a common demotic form of the language in the teeth of opposition
from neoclassical purists. Fauriel's informants, like Solomos, would
therefore have played down the importance of dialects in Greek, and
we must also remember that it was from the same educated sources
that he drew the texts of his songs. None of Fauriel's texts, accurate
though they are in comparison with those of other collectors, can pos-
sibly be an exact transcription of a performance, and most of their
dialectal features would naturally have been smoothed out or 'corrected'
by his educated informants.
The same impression was further fostered by N. G. Politis who in-
cluded in his Selections from the songs of the Greek people (1914) an
appendix entitled 'Songs in the Greek dialects', implying that these
were an exception to the general rule. And more recently James
Notopoulos made the quite unjustified claim that: 'It is a well-known
fact in modern Greek folksongs that adherence to a dialect is not strict,
especially where metre and rhythm are involved' (1959, p. 15).
We know from the satirical play by Dimitrios Vyzantios, Vavylonia
(Babylonia), first published in 1836, that the differences between regio-
nal dialects at the time could cause considerable misunderstandings,
which are exploited in the play to comic effect (Vyzantios, 1972). And
that these dialectal differences are equally present in folk songs is im-
mediately apparent when one hears an actual performance, or consults
one of the more conscientious transcriptions that have been made since
the time of Politis, particularly those in the periodical Laografia. The
easy adaptation of formulas to different dialects (as well as to a variety
of contexts, as we saw in Chapter 3) shows that the combined demands
of the modern language with its fewer inflections, and of the political
94
Songs of the fall of cities
verse, which is far less restrictive than the Homeric hexameter, could
not have imposed a comparable linguistic conservatism on singers in
the modern tradition.
The language of Greek folk song, with its occasional archaisms but
more general tendency not to depart from the contemporary vernacular
of each region, is unlikely to provide us with much fossilised historical
information. The precise significance of such archaisms as exist, and a
more exact definition of the language of the songs as compared to nor-
mal dialect usage would require a more detailed linguistic study than
has been possible here; and one of the greatest problems for such a
study would be the lack of song material transcribed with absolute
faithfulness to oral performance.
This is not to say that the language of the songs is in all respects
identical to that of everyday speech. The language of song or poetry is
probably never quite that of conversation, and it may be part of the
normal stylisation of poetic language that certain archaic words or forms
are retained although long separated from their origins in normal usage.
The position as now understood is best summarised by Ruth Finnegan
in her world-wide survey of oral poetry:
Whatever the exact truth, it is clear that the once-held model of 'oral
tradition' as necessarily involving the preservation of older strata of
language and culture has to be rejected (and this implication at least
of 'archaism' rejected with it) in favour of a view of poetic conven-
tions where certain established forms fit the currently accepted view
of the literary language appropriate to particular genres. Poetic selec-
tion and development is involved rather than passive acceptance of
earlier forms. (Finnegan, 1977, p. I l l )
C. SONGS OF THE FALL OF CITIES

Aside from the songs of the klefts, several of which refer to historical
events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the only songs of the
demotic tradition which contain certain historical references are those
relating to the fall of cities and towns. The earliest of these is the fall of
Adrianople, which was sacked several times but most dramatically by
the Ottomans in 1361. The text of the song, as given by Passow, is as
follows:1
Kkaiyovv rarjdovia rf?c BAa/cuk KOX TCL novXid OTr\v bvoiv,
Kkalyow apya, Kkaiyovv rayva, K\alovv
95
KXaiyovv Tr\v 'AdpiavovnoXtv rr\v j3

'Arrov TTJV kKOVpoexJjcwe TOTI Tpeis iopTaiq TOV xpbvov,
Tov XpiOToyevvov 71a /cr?pt KOX TOVfia'Cov71a j3di'a,
Kal TT?C Xaiinpfiq TX\V fcupta/cr? 71a TO XPUJTOS dvkoTX\.
(Passow, 1860, p. 145)
The nightingales of Wallachia weep, and the birds in the west,
they weep late, they weep early, they weep at midday,
they weep for Adrianople, so heavily sacked,
that was sacked on the three festivals of the year,
at Christmas for a candle, on Palm Sunday for palm branches,
and on Easter Sunday for the [greeting] 'Christ is risen'.
There is no immediate sign that this song has much to tell us about
the sack of Adrianople, or to support the assertion of Professor George
Megas that 'as is known, the historical songs almost without exception,
are contemporary with the events to which they refer' (in Academy of
Athens, 1963, p. 121). Everything in the song, with the exception of
the name of the city, is traditional and found with only slight variations
in other contexts. The idea with which the song begins, that of the
birds lamenting a human misfortune, is commonly found in laments for
klefts who lived and died some five hundred years after the fall of
Adrianople, and a variation on the same set of formulas as make up the
first two lines of this song is found in miroloyia, funeral laments for
individuals:
S e r a ok KXaiet rj yt,-cwoL%ri9 ok KXalec TO KaXonalpi,

ok Kkalv r' arjdovca OTIS tpcoAie? /cat rd novXid OTOUS Kafjurous
{Laografta 15, 1954, p. 280)
For you spring weeps, and summer weeps for you,
the nightingales in their nests weep for you and the birds in the
plains
ol Svo vd KXalve rr\v avyri KL ol Tpeis TO
Ta rtXiofkioiXknaTa vd nXaiv oi -nkvf
(Ioannou, 1966, p. 332)
two [of them] to weep at dawn and [the other] three at midday,
and when the sun goes down, all five to weep together.
The sense and imagery of the last two and a half lines of the song
are also repeated in these dirges:
96
va
vd judc TOW V w ? 'PKOWTCLL rk Tpelq (popes TO xpovo:
Td 3>cora, rd XpiOTOvyevva /cat TT? MeydXri
KOI 77? Meyakr) Kepe/cr?, nod Xep Xpioroq '
(Petropoulos, 1959, p. 218, No. 4)
for [Haros] to let them come to us three times a year:
at Epiphany, at Christmas and on Maundy Thursday
and on Easter Sunday, when they say 'Christ is risen'.
This 'historical' song, then, is entirely constructed, not only accord-

ing to the same principles as fictional narrative and purely lyrical songs,
but in the same words and imagery. The reference to Easter, which
N. G. Politis took to refer to an earlier attack on Adrianople by the
Bulgars during Holy Week in 1205 (Politis, N. G., 1914, p. 11) loses
all its historical importance when we find that the 'three festivals of the
year' is a common patterned expression found in the song tradition.
The structure of the song too, which is exactly paralleled in songs for
the dead, strongly suggests that in function this song is a lament, not a
historical reminiscence.
This may seem an unimportant distinction, but the song's local
function is more remarkable. Of the three extant versions, two derive
from Crete (Passow, 1860, p. 145; Academy of Athens, 1963, pp. 122-
3) while the third comes from Corfu (Manousos, 1850, II, p. 119). The
Academy of Athens version, which was recorded in Crete in 1938, has
tagged on to it a rhyming couplet which picks up the Easter reference
of the last line of the song:
aveorri, noneXid, eXa

Kai P&OTa Kai orr\ xepa oov KXfina vd pXorj&ovide.
(Academy of Athens, 1963, p. 123 n)
Christ is risen, my girl, come let's kiss,
hold in your hands a vine for our marriage ceremony.
In fact the song is sung, not as part of the Easter festival, but as a wed-
ding song. And it is a common feature of Greek wedding songs that
laments are sung for the bride as she leaves her parents' home, often
closely echoing the laments sung for the dead at funerals (Alexiou,
1974, pp. 120-2). The song's function has clearly been separated from
the one historical reference which it contains and has become allegori-
cal - as a lament for the 'conquest' and resultant loss to her parents of
97
a bride as she sets out for the wedding. That this is not merely acciden-
tal is suggested by two factors. Firstly, in the version of the song recor-
ded in Corfu, the 'sack of Adrianople' serves as an introduction to a
narrative about a girl who has been sold into slavery and laments the
fact that the man she loves will never be able to ransom her. And a song
in the seventeenth-century manuscript from Mount Athos, which is
clearly a love song or a wedding song, opens with the same formula as
the Corfu version ('The nightingales of the East and the birds of the
West') and ends with the formula of the 'three festivals of the year'
(Bouvier, 1960, p. 87, No. 2).
It must be suggested therefore that the song of Adrianople, although
containing a historical reference, has a function quite other than the
recording or commemorating of a historical fact. The real function of
the song seems to be the expression of grief over loss, without any im-
portance being attached to what has nominally been lost. And in Crete
this underlying function of a lament has been adopted to fulfil a more
specific, local function, in the celebration of a wedding.
The importance of the fall of Adrianople for the rural population of
the rest of Greece was probably not very great, even at the time, and it
is understandable in this case that the name of the city should have lost
its historical significance in the song. But when we come to consider a
much larger group of 'fall songs', those referring to the capture of
Constantinople in 1453, the case is quite different. Once again there is
little sign that singers were ever interested in chronicling the events, but
the importance of the loss of the capital of eastern medieval Christen-
dom, as a synchronic condition of life in later centuries, is undoubted
and is clearly reflected in the songs.
These songs can be divided into four main types. The first and best
known describes the last mass in the cathedral of St Sofia, which
according to tradition was interrupted by the final Turkish attack on
the city. Versions of this song begin either with the formula
Ufjpcw TT\v IIOXT?, nfipav rr\v, -nr\pav rrj SaAcwkr?
(Fauriel, 1825, p. 340)
They've taken the City [Constantinople], they've taken it, they've
taken Salonica,
linking the fall of the City with the spread of Ottoman power through-
out Greek-speaking lands, or with a description of the many bells being
rung from the cathedral of St Sofia (Zambelios, 1852, p. 599; Kriaris,
1920, pp. 200-1). All of these end with the moving depiction of the
98
icons in St Sofia weeping, and a voice addressing the icon of the Virgin
Mary, begging her not to weep,
7rdXe jue xpwoxx;, ne Kcupovs, irdXe 5t/cd oov dvai.

once again after years and ages, once again they will be yours.
A second type, found so far as I know only in Pontos, describes how
the keys of the City were given up to the attackers through cowardice,
and now to open the City again (that is, to the Christians)
0eX an ovpavov \xamopav KCLL and ir\v yrjv apydrev

(Politis, N. G., 1914, p. 270)
will take a craftsman from heaven and a labourer from earth.
The third type, again made up of Pontic songs, relates the breaking of
the news that the City has fallen - by means of a bird, the sun, or a
friend met on the road (Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 154-6).2 One of the
songs printed in modern anthologies, which seems to belong to this
type, is that in which a ship arrives off the island of Tenedos and tells,
with striking imagery, of the destruction of the City. There is no evi-
dence, however, that this song ever existed in oral tradition, as the ver-
sions of Petropoulos (1958, p. 154, No. 4D), Ioannou (1966, p. 93) and
Academy of Athens (1963, p. 126) all derive from a literary text of the
fifteenth century, the Anakalima tis Konstantinopolis (Kriaras, 1965).
The lines have been taken quite arbitrarily from the longer text by
modern editors, presumably because they bear a strong resemblance
to the style of folk songs, but this procedure gives no grounds for
regarding them as an integral folk song dating from the time of the
events.
And the final type, of which only one example is known to me, uses
the traditional device of the adynaton (paradox) to express the un-
naturalness of the event in the eyes of the singer: a nun is frying fish,
and a voice from heaven tells her to stop, as the City (Constantinople)
will shortly 'turn Turk'. The nun tartly replies with the adynaton:
'When the fish jump out of the frying pan and come to life again, then
the City may turn Turk.' The song laconically tells that the fish did
indeed jump out of the frying pan and the Emir (the Sultan) entered
the City on horseback (Zambelios, 1852, p. 600, No. 2).
With the exception of one feature, which I will return to shortly,
none of these types is unique in the song tradition. Similar structural
patterns and the same themes may be used by singers to create a song
99
referring to a quite different set of historical circumstances. In the case
of the first type, the same opening formulas and a similar tone of lamen-
tation are employed in a song which tells of the sack of the Turkish-
controlled city of Tripolitsa by Greeks in 1821. The situation is the
reverse of that lamented in the case of Constantinople and the hero of
the song was the wealthiest Turkish landowner in the Peloponnese at
the time:
\\f\pav TCL KaoTpa nripav ra, -nfipav Kai ra VTepfievia,
irfipau Kai rr\v TpmoXirod, TT\V âKovojjieurj x<^pa-
KXaiovv OTOVS Spdfxovq Toupfaaaec, K\alovv eiuponovXeq,
KXaiei Kai yua xaôu/xtaaa TO bbXvo TOP Kta^Xr?:
- 'Ax, Trot) 'aai Kai Se ipaiveoai, /ca/xapco/xe^' cupevrri,
nov *oovv KoXbva orb Mopvd Kai yXaiinovpo OTTJP KopOo,
fioovv Kai OTT\V TpLnoXiTod deiieXioonevoq nvpyoq;
Xrriv Kopdo TTXIA 8e ^paiveoai, ouSe juea' ora oapata,
evas -Hands oov rd */cai//e rd epfia rd naXdrva.
KXaiovv r' axoupia 71' dXoya Kai rd rfa/iid yi dyddeq,
KXaiei /cat T) KtaiiriXaLva TO SOXLO Trjq TOP avrpa:
- XKXdfioq paidbcov eneoe Kai fr) paidc palddaiv.
(Petropoulos, 1958, p. 168, No. 27)
They've taken the castle, they've taken it, they've taken the
passes,
and they've taken Tripolitsa, the famous town.
Turkish women weep in the streets, the daughters of emirs
weep,
and one Turkish girl weeps for wretched Kiamil:
'Ah, where are you that no one sees you, our pride and lord,
who were a pillar in the Morea, a pennon in Corinth,
and in Tripolitsa a mighty tower of strength?
You're no longer to be seen in Corinth, nor in the Seray,
a Greek priest has burnt down your poor old palaces.'
The stables weep for horses and the mosques for Agas,
and Kiamil's wife weeps for her unhappy husband:
'He is now the slave of rayahs, and lives - a rayah's ray ah.'
That the same opening formula and a similar style should be used in
two songs commemorating such different events suggests that the con-
tent of each is determined less by the historical facts in the case than by
an underlying attitude to a certain type of event.
A similar conclusion is suggested by the fate of the other types of
100
song relating to the fall of Constantinople in the tradition. The second
type, with its theme of the keys, recurs with subtle variations in songs
purporting to tell of the sieges of Rhodes in 1520, Malta in 1565,
Methoni in the south-west Peloponnese from 1685 to 1687, Nafplion in
1715, Berati in Epiros in 1810 and in the fictional ballads of the 'Castle
of Beauty'.3 The principal theme of the third type, that of the super-
natural messenger bringing news of the disaster, is found in a wide range
of narrative songs in the tradition, and, in a fairly stereotyped form, is
used in songs on the historical battle of Dervenakia in 1822, the des-
truction of the island of Kasos by the Turks in 1824 and the siege of
Mesolonghi in 1825-6.4 And the fourth type, the adynaton, is widely
encountered in Greek songs and proverbs.
The conclusion to be drawn seems to be that the same themes, for-
mulas and sometimes images (such as the keys) may be used in tradi-
tional songs purporting to describe a wide range of historical events.
This can only be understood in terms of a synchronic function of the
songs - which is not to report history but to uphold cultural values,
and to lament those historical events which threaten them, without
making any strong distinction between different events whose cultural
significance is the same.
This role of the songs is further emphasised by the one unique fea-
ture shared by some, but not all, of the songs of the fall of Constanti-
nople. This is the hope or conviction expressed in several of them that
'once again they will be yours' and that 'Romania [the Byzantine
Empire] even if it has passed away will flower and bring forth another',
and in the prophetic ending of the song about the keys. A comparable
assurance of return to life is never given in laments for the dead, which
these songs otherwise resemble. Mourners often beg the dead to return,
but it is never finally asserted that they will, nor is such a statement
found in any of the songs relating to the fall of other cities, or in writ-
ten laments for Constantinople which were composed shortly after the
event. This fact was noted by N. G. Politis, who commented that the
songs, alone among other commemorations of the City's capture
'express with deep simplicity the emotion of perseverance in the face
of great national suffering and affirm the hope of the enslaved race for
freedom and regeneration' (1914, p. 12).
None of the emotions Politis describes is actually mentioned in the
songs, and his interpretation assumes that singers before 1821 saw the
continuity of their culture in terms of nineteenth-century nationalism.
But he was right to regard this attitude, that even if Constantinople is
101
lost it will be Christian once again, as the core of the singers' reponse to
the event. It was evidently in order to express this hope or conviction
that these particular songs were sung.
If part of the songs' function is to deny the finality of a historical
event, this tells us something further about the attitude, whether con-
scious or not, of singers to history. The function of these songs is not
in fact to record events for posterity, nor is it to compare the past
glories of the City with a state of subjection. The firm authoritative
statement that what has been lost cannot be lost for good confirms the
view that the songs express the lasting belief of singers in the values of
their culture, to which the historical loss of the capital, and the actual
possibility of its future recovery, are but details of secondary impor-
tance. The loss of a city which occupies the key role in the stability of
the culture, both political and religious, within which the tradition
flourishes, necessitates drastic and undesirable changes at all levels of
life. It is in the nature of such a synchronic tradition, reflecting cultural
values and attitudes, to cry out against this change, to express the con-
viction that even such a catastrophe cannot alter the fundamental atti-
tudes which comprise the culture. And even though the historian tells
us that aspects of Greek culture did change in the centuries following
the fall of Constantinople, and even though many elements of Ottoman
culture were assimilated during the years of Turkish domination, this
conviction is not thereby altered. This helps to explain how the songs
of the fall of Constantinople have remained part of the tradition, and
were sung at least up until the beginning of this century - not as a
slogan for a political ideal, nor out of nostalgia for a lost golden age,
but as an affirmation of the changelessness of current attitudes and
values.
D. THE SONGS OF THE KLEFTS

The klefts (K\eipT€$) were a species of social bandit whose activities, so
far as they have been documented, were conspicuous during the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, chiefly in the northern mainland of
Greece. They have achieved a lasting place in modern Greek history
thanks to their role in the Greek War of Independence (1821-30), but
many of those who have been commemorated in songs lived long before
this. Most modern accounts of the klefts and their activities are agreed
that these men were not primarily motivated by any form of national
consciousness (Dakin, 1972, p. 19; Politis, A., 1973, p. li) but, for a
102
The songs of the klefts
variety of reasons, became the hard core of armed resistance to the
Ottoman state once the uprising of 1821 had broken out. But the more
traditional view, that the klefts before 1821 had been engaged in some
form of national preparation, still finds support (Romaios, 1968, p.
192).
During the years of Ottoman rule, local governors recruited armed
bands to protect property and to help maintain a centralised authority
over their regions. These groups of law-enforcers were called armatolikia
and the men who served in them were known as armatoli. The exis-
tence of these bands, which we know were well established throughout
the central and northern provinces of the Greek mainland by the end of
the seventeenth century, presupposes that brigandage in those regions
was already a problem, and it may be suspected that the armatolikia
were often recruited from the footloose fringes of Greek peasant society
from which the klefts must also have been drawn. Certainly by the late
eighteenth century, the terms armatolbs and kleftis had become almost
interchangeable, and well before this time many organised bands of
armatoli had begun abusing their power and position to embark on acts
of brigandage. So much so that in 1720 the armatolikia were effectively
abolished in certain provinces, and may well have lost their official
standing throughout the rest of Greece (Vasdravellis, 1952, p. 158). By
the early nineteenth century, when folk songs began to be collected,
there was little practical difference between the armatoli and the klefts.
Both groups were made up of armed insurgents proscribed by the
authorities, and in the songs are often treated as synonymous.
By far the greatest number of kleftic songs referring to people and
events before 1821 come from areas where armatolikia were active,
although brigands existed throughout Greece at this time, and it has
been suggested that the history of brigand songs in Greece is closely
bound up with the history of the armatolikia (Politis, A., 1973, pp.
xxxvi-xxxvii). Some writers maintain that this institution goes back to
Byzantine times (Dakin, 1972, p. 18) or to the fifteenth century
(Vakalopoulos, 1964, p. 216), but the earliest certain reference to
armatolikia tells us merely that they were flourishing in Macedonia by
1627 (Politis, A., 1973, p. xx). Had brigandage not been a serious prob-
lem at this time there would have been no need to recruit and maintain
these forces, so it may be assumed that the institution of social ban-
ditry, as exemplified by the klefts, was at least two hundred years old
when their songs first came to be recorded. It is quite possible that
banditry of this sort has a much longer history in certain parts of the
103
Greek mainland, but this cannot be ascertained. One historian even
cites a reference to the word kleptis, allegedly in the sense of the later
'kleft', dating from the beginning of Ottoman rule in northern Greece,
and suggests that these 'freedom fighters' became established immedia-
tely upon the Ottoman conquest (Zakythinos, 1976, p. 76). This may
well prove too good to be true.
We do not know for certain whether the songs were composed and
sung by the klefts and armatoli themselves or at a safe distance by their
admirers in the towns and villages (Politis, A., 1973, p. xl). But when
we consider that social banditry is almost universally a part-time acti-
vity, the bandits being drawn from the surplus rural population and
active only at certain times of the year (Hobsbawm, 1972, pp. 30-40),
this distinction really disappears. One constant fact to emerge from
Professor Eric Hobsbawm's study of social banditry is that the bandit,
whether admired or feared or both, remains within the local peasant
society - it is precisely this that makes a him a social bandit as distinct
from a criminal. Thus the songs must be regarded as the common pro-
perty of the klefts and armatoli (both of which groups could be classed
as social bandits by the second half of the eighteenth century) and of
the village communities from which the bandits originated. This is con-
firmed by Fauriel: 'The mountain people have regard only for the kleftic
songs insofar as they tell of the lives of these wild men or of shepherds'
(1824, pp. cxiii-cxiv), and their contempt for the songs of the towns,
according to Fauriel's account, was indicated by the term tragoudia
poustika by which they described them. This solidarity of the moun-
tain communities was also reported by William Martin-Leake, whose
delicate gloss on the term poustika deserves to be quoted:
These last, in the most vulgar language of that part of the country
are often called 7TOVOTIK&, a word, highly characteristic of the man-
ners of those who have adopted it, and derived from a Turkish word,
for which we have happily no corresponding term in the English
language. (Martin-Leake, 1814, p. 159)
The songs known zskleftikalbelong structurally to the demotic trad-
ition, although the earlier collections also contain a number of semi-
professional minstrel songs similar to those found predominantly in
Crete and Cyprus. These latter songs deal mostly with events around
the time of the 1821 uprising and often reflect a growing national and
political awareness which belongs to the climate of the time. The tra-
ditional kleftika, however, do not differ from other songs of the demotic
104
tradition in style and structure: but the preponderance in them of
named individuals, most of whom are known to history, and of actual
events, whether historically verifiable or not, enables us to define part
at least of their function in the way in which real people and events are
treated in them.
It was clear to Yannis Apostolakis, one of the most independent-
minded of writers on the subject, that this function was not a historical
one:
Kleftic song is not history, nor is it a display of emotions or a dra-
matic representation, but something deeper and more fundamental:
it is the awakening of the individual to the boundless power which
nestles within him deeper than his heart and mind. (Apostolakis,
1950, p. 121)
Apostolakis' individualism and rather impressionistic approach to folk
song often led him to excess, both in his ideas and in their expression.
But he was right to see in the songs a representation of something, not
necessarily more fundamental than historical fact, but significantly
different. And more recently Alexis Politis has restated the core of
Apostolakis' proposition in less poetic terms: 'The chief characteristic
of the kleftic songs . . . is their spirit; that is to say their attitude to life.
Of all the good things of life only one has any interest for the poet:
freedom' (Politis, A., 1973, p. li). In order to understand the function
of these songs we must be careful to define the 'awakening to boundless
power' or 'freedom' which these commentators regard as fundamental
to the kleftic songs.
The kleftic songs are normally brief, and consist of the narration of
a single event or perhaps a brief series of events. These are not usually
connected as a narrative sequence, but as in the longer narrative songs
on mythical or fictional themes, are presented vividly as a succession of
images, often rather like 'stills' from a film. The most common such
events are battles or encounters between klefts and their personal
enemies, and the death of an individual kleft. With the exception of
the more spectacular events of the War of Independence and the years
which led up to it, such as the campaigns of Ali Pasha of Ioannina
against the Souliots, and the decision of Despo Botsari and the belea-
guered Souliot women to blow themselves up rather than submit
(Passow, 1860, pp. 150-65), most of the battles recounted in these
songs had little military or political significance.
The nature of these skirmishes, in which both klefts and Turks were
105
limited by the use of old-fashioned, inaccurate firearms and poor-
quality gunpowder, has been vividly described by a historian of the
philhellenes in the War of Independence:
Firing their weapons was a lengthy process and often as dangerous to

themselves [the klefts] as to the enemy. They invariably fired from
the hip and turned their back to the enemy as they pulled the trigger
. . . Much of their effort during a skirmish was devoted to under-
mining the enemy's confidence by vigorous shouting of abuse and
taunts from behind cover. We hear of Greeks being shot in the bot-
tom while making obscene gestures at the Turks . . . Casualties were
almost always light on both sides. Sometimes a battle went on for
many hours with hundreds of men engaged but without anyone
being killed. If someone was killed then it became a matter of pride
to try to capture and strip the body. After a battle the heads of the
dead were invariably cut off and taken in triumph to be piled into
pyramids as a trophy. (St Clair, 1972, pp. 37-8)
If this description by a historian is superimposed on the ballad of

Yiftakis, there are no actual inconsistencies. One's credulity is not
strained to believe that the same event is being described, but the dif-
ference in deliberate intention between the historian and the folk singer
is abundantly clear.
Atxpovv ol n&iJLnot, 71a vepa Kal ra fiovva 71a \ibv\ja

Kal TCL yepaKva yvd novXid KI ol TovpKOL 71a K
T&xa TO TL vd yevrjKev f? [lava TOV Fi^rd/cr?,
nov exaoe TCL 8vb TraiSid, TOV a5ep</>6 TTJC TP'UL,
Kal rcopa -naXaficbdrjKe Kal nepnaTel KCLL KXaiei;
Mrjre OTOIK Kdymovq ipalveTcu, \ir\Te OTCL K
Md<; einav nepa nepaoe, nkpa OTCL
/a enei VTOixpema nk^TOve Kal OXifiepa fipovToboav,
oe y&iioiK Tte^rave, \ir\Te ok navriyvpia,
v^prri Xafiojoav OTO ybva Kal OTO xept.
Sd bevTpov epayioTrjKe, odv Kvnapiooi nkyrei
\piXfi ycovovXav eflyaXe, odv iraXtKapi onov *Tav:
- Hoi) eloac KaXe JJLOV adepye Kal noXvayanrineve,
yvpioe moco nape lie, nape fiov TO Ke^pdXi,
vd ixrjv TO ndprj r\ nay avid Kal 6 Ftovoovif apd-nris,
Kal fxov TO -ndr\ ard Fidwiva, f 'AXf? naod TOV OKVXOU.
(Fauriel, 1824, p. 20)
106
The plains thirst for water and the mountains for snow,
falcons for prey and the Turks for heads.
What ever can have happened to Yiftakis' mother,
who lost two children, and her brother made three,
and now has gone out of her mind and wanders and weeps?
She hasn't been seen on the plains, nor in the mountain peaks.
They told us she had gone away, over to the Vlach villages;
rifles were firing there and thundering dismally,
they weren't firing for weddings or festivals,
but wounded Yiftakis in the knee and hand.
He was cut down like a tree, he fell like a cypress;
he gave a shrill cry, like the pallikdri he was:
'Where are you, brother, my dearly beloved brother,
come back and take me, take off my head,
don't let the pursuit get hold of it and Yusuf the Arab,
to take it to Ioannina, to Ali Pasha the dog.'
The skirmish in which Yiftakis lost his life is not otherwise known to
history, and all we know about Yiftakis himself is that he was related to
the energetic Boukouvalas family of bandits and probably died close to
the beginning of the nineteenth century. The event has not been recor-
ded, and this song tells us nothing about it. Clearly it was not intended
to - the song is about the impact of Yiftakis' death on his mother and,
by implication, on the rest of the community from which he came. But
it is not quite a dirge: Yiftakis has become a local hero and deserves
praise as much as lamentation. This song, like a great many of the klef-
tika, belongs to a restricted, intimate social setting and functions as an
assertion of a common ideal held by the group. The grief of the hero's
mother is weighed against the praise which Yiftakis, dead, has won for
himself, so that the song upholds a way of life in which life itself is pre-
carious, by its implied assertion that mere living must be subordinated
to the ideals of the kleft, or 'freedom'.
What sort of freedom is it that can outweigh the fact of Yiftakis'
death and the touching human grief of his mother? In this song one
could be forgiven for supposing that it is the freedom for which the
traditional patriot dies, freedom for all from oppression and arbitrary
acts of violence. But this is not so. The crux of the matter was pointed
out by Alexis Politis: 'What is sung in the kleftika is individual bravery:
nowhere will we find either national or social consciousness' (1973,
p. li). And the emphasis here must be placed on individual, since the
'bravery' of the klefts could take a variety of forms.
107
Zaharias, who is known both historically and through the songs
about him to have terrorised and robbed the Greek population of the
Mani is described:
M' avrbs Tovpnous 5e OKtdfercu, FOJJJUJOVS 8ev irpooKvvaei
(Petropoulos, 1958, p. 198, No. 32B)
But he cares nothing for Turks, nor bows to Greeks
Papathymios has no qualms about the use of guile in an attempt to

break into the Varlaam Monastery in the Meteora (Apostolakis, 1929,
p. 86), and a number of songs also celebrate the corresponding perfidy
on the part of monks who informed the authorities if they knew where
klefts were hiding. Nor are the songs exclusively dedicated to individuals
who fought against the Turks. Stournaris, father and son, were heredi-
tary chiefs of an armatoliki in central Greece and between them pur-
sued a pro-Turkish policy for over thirty years, but one, or more likely
both of them, are commemorated in a song whose style and apparent
motivation are no different from those of more 'heroic' songs (Politis,
A., 1973, pp. 30-1). And the fine song of Katsoudas relates how the
hero went to Ali Pasha and suggested that the two of them should join
forces, using the money which Katsoudas had robbed from the Pasha,
to crush a rival armatoliki:
Kvpie JJLOV, ri va yivrjKav ol \iabpoi ol KaTOOudaioi;

Kt ovde OTT)V Warpa yaivovTai, KL ov8e OTOV K'Ayi Zcoarr?.
l
O <3>Xcopos 6 iteprnpavcK, 6 K&Xeovos KaToovdas,
TTOV \av OTOIX; KdjUTrous yXannovpa, Kai or a &ovva ixnai'paKia.
KdTOOvdaq -ndei OTOL Tuwviva, naei va TipooKVvr\or\.
- IloXXd TCL err) vrovfikeTt). - KaXcoc TOV TOV KaraouSa.
KaroovSa, Kajoe Karayris, Karoe va oe pcoTt)ou)'
TroXXd OKaena ixov 'pdave V oka TCL j3tXaerta,
an' "Aypatpa Kai Warpivb /a and TO Kapneviot.
- 'AXrjdeia, a^kvTt\ ju\ oov *pdave, Kai va fie oviinadrioris,
xiXia ifXovpiA Ka$avrr)oa, rcbpa va ora /ierpâco'
va bidoôviie TOVS BaXTivovs, Kai TOVS KovToyuzvvaLovs.
Kt AXT? naouis dev fJKOVoe, TOV 'KO\JJ€ TO Ke^pdXi.
(Tommaseo, 1842, p. 385)
My God, what can have happened to the unhappy Katsoudas

family?
They haven't been seen in Patras or in Ayios Sostis,
108
The songs of the kiefts
Floros the proud and handsome Katsoudas,

who were [like] pennons on the plains, and banners in the
mountains.
Katsoudas has gone to Ioannina, has gone to pay homage.
'Long life to you, devletli.' 'You're welcome, Katsoudas.
Katsoudas, sit down on the floor, sit down and answer me this:
I've had many complaints from all the outlying districts,
from Agra fa and Patrino and from Karpenisi.'
'Quite right, effendi, so you have, but look at it my way,
I've made a thousand florins, I'll count them out for you now;
and let's go and rout the men of Valtos, the Kontoyannis family.'
Ali Pasha didn't heed him, but cut off his head.
Finally, the almost narcissistic nature of such absolute individualism

can be seen in the songs (which cannot be regarded as flippant or sati-
rical) in which the klefts groom themselves and admire themselves in
the mirror:
01 nXeipres idnapinrepftovPTaL Kai OTpifiovp TO

KL evas TOP aXXop eXee, KL evas TOP dXKo Xeei:
- 'Mbpipa neipaXui iroxovfie Kai fjtavpa V TOL /iaXXid /xac,
nai bep iddq npenei KO^LIIO, jjtovlde Kai \apiiayKvoka,
IJLOPO juac npenovp apfiaTa, oap'Ckia Kai PTOVK&Ses.
(Spandonidi, 1939, p. 35)
The klefts are grooming themselves, and twirling their moustaches;
and one to another was saying, and one to another says:
'Fine heads we've got, and our hair is black,
not right for cutting, not right for the guillotine,
but right for arms, doubloons and ducats.'
KaBovprai, oi /cXe^rec, KOQGOPTOI OTOP TTXCLTOPO CLTTO KCLTOV.

Aovôvprat, inrapidnepftovPTaL Kai orb yva\i Koiruovprai.
KOLTOP TTJP efiop^pada TOVS, KOLTOP Tr\ XefePTia TOVS.
Komerai 6 Afnioq fjnd yopa, ra naXtKapia irepre,
KL 6 Kcbara? 6 neprnpapos KOinerai deKanepre.
KoiT&ei Trjpefiop^pdSa rov, Koiraei TTJ Xefiepna rov.
Ki and TT\P nepr\<papeia TOV, KL and TTJ XefiePTia TOV,
8ep naeL TO (5pa8 v OTT'LTL TOV, hep naeL OTTJ ^paiieXva TOV,
lid \aToe dndpov OTafiovpdKai aric i//T?Xec paxovXes.
(Ioannou, 1965, p. 1)
109
The klefts are sitting, sitting beneath the planetree.
They wash, they groom themselves and look at themselves in
the glass.
They observe their fine features, they observe their leventia.
Dimos takes one look, the pallikdria five,
and Kostas the proud looks fifteen times.
He observes his fine features, he observes his leventia.
And out of his pride and out of his leventia,
he doesn't go home in the evening, he doesn't go back to his
family,
but stayed up in the mountains and high ridges.
The first of these reveals a grim humour, while the second is a more
explicit account of the psychology of the Greek bandit. The reason that
Kostas takes to the mountains is his own pride - in himself and his
leventia, an untranslatable term which combines the ideas of youth,
beauty, strength and daring.
In the light of these examples we can define the klefts' idea of free-
dom as little short of absolute individual self-sufficiency, the complete
freedom of self-assertion, whether in the relatively harmless case of
Kostas taking to the mountains because he has looked in the mirror
and seen that he is too good for the life of the plains, or more seriously
in the case of the brutal Zaharias, who cared nothing for Greek and
Turk alike. Freedom so understood may well lead to acts apparently
less introverted, as happened with Yiftakis, or with Despo Botsari blow-
ing up herself and the rest of the women of Souli rather than fall into
Turkish hands. But even here one feels that the freedom invoked in
these 'heroic' acts of self-sacrifice is not motivated by political or reli-
gious allegiance but by the same self-regarding determination of the
kleft to recognise no authority but his own. The logical conclusion of
this ideal of freedom is the point where even life, dearly prized as it is
in the kleftic songs, must be discarded if continuing to live will force
the kleft to submit to another's authority.
The kleft as he portrays himself in the songs is in no sense a revolu-
tionary, but a solitary rebel, refusing all allegiance and obligations.
Hobsbawm's sociological study of banditry, as well as common sense,
tell us that this cannot quite have been the case in real life. The depen-
dence of social bandits on the local community is well known, and,
while the idealised self-sufficiency of the kleftic songs may, as a goal to
be achieved, have determined the behaviour of real klefts in action, it
110
cannot have been a social reality among them. Thus the kleftic songs
do not merely reflect current cultural or social values, which was the
furthest we could go in defining the function of the song tradition from
the evidence of the historical songs of the fall of cities. To this we must
now add the function reflecting cultural aspirations. The kleftic songs
do not reflect the lives and attitudes of the klefts precisely as they
were, but as the klefts would have liked them to be, as they appeared to
their own imaginations.
This function is probably not confined to the songs of the klefts -
it will account admirably for the historical songs, in particular those in
which the return of Constantinople to the Christians is prophesied. And
further corroboration is found in the case of love songs in the revealing
remark of a Sarakatsan shepherd quoted by J. K. Campbell. Discussing
the rigid code of sexual morality practised by these nomads of north-
western Greece, this shepherd dismissed the romantic ideals of the love
songs sung in his community with the words, 'The songs tell lies'
(Campbell, 1964, p. 124). So long as they are not interpreted literally,
lies such as this can tell us much. The songs of the klefts are^not after
all mendacious, but neither was it ever their purpose to be true to his-
torical fact.
Ill
7. The Songs as Myth
The discussion of function in Greek folk poetry in the last chapter led
us to the generalised conclusion that this was the synchronic reflection
of cultural values, attitudes and aspirations. We saw that neither in the
historical nor in the kleftic songs are events either placed in time or
sequentially related. Neither is historical detail often found in the tra-
dition. The whole barrage of facts and contingencies which clearly
separate, say, the siege of Rhodes and the siege of Paros in the mind of
the historian is absent from the songs. We find songs referring to the
loss of cities, to the death, betrayals and acts of defiance of klefts: from
a mass of contingency, only those features which have been frequently
repeated on different historical occasions have found their way into the
tradition. History (not the facts but the telling of facts) when it repeats
itself belongs with other stories which are characterised by their 'time-
lessness', namely myths. The tale of a captured city, be it Constanti-
nople, Rhodes, or Malta, shorn of the historical contingencies which,
for the historian, make the event unique, is no longer a piece of history,
but has taken on the character of myth.
No distinction is to be drawn, therefore, between narrative songs on
'mythical' and 'historical' subjects, and the importance of 'myth',
understood in this way, will be evident as we come to consider two
problems which have traditionally been of concern to folklorists and
anthropologists. These have to do with diffusion (how does oral tradi-
tion travel?) and with meaning (does a folk song or narrative mean any-
thing, and if so how can we interpret it?).
A. DIFFUSION OF SONGS WITHIN GREECE

The problem of 'diffusion' is essentially the problem of 'variants' which
was discussed in Chapter 2, viewed from a different angle. As a pheno-
menon it has been extensively studied and a degree of mystery has
112
Diffusion within Greece
grown up around it which is not entirely deserved. Partly this is because
the early 'diffusionist' scholars of folklore adapted to the study of oral
texts certain assumptions which had been current among the most
plodding of nineteenth-century literary scholars (Wilgus, 1959, p. 65).
When the same story is found in the work of more than one writer,
working within the same European literary tradition, it is perfectly pos-
sible to trace the evolution of the story through successive 'borrow-
ings'. Since written works, or those at least of sufficient merit to
influence succeeding generations of writers, are relatively few and most
of the corpus was accessible to practitioners all over Europe from the
middle ages onwards, there is no particular difficulty in saying, for
example, that Shakespeare took part of the plot of Cymbeline from a
story of Boccaccio. The evolution of a story can be traced when we
possess the earlier stages from which later departures were made: but
only when we can be certain that they really are earlier, and also that
these are the same early versions as were known to the creators of the
later ones. The assumption that this is also true of oral narrative is cen-
tral to the work of the 'historical-geographical' or 'Finnish' .school of
folklorists, whose methods have been influential in the study of Greek
folk poetry.
This view of diffusion assumed that each narrative started from a
single original or archetype, which was then transmitted over an ever-
widening area. By comparing variants from the entire area (in some
cases the whole world) and interpreting the characteristics of each
according to this model of historical and geographical diffusion, it was
thought that the folklorist could reconstruct the archetypal form and
estimate the approximate time and place of its genesis (Thompson,
1946, p. 440; Finnegan, 1977, pp. 41-4). Most of the followers of this
school were concerned with tales rather than with songs, and the rela-
tive neglect of songs was probably inevitable in a school which tended
to ignore questions of style. The 'tale' was the thing - and it was also
inevitable that this meticulous but often unimaginative application of a
method of literary research to the study of oral material should have
kept its distance from the complementary disciplines of anthropology
and sociology. As Dorson, one of the most recent apologists of the
'school', comments, 'where the Finnish method seeks to establish the
oldest narrative traits of an international tale, the anthropologist
searches for dominant psychological attitudes projected into a tribal
tale' (Dorson, 1964, p. 103).
Recent developments have rather altered this picture. Levi-Strauss'
113
The songs as myth
application of the methods of structural linguistics to the study of myth
has brought about a resurgence of interest among anthropologists in
myths, which are really the folk tales of the Finnish school under a dif-
ferent name. And in a parallel development the disciplines of literature
and sociology are coming closer together in the examination of the
'sociology of literature', in which oral or folk material is now seen to
play an important part.
The usefulness of these developments will probably not be to pro-
vide solutions to problems that have concerned folklorists in the past,
so much as to change the fundamental assumptions which gave rise to
the problems in the first place. Once it is realised, in the light of Levi-
Strauss' work on transformations in myth and of Parry's and Lord's
conclusions on the composition of oral narrative poetry in Yugoslavia,
that the myth or the song is not necessarily a separate entity derived by
a simple progression from a single archetype, then the need to discover
or to reconstruct archetypal forms disappears. And along with arche-
types the idea of 'diffusion' may also have to be discarded or at least
seriously modified.
The first serious attempt to chart and interpret the diffusion of songs
in the Greek-speaking world was made by Professor Samuel Baud-Bovy.
A musician and musicologist by training, Baud-Bovy visited the Dodeca-
nese in 1930-3 as part of a project launched by Melpo Merlier to record
music and songs from all over Greece. Baud-Bovy's collection of texts
and music, the latter transcribed in notation during actual perfor-
mances, is one of the fullest and most meticulous of all Greek folk song
publications. When he published the first volume of his Chansons du
Dodecanese (1935) Baud-Bovy was already well advanced on his doc-
toral thesis - an analysis of the texts he had collected and a detailed
comparison of characteristic versions of songs from the Dodecanese
with those of other areas (Baud-Bovy, 1936). Both the aim and method
of this research are clearly derived from the folk tale studies of the
'historical-geographical' school in Europe and America. Baud-Bovy 's
aim, he states, was to 'examiner parallelement le plus grand nombre
possible de versions d'une chanson afin de determiner sa forme originate
et, si possible, le lieu et la date de sa creation' (1936, p. 125). In the
pages which follow Baud-Bovy examines the characteristic differences
between groups of variants of some of the most widely diffused narra-
tive songs in Greece, and ascribes priority to those which omit details
of narrative that in other versions show the widest inconsistency. This
procedure is justified by the principle that those elements of a song
114
Diffusion within Greece
which belong to the archetype will be transmitted more faithfully than
those which are accretions. The original form of the song must there-
fore be that on which the maximum number of versions agree, while its
geographical origin must be the area in which the versions closest to the
consensus version are still sung.
The flaws in this procedure are clear to see. Baud-Bovy was unable
to justify the assumption that a song can be traced back to an arche-
type and an origin in time and place, and, as regards his method, the
omission in a song of the details most susceptible to variation may be
considered merely as another case of variation, without special signi-
ficance. Baud-Bovy's conclusion, that the oldest Greek ballads were
composed in Asia Minor in the ninth or tenth centuries and transmitted
westwards with the decline of Byzantine power, is consistent with the
argument used, but can no longer be accepted without careful reassess-
ment of the method.
Both Baud-Bovy's method and his conclusions have, however, been
accepted as solid fact by Entwistle in his authoritative survey of Euro-
pean balladry (1939, pp. 237ff.), more recently by Gareth Morgan
(1960, p. 11), and G. Megas (1971), and again by Bertrand Bouvier, a
pupil of Baud-Bovy, in his otherwise admirable study of the 'Virgin's
Lament' in popular tradition (1976).
An interesting exception to this trend is the work of G. Saunier
(1972), who examines the narrative of Diyenis' combat with Death in
terms of 'myth', which he then divides into 'themes', and analyses
according to a sophisticated version of the 'historical-geographical'
method. According to Saunier the themes which comprise the myth
gradually change in transmission, so that in time one theme gives rise
to another. Where it can be determined that a theme in a certain song
is derived from one or more themes found elsewhere, it must follow
that the derived form is later. Saunier concludes that from all the exist-
ing songs which express this myth, four 'original' themes or forms of
the myth can be isolated, each of which has a separate geographical
origin. Saunier's analysis is cogent and subtle, but there is an inherent
danger in seeking original forms within a myth, since the two terms
normally belong to diametrically opposed methods of approach. One
cannot escape feeling, with Saunier himself, that 'Le choix des formes
originelles pourra, il est vrai, paraitre arbitraire', without being wholly
convinced that 'il suffit que la suite de l'analyse le justifie' (1972, p.
124).
115
The songs as myth
B. DIFFUSION BEYOND GREECE

For all its evident hazards, the work of the diffusionist scholar within
the confines of a single culture or language-area is relatively uncompli-
cated. But the enormously wide distribution of so many of the folk
tale 'motifs' with which he is pledged to deal requires him to separate
the 'motif not merely from the style, structure and function which
govern its expression, but also from the place which it occupies in
many different regional cultures. This is from many points of view un-
desirable as well as difficult; and, in the case of Greek folk songs and
those of the neighbouring Balkan countries, immediately gives rise to
questions of the national ownership of ballads.
One of the most important questions for the folklorists of the
'historical-geographical' school is how tales and motifs cross cultural
and linguistic boundaries. But here problems of method arise which
have never been satisfactorily solved. If one believes, with the expo-
nents of the classic 'historical-geographical' method, that the folk tale
is somehow a self-generating entity governed by its own laws which
can be scientifically studied, and to this extent detachable from the
environment in which it is found, then it is indeed possible to isolate
the same trait in different cultures and chart its diffusion without re-
ference to the various cultural contexts of which it is a part. But what
then is the correct reply to the Greek scholar who maintained that the
pan-European ballad 'The Dead Brother' must have been diffused across
Europe from Greece, because the Greek versions are perfectly adapted
to specifically Greek cultural attitudes (Politis, N. G., 1885)?
Such an appeal to the perfect integration of the international 'tale'
into a particular culture should not go unheeded. It is here that the
greatest weakness of the classic 'historical-geographical' approach is
apparent. It is sometimes possible for a single scholar to collect and
compare all the world-wide manifestations of a particular 'tale', although
this in itself may easily be more than a life's work (Dorson, 1964, p.
94). But it is quite impossible for one person to know intimately more
than one or two of the cultures in which this tale occurs, so that in
only one or two of many hundreds of cases will he be aware of the
degree of integration of the tale he is studying into its surrounding
culture. Thus any conclusion reached by an application of the method
must be open to challenge from anyone closely acquainted with any of
the cultures which effectively have been ignored in the exclusive analy-
sis of a single trait.
116
Diffusion beyond Greece
This problem was appreciated early on in the 'historical-geographical'
debate by the Swedish scholar C. W. von Sydow (Thompson, 1946, pp.
440-1), whose division of an international tale into local 'oikotypes'
showed an awareness of the problem but failed to restate it in more
manageable terms. The concentration by von Sydow and his followers
on local or national 'types', and the failure of the classic 'historical-
geographical' school to take into account the place of a tale in the cul-
tures in which it is found have given rise, in the study of Greek and
Balkan folk material, to an exceptionally, and unnecessarily, confused
situation.
There is no lack of Greek narrative songs which clearly bear some
relation to counterparts in other areas of Europe, notably the Balkans.
The most widely examined of these are the ballads known as 'The Dead
Brother', which has counterparts as far away as Suffolk and Russia, and
'The Bridge of Arta' which will be discussed below.1 Almost all of these
'diffusionist' or comparative studies are concerned with motifs or ele-
ments of the narrative, and not with stylistic features, so that they
really concern the content of the ballads and not the songs themselves.
The assumptions from which such studies begin are invariably those of
the 'historical-geographical' school concerning origins and diffusion,
yoked with a nationalism or partisanship which is often fostered by
each contestant's being most familiar with only one of the national
languages and cultures under discussion. Under these circumstances it is
hardly surprising that the debate should degenerate into a squabble
between national and political allegiances, which is all the more incon-
gruous as so often in the Balkans national boundaries do not correspond
with cultural groupings.
In a discussion of 'motifs' without regard to structure or to the place
of the song in its own cultural tradition, one-sidedness and distortion
are only to be expected, and the avowed methods of research logically
deficient. The Hungarian scholar Lajos Vargyas, whose study of the
Balkan distribution of the ballad 'The Walled-up Wife' (or 'Bridge of
Arta' in Greece) is in many ways useful and informative, puts forward a
detailed case for the Hungarian origin of the song. Concluding a discus-
sion of one particular motif, Vargyas says, 'I think the examples shown
make it clear on the uniform evidence of several details that the Hun-
garian formulation shows the purest form: in stylised form all together
conform completely to the requirements of ballad style' (Vargyas, 1967,
p. 222). This sort of conclusion is only natural if one is comparing
material from one's own culture and language with that of other cul-
117
The songs as myth
tures and languages which are less well known or known only through
translations, divorced from their context. Vargyas' conclusion is really
based on an aesthetic judgement, which need not be challenged so far as
it concerns only the songs in Hungarian. But the comparison with other
non-Hungarian versions has been made without the linguistic knowledge
to appreciate them at the same level and without the detailed under-
standing of the place of these rival versions in the cultures to which
they belong.
The corresponding weakness of Professor Megas' argument, from the
Greek side, is no less easy to perceive. The dogmatism of his final com-
ment is forced on him by the 'historical-geographical' assumption re-
iterated in the first:
All attempts so far to establish the view of 'polygenesis' for the

origin of the song of the walled-up wife lack stability, insofar as we
are dealing with a poetic rendition of a folk tale (paradosi), whose
central theme in the variants of all the peoples of SE Europe is single
and for this reason must have a single origin. This t>rigin, for the
reasons set out, must be located on Greek soil and in the early Byzan-
tine period. (Megas, 1971, p. 190) 2
The question is not so much whether all these songs have a single
origin but whether, if they did, the modern versions have been derived
from it by a process of lineal descent. A less one-sided examination of
oral tradition suggests that the interaction of variants and their relation
to other songs in the linguistic tradition as well as to cultural factors
render it naive to suppose that a single traceable cause has resulted in
the distribution of these versions about the Balkans, or that 'diffusion'
has taken place in only one direction.
Another important fact is that this wide 'diffusion' is not confined
to narrative details or 'motifs'. It is not uncommon to find identical
structural patterns recurring in cultures quite remote from one another.
Of the two songs which follow, the first is a Greek song lamenting the
fate of a loved one in exile, the second is part of an oral poem composed
by a Polynesian poet for a friend:
(1) Tivd oov aretXco, %eve fxov9 n va oov irpoftodloco;

Nd oretXco /XT?XO, oenerai, KVSGIVL,
va oreiXoj iioonoorckpvXo m kneivo
va oreiXco KQV TCL baupva JJLOV a' era
118
Diffusion beyond Greece
TCL d&KpVCL (JLOV 'POL K(WT€pd KCU KCLiyOVV
TLva aov oretXco, %kve JJLOV, T'L va oov
(Passow, 1860, p. 247)
What can I send you, my exiled one, how can I keep you
company?
If I send an apple, it will rot, a quince, it will shrivel,
if I send a muscat grape, that too will dry out,
even should I send my tears on a fine kerchief,
my tears are burning hot and would burn the kerchief.
What can I send you, my exiled one, how can I keep you
company?
(2) If I give a mat it will rot,
If I give cloth it will be torn,
The poem is bad, yet take it,
That it be to thee boat and house. . .
(Finnegan, 1977, p. 204)
Allowing for the disadvantages of translation we can see atommon
structural pattern employed by both poets - not in precisely the same
way, but arguably for a very similar reason, to dramatise the love or
respect of the singer for the person addressed through contrast with
the inadequacy of conventional gifts to express his feelings. The device
is both formal and spontaneous (in that it seems to evoke a genuine and
personal emotion); but what is most conspicuous about parallels of this
kind is that neither the pattern itself nor the idea it expresses seems
important or striking enough to merit 'diffusion', even where this is
conceivable.
Similarities between traditions in imagery and even wording are also
as deserving of study as the similarities between the motifs of tales. The
minor role of the expression would seem to rule out diffusion as the
cause of similarity between the Greek,
Ba*>' aorjideuia neraXa juaXajuarewec \6tipes (Megas, 1961, p. 488)
He put on silver horseshoes and nails of gold
and the Scottish,

The horse Fair Annet rode upon,
He amblit like the wind;
Wi siller he was shod before
Wi burninggowd behind. (Child, 1957, No. 73)
119
The songs as myth
And in the same way the ending of songs in Greek tradition where two
lovers die and a cypress and lemon grow out of the graves of each and
intertwine has a significant counterpart in the British tradition where
the rose and briar fulfil a comparable role. This is not sufficiently im-
portant to the story in either case to be considered as a 'motif, and the
chances of diffusion having played a part seem slight. Rather this
example suggests that the imagination of singers in more than one cul-
ture may respond to a given situation in parallel ways, and that some
analogy may exist between the requirements of expression characteris-
tic of different traditions.
C. THE BALLAD THE BRIDGE OF ARTA'

This is one of the best known of all Greek narrative songs, and versions
of it have been collected from all parts of the Greek-speaking world, as
well as from Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania and Hungary. As a
result of the song's popularity and wide distribution it has been a sub-
ject for studies of 'diffusion' for close on a hundred years. Scholars
have been unable to reach agreement, however, on the song's country
of origin (although the majority opinion favours Greece) or, if the song
is indigenous to Greece, on which of the regional variants is closest to
the original.
The broad outlines of the story are these. A master-builder, with a
varying number of craftsmen and apprentices, is engaged on a building.
In all of the Greek versions this is a bridge, although elsewhere in the
Balkans it may be a castle or a monastery. What the masons build by
day, however, falls down by night, and the master-builder is in despair
until it is revealed to him by a supernatural agent that the bridge will
not stand firm unless a human sacrifice is built into the foundations. In
most of the Greek versions it is spelt out to him that the sacrifice must
be his own wife, although the selection of the victim (always the
master-builder's wife) may be made in a number of ways. The master-
builder sends for his wife who, to his chagrin, comes all too quickly to
the site. In most of the Greek versions the wife is tricked into descending
into the foundations, usually on the pretext of recovering a ring which
the master-builder has accidentally dropped, and once she is there the
masons begin to immure her. As she is being walled up the woman
vainly appeals to her husband's sense of pity, then curses the bridge,
often lamenting the fact that she is the last of three sisters to die in this
way. The master-builder reminds her that she has a brother or son still
120
The ballad 'The Bridge of Arta'
living who will one day have to cross the bridge and so persuades her to
revoke her curse and bless the bridge instead.
No less than sixteen 'historical-geographical' studies of this ballad
are summarised and discussed by Megas (1971), whose own approach
shows little advance upon that of his predecessors. The essential weak-
ness in all these arguments is the assumption that certain variants of the
song must be derived from others (according to varying sets of criteria)
and that, depending on the criteria selected, the evolution of the song
through a series of variant-types can be traced. The truth is, however,
that every oral variant is of equal validity, and has an equal claim to be
regarded as 'original' (cf. Lord, 1960, pp. 99-123). The song does not
evolve according to a mysterious Darwinian principle, beyond the con-
trol of individual singers, but is created anew every time it is sung, the
resulting version being determined by the capabilities of each singer and
his free artistic choice within the narrow structural conventions of his
tradition.
Once these premises are granted, the question 'Which is the original
version?' loses most of its meaning, to be replaced by the question
'What is the myth expressed?' Since it is in the nature of myth to
undergo certain transformations between one culture and another,
there is no reason to insist that the myth expressed is precisely the same
in all the languages and cultures in which the song is found. There may
be significant, and consistent, differences between the myth as expres-
sed by the Bulgarian, Hungarian and Greek ballads, and this would be
a proof not of historical diffusion but of cultural adaptation. This is
perhaps why 'The Bridge of Arta' so often seems native to the region
and people whose versions are best known to each commentator.
Speaking now only of the Greek versions of the ballad, there are two
important features which give a clue to the nature of the myth expres-
sed. The first is the name given to the bridge in different versions. The
most common of these is the Bridge of Arta, although other local names
are sometimes substituted, such as the Bridge of Adana in Cappadocia
and of Larisa in Thessaly, and the improbable location 'on the shore' in
the islands of Evia and the Sporades. Otherwise the bridge is not geo-
graphically located but instead is given a mythical significance. The next
most common name after the 'Bridge of Arta' is the mythical 'Bridge of
Hair' (77?C Tpixac TO yiapvpi), and there may be a similar mythical
intent in the Cypriot and Asia Minor versions which place the bridge
'Down at the edge of the world' (Megas, 1971, pp. 92-3). 3
Scholars following the methods of the 'historical-geographical'
121
The songs as myth
school have devoted much attention to the real monuments mentioned
in the song: according to Baud-Bovy the Bridge of Adana is the oldest
monument referred to, and therefore the song must have originated in
Cappadocia with the building of that bridge in the reign of the Emperor
Justinian (Baud-Bovy, 1936, p. 170); while Megas on statistical grounds
attaches the song to the bridge of Arta, although that bridge was almost
certainly not built until some centuries after the time when he believes
the song originated.
Such theories are only credible if one believes that the song relates a
historical fact associated with the building of one of these bridges. But
the ease with which the song evidently attaches itself to any local
monument of sufficient importance (by far the greatest number of
'Arta' variants come from the Greek mainland, although not from Arta
itself) is shown by the predominance of unusually imposing monuments
in the song (the bridges of Arta and Adana in Greek versions, the castle
of Shkoder (Skutari) in Albanian, etc.) and by the large number of such
monuments with which it has become associated throughout the Bal-
kans. Since the song is not historical there is no need to believe that any
of the actual monuments named is an essential part of the myth.
With the 'Bridge of Hair* we are on quite different ground. In our
attempt to isolate the mythical core of the song, we are justified in re-
writing the name of any real bridge as 'Once upon a time a bridge. . .'
The name Arta or Adana or Larisa would be introduced by singers in
order to add verisimilitude and a degree of local immediacy to a fic-
tional story, just as many realist novelists have introduced historical
events and even characters into their fictions in order to strengthen the
illusion of reality for their readers. But rewritten in the same way, tis
Trthas to yofyri becomes 'once upon a time a bridge of hair. . .'. Since
this is the only mythical description of the bridge, much greater impor-
tance must be attached to the 'Bridge of Hair' than might have been
expected from a statistical count of its occurrences (17.41 per cent
according to Megas, as against 33 per cent for 'Arta'), and this is further
borne out by its exceptionally wide distribution. 5
The mythical significance of the 'Bridge of Hair' is not hard to find.
In Greek popular usage the phrase is recorded as meaning figuratively
any exceedingly long-drawn out task, but the usage 'He crossed the
bridge of hair', meaning that someone has successfully negotiated great
difficulties or danger (Politis, N. G., 1901, pp. 621-2), suggests that no
distinction is to be drawn between the 'Bridge of Hair' (777c Tptx<K TO
and the 'Hair Bridge' (76 Tpixwo yeipvpi).6 The latter, accord-
122
The ballad 'The Bridge of Art a'
ing to a popular belief attested in many parts of Greece, connects the
world of the living with that of the dead:
In the underworld the souls have to cross a bridge, the Hair Bridge.
This is as slender as a hair and is most unsteady. Whatever soul is
unable to cross falls into the river which runs beneath and is lost.
(Politis, N. G., 1904,1, p. 612, No. 983).
And in a Thracian popular tradition this bridge is actually called the

'Bridge of Hair* as it is in the song:
In the mouth of the dead man they would put a coin for him to give
to the angel and cross the bridge. Whoever had been a just man
would easily cross the Bridge of Hair (rr?C TpixcTC TO yuxpvpi) and
whoever was a sinner would fall into the Touna. (Thrakika 11, 1939,
p. 197)
The reference to the river Touna, or Danube, which is frequently men-
tioned in versions of the song, further strengthens the link between this
tradition and 'The Bridge of Arta'.
It is possible that this belief and the myth on which the song is based
are connected with the Islamic Sirat which is described in the Marifet-
name as 'narrow as the edge of a sword' (Gill, 1953, p. 81) and in the
Mulla All Qari as 'finer than a hair and sharper than a sword' (Hughes,
1885, p. 595). According to the Islamic sources this bridge connects
the earth with Paradise, and while the righteous cross it in a moment,
the souls of the guilty fall off it into Hell which gapes below. This belief
was presumably known to the Turks and it would be interesting to
know whether there are Turkish songs or popular accounts in any way
comparable to the Greek.7
But the belief and its attendant myths are by no means confined to
Islamic culture. The idea that the other world is connected to this by
a bridge supernaturally difficult to cross is found in Celtic, Icelandic,
Indian, Indonesian, Melanesian, Eskimo and American Indian traditions
(Thompson, 1955-8, F 152). Against this background it would be quite
reasonable to suppose that the song 'The Bridge of Arta' is connected in
some way with myths concerning the passage from life to death.
The second main feature which supports this analysis of the song is
found in those versions where the master-builder's wife is persuaded to
go down into the foundations of the bridge, generally on the pretext
of recovering a ring. At this point the wife may call to her husband
123
The songs as myth
above to say that she has found nothing or he may reveal the ruse, tell-
ing her that he has the ring and never lost it; but by far the most telling
are those versions in which the wife, searching for the ring in the foun-
dations of the arch comes upon the apparently severed hand of a man
or monster, or discovers snakes and vipers knotted together. This des-
cription, when it occurs, is too consistent to be gratuitous, and it may
be supposed that those singers who included or added it did so with a
definite purpose. Descriptions of severed limbs and in particular the
formulaic evocation of snakes and vipers are a sure indication that the
world of the dead is being described. These images only make sense if
the bridge represents a crossing from this world to the next. By includ-
ing these details the singers were able to emphasise the supernatural
character of the bridge and incidentally, in doing so, to heighten the
dramatic effect: even before she is killed by the masons throwing down
rocks and lime on top of her, we know that the master-builder's wife
has already entered Hades, from which there is no return.
According to Megas this whole episode of the ring is an intrusion
from another song (in fact a series of songs or widely diverging variants),
in which a young man is enticed by a beautiful woman to go down a
well and recover a ring for her; but the woman turns out to be a spirit
and refuses to hold the rope for him to ascend. In many of these songs
too, the hero becomes aware of his fate by the discovery of knotted
snakes at the bottom of the well (Megas, 1971, pp. 113-19). There is
no reason, however, to believe that this theme was ever restricted to a
single form and to the context of the 'haunted well', and it is perfectly
in accord with the structural principles of the tradition that the theme,
with the roles of the protagonists inverted, should form an equally inte-
gral part of songs which tell the story of the 'Bridge of Hair'.
A final feature which tends to confirm this approach to the song is
the reason for which the dying wife is persuaded to revoke the curse
which she has put upon the bridge, and which often includes a specific
wish that travellers who attempt to cross the bridge should fall off. In
a number of versions the master-builder prevails upon her to take back
this curse and bless the bridge instead, by reminding her that she has a
brother or a son who will one day cross it. If the bridge is the perilous
hair bridge which the souls of the living must cross after death, then it
is easy to see why this argument might have such force.
124
The question of meaning
D. THE QUESTION OF MEANING
With the substitution of the question 'What is the myth expressed?' for
the diffusionist 'Which is the original version?' the emphasis in the fore-
going discussion was seen to shift from the diffusion of the ballad to
its meaning. But it will be noticed that I have not been able to give a
more conclusive answer to the latter question than to the former. The
truth is that the kind of answers to these questions expected by the
folklorists of the 'historical-geographical' school must always prove
elusive.
It will be helpful here to take account of the difference not only of
basic assumptions but of intention between these scholars and modern
structural anthropologists. The task of the diffusionist, according to
Stith Thompson, 'has not been unlike that of the student of Indo-
European languages who has worked out the theoretical Indo-European
form for a word'. Having first posited a primitive form for all the main
branches of the Indo-European family of languages, 'he arrives at a
hypothetical word which could serve as the common ancestor of them
all. This method of working back to primitive local forms and from
them to an ultimate archetype is applicable not only to language but
also to traditional narrative' (Thompson, 1946, p. 435). The structuralist
approach to 'traditional narrative' or myth was also directly inspired by
developments in the science of linguistics, but developments in quite a
different direction - away from seeking explanations for phenomena in
terms of simple cause and effect, towards the attempt to describe their
operation by means of more complex models (Levi-Strauss, 1968;
Chomsky, 1964, pp. 7-27).
When it comes to the analysis of myths or folk tales this difference
is perhaps most apparent, and fundamental, in the treatment of trans-
formations. For Aarne (in Thompson, 1946) and Thompson, the trans-
formations which a tale may undergo in transmission are like the gradual
corrosion of a mineral ore: by reversing the process the scientist may
recover the original untarnished metal. These scholars, like the linguistic
researchers to whom Thompson compared them, regarded the trans-
formations in folk tales as a diachronic progression separable from the
tale itself: thus, a series of accidents to which the tale is subjected
(Thompson, 1946, p. 436). Although Aarne even listed types of trans-
formation which tales characteristically undergo, the significance of
these was not noticed either by him or by Thompson. This is that, as
Dan Sperber recently put it,
125
The songs as myth
the differences between two versions are no less systematic than are
the similarities. In other words . . . the borrowing of a myth is not
simply a departure which, with time, arbitrarily becomes more dis-
tant from its model, but rather it is a set of rule-governed transfor-
mations. (Sperber, 1975, pp. 76-7)
Two possible consequences follow from Levi-Strauss' structural
analysis of myth. The question of meaning can be transferred to the
plane of metaphysics, where the true 'meaning of meaning' can be con-
templated (Paz, 1971, pp. 16, 19, 95-6); or one is forced to conclude,
with Sperber, that myths are not composed of signs which signify (as is
language) and therefore do not mean at all (Sperber, 1975, p. 83).
According to the second alternative, every interpretation of a myth is
merely a rearrangement of its constituent elements and must itself be
accounted as a version of the same myth in a subsequent interpretation.
As Sperber has said of symbolism, 'exegetical and psycho-analytical
attempts seem to obey a cultural plan - in appearance, to interpret
symbolism; in fact, to recreate it. For all keys to symbols are part of
symbolism itself (1975, p. 50). This was all but admitted by Levi-
Strauss when, in emphasising the need to consider all versions of the
Oedipus myth in order to interpret it, he wrote that 'our interpretation
may take into account the Freudian use' of the myth (my italics). The
difference between 'interpretation' and 'use' here is one of perspective
only. Levi-Strauss' own interpretation of the Oedipus myth, or, in his
own words, 'what it means' is this:
The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the
belief that mankind is autochthonous . . . to find a satisfactory tran-
sition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings
are actually born from the union of man and woman. (Levi-Strauss,
1968, p. 216)
This is no more a meaning and no less a rearrangement of the myth

itself than the 'Freudian use'. Levi-Strauss' structural analysis does not
tell us what myths mean but what they do, and this is the value of the
method. In the case of the Oedipus myth: 'Although experience contra-
dicts theory, social life validates cosmology by its similar structure.
Hence cosmology is true' (1968, p. 216).
In a similar manner Sperber in his analysis of symbolism does not
attempt to define the meaning of symbols so much as to describe the
'symbolic mechanism'. Sperber, if I have understood him correctly,
126
The question of meaning
maintains that symbols are conceptual representations which, having
failed to achieve their object, are not valid representations of anything,
but can still become the subject of further representations as the 'con-
ceptual mechanism' attempts to validate them. It would not then be
too wide of the mark to suggest that myth is a conceptual system in
which, again, the conceptual mechanism carries out its task of organis-
ing the data presented to it - data, however, consisting not of information
which has been understood and assimilated but of the conceptual repre-
sentations residual after the failure to understand and assimilate
(Sperber, 1975, pp. 110-13). Thus myths and their constituent symbols
have no meaning: symbols lack the signifying power of the signs that
make up language and other codes.
But Sperber's insistence that symbolism is not a semiological system
(as Levi-Strauss had maintained) perhaps does not pay sufficient atten-
tion to the fact that symbols behave like signs in everything except the
ability to signify. True, this is the most important characteristic of a
sign, that it stands unambiguously as a representation of something
else. But it follows from Sperber's analysis, as I understand it, that
myth is an attempt to organise symbols as if they were signs and that
the organisation is itself an attempt to give values to these supposed
'signs' - in other words to interpret them. If every new 'interpretation'
of a myth is merely another version of the myth, to be taken into
account in subsequent 'interpretations', then it would not be unreason-
able to suppose that each formulation of a myth is conversely an
attempt at its interpretation.
This would help to account for the curious fact that myths, although
without the real meaning of semiological systems, can in fact support a
multiplicity of possible meanings. Let us suppose that a myth, such as
that retold in the ballad 'The Bridge of Arta', comprises a systematic
arrangement of signs of which we do not know the meaning. The prob-
lem facing us is precisely that confronting the student of linguistics
coming upon a statement in an unknown language. As with linguistic
signs, the 'signs' of the myth are arbitrary, containing in themselves no
clue as to their meaning. But the student of linguistics knows that the
signs confronting him will have acquired specific meanings through use
in combination with other signs. To decipher his text, he must first
have a large enough sample of the language in front of him to be able
to detect how the signs are used in it. Now, if 'myth' is to be compared
to 'language' as a semiological system, what is the mythical analogy for
'languages'? Surely not 'myths', which would be closer to 'sentences'.
127
The songs as myth
The mythical equivalent for the individual language must be the mytho-
logy of a cultural tradition, and it is by comparing the usage of the
symbols in 'The Bridge of Arta' and in other myths of the same tradi-
tion that we can discover how the signs are used in this 'language', and
hence what they 'mean'.
Myth, if it is not a semiological system, functions exactly like one,
to the extent that within the mythology of one cultural tradition
symbols are employed with the same consistency as real signs, thus
acquiring specific associations which become their 'meanings' for the
people of that culture. An 'interpretation' of 'The Bridge of Arta'
ballads sung in Greece need not therefore be inconsistent with the view
that myths have no intrinsic meaning. The features which I noted in the
previous section as being significant and relating the ballad to myths
about the passage from life to death provide at best a partial interpre-
tation of the myth as formulated by Greeks, through the allusions in
the ballad to other parts of the same cultural tradition. Two further
points can now be made about that analysis. Firstly, that the symbols
regularly used in versions of the ballad (the bridge of hair, the snakes
and vipers) although devoid of intrinsic meaning, signify quite specific
things in modern Greek mythology - respectively the bridge to the
underworld and the underworld itself. And secondly, that these associa-
tions, linking the story of the walled-up wife to beliefs about the after-
life, are almost certainly restricted to the Greek ballads on the subject.
These particular allusions are precluded, or at least greatly reduced in
importance, in the other Balkan versions where the building is only
rarely a bridge. But there can be no doubt that other allusions of a dif-
ferent sort are made in each of these traditions, and could usefully be
contrasted with the Greek. It is by allusion, above all, that a myth is
given a place and a semblance of meaning in a cultural tradition, and
consequently it is in terms of such allusions that the transformations of
myth from one culture to another can most helpfully be understood.
E. 'MIKROKOSTANTINOS'
The meaning of this ballad (quoted in full on pp. 13-15) does not seem
to present a problem to those who sing it as part of the Anastenaria
ritual. According to them 'Little Constantine is none other than St
Constantine when he was young' (Mihail-Dede, 1973, p. 60), and 'This
song too shows that St Constantine rid the whole world of slavery'
(Megas, 1961, p. 481). It is all too easy to dismiss as naive the interpre-
128
'Mik rokostantinos'
tations of their myths by those who ought to know them best; so
before doing so let us clarify what is meant by this 'meaning'.
The interpretation would go something like this. 'Little Constantine'
is equivalent to 'St Constantine' as a traditional saint-martyr, the appa-
rently weak hero who vanquishes the big battalions by moral or super-
natural strength. The young saint is called away to war and, given that
he is a saint and that we know he is going to rid the world of slavery,
this departure for war must be counted as a 'positive' sign in the inter-
pretation: it must be a war on the side of the good, and his departure is
in line with Christ's teaching that whoever follows Him must be pre-
pared to abandon father and mother. But while Constantine is away
ridding the world of slavery this very evil is rife within his own family.
His mother reduces his wife to the level of a slave and sets her menial
tasks. The moral victory of the wife exactly parallels that of
Constantine over his enemies at war, as she accepts her fate with humi-
lity, accepting and fulfilling her role as a shepherd or as a monk (pas-
toral cares both). This is perhaps made deliberately explicit in the line,
included so far as I know only in versions sung by the Anastenarides,
in which the wife is forbidden to take her flocks to drink in the River
Jordan. She does so and it is at the site of the first Christian baptism
that she meets the victorious Constantine returning. Slavery has been
eliminated from the world, with the exception of the saint's own home.
The opposition which has been latent throughout the myth between
the values of blood relationship and of good and evil is resolved firmly
in favour of the latter, with Constantine making the most extreme sacri-
fice of family loyalty (killing his mother) in order to punish evil (the
imposition of slavery) in its most monstrous form (within the family).
This is of course nothing but a flight of fancy. And yet it is a legiti-
mate 'interpretation' of the whole myth which follows from the 'mean-
ing' ascribed to it by those who sing it. Not only is it legitimate, but it
could easily be set out in a structural diagram in which the constituent
elements of the myth are tabulated under the headings of 'freedom
(=good)/slavery (=evil)' and 'kinship/socio-religious order'. But for all
this there is clearly something wrong with it.
What is wrong with it is a failing to which even the most sophistica-
ted and objective methods of structural analysis are not immune - namely
that it assumes a value for certain 'signs' which (since the system is
quasi-semiological) automatically imparts values to other signs in the
system.8 The singer here has added two pieces of information to the
myth: that Little Constantine is to be identified with Saint
129
The songs as myth
Constantine, and that he 'rid the world of slavery'. Thus values are
given to the 'signs' or constituent elements of the myth 'Little
Constantine' and 'he rode off to war', which are not intrinsic either to
the elements themselves or to the structured sequence in which they
appear. In the attempt at interpretation these elements are arbitrarily
motivated, that is to say made into signs. The identifications are not
implicit in the text of the ballad, read as ordinary language, but are
external to it. As a result, the equations which have made the symbols
into signs have added new content to the myth, and this in turn must
alter its structure.
So what is really wrong with the 'meaning' given by the Anastenari-
des to their song is that it alters the structure of the myth - and this is
easily seen, in this particular case, not just by the gratuitous addition of
content it entails but equally by the fact that this 'meaning' is flatly
contradicted by a line often still included in the song. In some versions
sung by the Anastenarides Little Constantine is described:
l>ap uAl' Tioopyns Trr)8r)%e9 oav 'At KCOVOTCLVTIVOC;
(Mihail-Dede, 1973, p. 44)
Just like St George did he leap, just like St Constantine
Clearly he is not the saint of the same name, and hence the interpre-
tation requires this line to be ignored and ultimately, one would sup-
pose, dropped out altogether. So the 'meaning' is not a meaning at all,
but a new version of the myth in which certain simple structural trans-
formations have taken place.
The development and rearrangement of myths by the addition of
material designed to interpret them is one of the ways in which a cul-
ture makes its myths peculiarly its own. It also shows how myths are
rarely static, as each interpretative rearrangement requires in turn to be
interpreted. This is one kind of 'meaning' which a myth can have as part
of a cultural mythology - a meaning consciously brought to the myth
by those who repeat and reshape it. Such a meaning is not false (there
is no true meaning to be falsified) but there is nothing to limit the
number of possible meanings of this type which can be attributed to a
myth even in one culture. (The history of religious and ideological per-
secution aptly underscores the point.) These 'meanings' are conscious
attributions, and unstable. By contrast the associations, or allusions,
between the constituent elements of myths in the Greek song tradition
are unlikely to be conscious attempts at interpretation, but reveal a
systematic 'grammar' of their own, whose rules have been just as much
130
f
Mik rokostantinos'
internalised by the Greek peasant as those governing the everyday

language he speaks.
I wish to illustrate this briefly, using as an example two of the sym-
bols which commonly occur in versions of 'Mikrokostantinos'. First,
the name of the hero. It would be natural to question whether the mere
name Mikrokostantinos (Little Constantine) is really a symbol at all.
Here statistics can come to our aid, in identifying those mythical con-
texts in which the name seems to fulfil a structural role, without at the
same time prejudging the issue by 'interpreting' what this role may be.
No special importance is to be attached to Kostantinos as a name, since
in a sample of several thousand songs and variants9 the same name is
given to the hero or a major character 199 times in 45 separate con-
texts. Mikrokostantinos, on the other hand, is found only 56 times and
in 20 contexts, almost all of which are shared with Kostantinos. At this
point it might be expected that Mikrokostantinos, as a qualified form of
the name with about a quarter of the occurrences of Kostantinos, would
occur considerably less often than Kostantinos in those contexts which
are common to both. There are, however, five contexts in which, out
of a significant number of occurrences, the name Mikrokostantinos
occurs as often as Kostantinos or more frequently. In these five cases
there can be no doubt that the name of the hero operates as a symbol,
an effective constituent element in the structure of the myth, and it is
by observing the function of the symbol in each of these contexts that
we can determine how and what it has come to 'signify'.
The first of these contexts is defined by the themes of departure,
return and recognition and includes the song 'Mikrokostantinos' and
other ballads which share these themes. Another is a song in which
three heroes, of whom two are 'little' and the third is 'brave' or 'great',
are robbed of their womenfolk by the enemy and ride out to recover
them (Passow, 1860, p. 92; Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 48-50). The 'little'
hero may be either successful or unsuccessful. The third is the song of
the haunted well, where the youngest of several brothers descends into
a well and cannot escape (Jeannaraki, 1876, pp. 116-17). The evil spirit
guarding the well is sometimes disguised as a beautiful woman, who
beguiles the inexperienced hero into descending so as to win her favour,
and then leaves him there (Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 14-15). The fourth
tells how a rejected and slighted lover is reduced to the use of magic in
the attempt to sleep with his mistress (Laografia 2, 1910, pp. 675-7).
This story, of which the most famous example has been given the title
'Harzanis and Lioyenniti', may unfold in a number of ways, although
131
The songs as myth
the end is usually tragic, but the emphasis on the 'little' hero is not
confined to Kostantinos, and we find other names compounded with
the adjective mikro in the same way. The final context is that of the
hero, often alternatively called Porfyris, who allows himself to be
tightly bound, either by minions of the king, who fears his prodigious
strength and audacity, or by a rival who does so to elope with his wife.
In either case the hero frees himself and exacts a bloody vengeance
(Laografia 2, 1910, pp. 81-2; Sakellarios, 1868, pp. 3-8).
What is common to all of these is not merely the idea of smallness.
The hero who departs, returns and is recognised by his wife is deprived
of a sexual relationship by going away to war but recovers it on his
return. The Mikro Vlahopoulo, in the second context, is deprived of a
sexual (or family) relationship by a hostile raid on his home and recovers
(or attemps to recover) it by going to war. The hero of the haunted well
is sexually tempted and betrayed by magical means. The hero of the
'Harzanis' songs is sexually humiliated and betrays his mistress by magi-
cal means. And the hero of the 'Porfyris' songs allows himself to be
humiliated and recovers his wife by magical strength.
The consistency with which the name Mikrokostantinos (and other
compounds of mikro- with a name too) is associated with sexual defi-
ciency or disadvantage, either balanced by an act of corresponding over-
assertion or leading straight to the hero's doom, admirably illustrates
how, through usage, this symbol has acquired the status of a 'sign', and
the different ways in which this sign can be used in the 'language' of
Greek popular mythology.
Returning to the ballad 'Mikrokostantinos', the knowledge that this
is what the name 'means' enables us to read the opening lines of the
song in a new way:
*O KaxjTadivos
liuipb dbv elx V wwva dou, jjunpb d' dppa|3cj^tdf et,
ixiKpb dbv fipre (irivvfxa va TOT? orb oeye pi.
(Megas, 1961, p. 488,11. 1-3)
Kostantinos the Little, Little Kostantinos
was little in his mother's arms, and little when she betrothed him,
and little when a summons came to him to go to war.
Giving to the name the sign-value which it has acquired by usage, we

may rewrite the lines as follows: 'The hero of the song [is] sexually
disadvantaged, [because] (1) his mother has kept him close, (2) she has
132
'Mi k ro k ostan tinos'
arranged a marriage for him [too?] young, and (3) [capping the first
two with the force of the final proposition of the "rule of three"] this
already unstable set of circumstances is crucially aggravated by the
hero's enforced departure.'
The second symbol whose associations I wish to trace is that of the
cutting of hair. In the song which serves as our starting point, we are
told that, as soon as Kostantinos has gone, the evil mother-in-law takes
the wife,
and TO x£p' Tr\v dp7ra£e, orb intepimepvo rr\v
lid orb onaiivi drj ga&toe KL cwrpuceta d?7 %vovpi$et
(Megas, 1961, p. 489,11. 18-19)
seized her by the hand and took her to the barber,
made her sit upon a stool and cut her hair like a man's
In these lines and in the description which follows, where the wife is
given a man's clothes and a man's job (as a shepherd or monk), there is
a clear implication that the wife has in some sense been made to change
her sex. This is implicit in the meaning of the words as ordinary
language, but is never explained in the song and leaves behind it a sense
of something mysterious - of something, in fact, symbolic.
In the song tradition as a whole the symbol is associated with a
limited number of contexts, and an examination of these will enable
us to define what, in the tradition, the symbol has come to signify.
Aside from songs of departure and return, the symbol is used in three
kinds of context. First of all, as an accompaniment to the deliberate
disguise of either a man or woman as a member of the opposite sex (the
verb xyrizo may refer equally to the cropping of a woman's hair to dis-
guise her as a man, as to the shaving of a man's beard). The symbol is
found in versions of the 'Harzanis' song, where the humiliated lover dis-
guises himself as a woman to gain access to his mistress' bedroom
(Laografta 5, 1915, pp. 195-8), in a version of the 'Castle of Beauty'
where a Turk among the besiegers of the heavily defended castle dis-
guises himself as a pregnant woman and so is allowed to enter (Haviaras,
1910, pp. 573-4), and in a series of songs where a woman tries to join
a group of men in an attempt to escape from the world of the dead and
offers to cut off the hair which, they warn her, will betray them to
Haros, the keeper of the lower world (Passow, 1860, pp. 300-2).
The association with changing sex is now evident enough, but what
is to be understood by 'changing sex'? This will become clearer as we
133
The songs as myth
examine the other two types of context for the cutting of hair. In two
songs where a priest, falling in love, decides to cut off the long hair and
beard which in the Orthodox Church are symbolic of his calling, it is
clear that the symbol signifies a change of role (Tarsouli, 1944, p. 110,
No. 154) and this meaning also holds good for the unusual song discus-
sed on p. 32 in which Kostantinos, released at last from slavery on
being recognised by his wife, has his excess hair cut off to restore him
to his former status (Louloudopoulos, 1903, No. 50). Two other con-
texts mediate between this and the final type, in which the cutting of
hair by a woman is a sign of grief. In the first of these a wife is grossly
ill-treated by her husband and the cutting of her hair implies both grief
and protest at an enforced change of role, both social and sexual (Lao-
grafia 4, 1913, p. 106). That all three meanings are closely related is
clear from a version of this song in which a well-wisher advises the
bullied wife to cut off her hair to use as a rope to help her in her tasks.
She refuses in the following terms:
Zch> K6I//CO TCL fiaXkux fiov, rr\v npcorr] JJLOV OTOXTJ,
vorepa n TTJ # e \ c o orbv KOOJIO rr\ fan?;
(Baud-Bovy, 1935, pp. 202-3)
If I cut off my hair, my first adornment,
afterwards what will be the use of living in the world?
And the same mediation is found in versions of the song, usually en-
titled 'The Wife who Came to GrieP, in which a husband squanders his
wife's dowry so that she is obliged to join him in his man's tasks in
order that both may survive [Laografia 9, 1926, p. 187). Here too the
cutting of hair combines the values of 'expression of grief, 'change of
social role' and 'change of sexual role'.
The symbol of hair-cutting may then point to one or more of three
quite specific 'meanings', whose significance is further glossed by the
allusions set up among them. Once again the 'meaning' is not arbitrary.
Although it is not as satisfactory as the one-to-one equation of a sign,
the range of meanings is firmly restricted within the tradition and the
symbol acquires a further function in its ability to draw these meanings
together. When the singer of 'Mikrokostantinos' tells us that the evil
mother-in-law cuts the girl's hair, he is consciously or unconsciously
alluding to other types of song where the same symbol occurs and by
this 'shorthand' method conveys a good deal of information which aids
our understanding of the song. 'Cutting of hair' means here that
134
'Mikrokostantinos'
Kostantinos' wife is forced (1) to change her sexual role (to dress and
act like a man), (2) to change her social role (to leave the house where,
as a wife, she has a protected position, and to work for a living) and (3)
to make a formal show of grief at parting from her husband.
If the associations of every constituent element of the song were
listed it would be possible to 'rewrite' the entire ballad according to the
'meanings' acquired by its symbols in the Greek tradition. In this sense,
I believe, it is possible to interpret what ballads 'mean' in a given cul-
tural context. But the theoretical question of whether these are 'real'
meanings must be left unanswered. Within a tradition the symbols of a
myth certainly behave like signs and acquire specific values. But do not
these values, too, belong to the symbolic world? It begins to look as if
symbols, even when they behave as signs, only signify other symbols.
The last word belongs to Sperber:
It is with symbols as it is with spirits. If spirits speak by causing

tables to turn, they don't - for all that - have much to say. If sym-
bols mean, what they mean is almost always banal. The existence of
spirits and the luxuriance of symbols are more fascinating than are
their feeble messages about the weather. (1975, p. 6)
135
8. One Tradition or Several?
The demotic tradition which we have so far been considering was defined
in the first chapter as a body of folk songs sharing a specific and consis-
tent structure and function. But this tradition, although made up of a
great variety of songs, is not synonymous with the whole corpus of
Greek folk poetry. There is no lack of material in Greek which falls
within the more general definitions of folk poetry, or oral tradition,
and yet whose structure and function are significantly, different from
those of the songs we have been discussing up till now. To regard these
as belonging to separate traditions is not, I believe, to impose an arbit-
rary system of classification. It would be naive to suppose that folk
poetry need be uniform, any more than literary poetry; and it is pos-
sible to see how, despite a degree of assimilation, traditions of different
function and structure are decisively separated within one culture.
Once it is recognised that folk poetry need not be homogeneous but
may consist of differently motivated traditions, the kind of diachronic
analysis which proved to be impracticable within a tradition again
becomes possible. That is to say, any attempt to date individual songs
and account for their derivation in terms of cause and effect is doomed
to failure because of the complex system of interrelations which give
the demotic tradition its unity and internal consistency, but a tradition
as a whole, and the relation between the traditions, may still be treated
historically, as was attempted for the demotic tradition in Chapter 5.
A. RITUAL AND FUNCTIONAL SONGS

These are songs whose structure is determined by a specific function,
whether religious or secular, and, despite the many differences among
them, this fact in itself enables us to draw a distinction between such
functionally determined songs and those of the demotic tradition.
136
Ritual and functional songs
(i) Quete songs

These form an important sub-group of songs which fulfil a ritual func-
tion. Their content, like that of other ritual songs, is determined by the
occasion to be celebrated and its accompanying religious beliefs, but a
further factor is that they are always performed by groups of children
whose role, whatever the ritual or festival celebrated, is to importune
householders and passers-by with demands for money: a common fea-
ture of these songs therefore is the demand for money, often accom-
panied by playful threats.
This type of song existed in Greece in antiquity and two examples
are quoted by Athenaeus (VIII 359d-36Od). Functionally there is no
difference between the 'Crow* and 'Swallow' songs which he quotes and
the kalanda sung by children today at most of the major church festi-
vals. But the antiquity of this tradition, even in points of detail, is affir-
med by the survival of one ritual seemingly intact from antiquity until
the present day. This is the celebration of the arrival of the first swal-
low, described by Athenaeus, 'There is a sort of collecting the Rhodians
call Playing the Swallow {x^XtSoviêiu), which occurs in the month of
Boedromion [March]. The term "swallowing" {xeXtdovifrlP) is used
because of the custom of singing in refrain' - and he quotes the song.1
The modern ritual is described by Kyriakidis: These delightful little
songs are sung by children and principally by young schoolboys on
1 March going from door to door, holding in their hands a likeness of
a swallow'(1965, p. 56).
Since the theme of the song, its structure and method of perfor-
mance are dictated by the same ritual, it is not altogether surprising
that there are close textual similarities between the swallow song
quoted by Athenaeus and modern 'helidonismata'} No less remarkable
are the differences between the helidontsmata and songs of the demotic
tradition. The ancient song begins with the proclamation of the swal-
low's arrival,
rfKde, fjXOe xeXl&COV the swallow has come, has come,

and of the good weather it is supposed to bring with it. The singers then
demand a share of last year's harvest, supporting their claims with play-
ful threats, and the song ends,
tivoiy' dvoiye rav dvpav x^XvbbvC
ov yap yepovres eoixev, akXa naifi'ia.
137
One tradition or several ?
open, open the door to the swallow;

we are not old men, but children.
These themes are also found in modern versions, of which the most
striking has an identical opening line to the ancient (Passow, 1860, pp.
227-8), and these are often combined with a reference to the children's
teacher, who beats them, and to his teaching:
"£lpLO€P d daondkos, The teacher made it a rule,

Kai 6 0«k nov raSojfce, and so did God who gave us them,
N' aryopaowiiev dxrcb, that we should buy for eight,
Nd -noSk&iiev 5e/coxrcb, and sell for eighteen,
Nd Kepbdivoiixev tpuWTa, and make a profit of thirty,
Auupopa fieyaka TTOPTCL big profits always
(Passow, 1860, pp. 227-8,11. 26-31)
Quaint though it sounds, this exarsis of the profit-motive can be seen to
play its part in a ritual celebrating the return of spring and the promise
of gain to come at harvest-time.
A song fulfilling an identical function is also known from the middle
ages, if the testimony of Canon Benedict of St Peter's in Rome is to be
trusted. The canon's liber politicus, written in the twelfth century, con-
tains the text of a quite song about the swallow, which, he tells us, was
sung at the time by the Greek schoolchildren of Rome (Maas, 1912).
This text, written in Latin characters, is extremely garbled and presents
many problems of interpretation. Some of the difficulties have been
resolved by Baud-Bovy by ingenious references to modern texts (1946),
and the success of these efforts confirms that the twelfth-century song
belongs to the same tradition as its modern counterpart. The song
begins with a greeting to the master of the house, followed later by an
invocation to March and to the swallow. The swallow is addressed as
'counsellor of angels' and the final part of the song is full of religious
fervour and Byzantine patriotism which are external to the ritual. But
references to the schoolmaster are similar to those of the modern songs,
and the meaningless line,
itevre nevTe, dWa nevre, Sena nevre

five [and] five, another five, fifteen,
suggest that the profit-motive was also present in the medieval version.
The excessively garbled nature of this text, which cannot be fully
accounted for by normal lapses of memory or by misreading or mis-
138
hearing of a source, points to another unusual characteristic of the heli-

donismata not shared by other quite songs, but conspicuous in ritual
songs where the ritual is of great antiquity. If the modern versions of
the helidonisma are looked at carefully they too seem suspiciously
garbled. All of them have an incantatory quality which seems to depend
on the rhythm and sound of words rather than on their meaning. Struc-
ture in the quite songs is generally linear and there are no architectonic
patterns, but in the helidonismata the linear development is loose to
the point of being inconsequential. Consider the words given to the
swallow in this, the best known of the modern versions:
Qakaooav enepaoa, Thalassan eperasa,

TTJP orepuw 8ev |eoxaaa, tin steridn den xeschasa,
Ku/zara HOP eaxtaa, kymata kan eschisa,
"Ea7retpa, KOPOiirjoa, espira, konbmisa,
"Eîrya /a' cuprJKa criJKa, eflga ki afika sika,
Kai araopop nai drHJLoiPLToap, ke stavron ke thimonitsan,
K' f\p6a rcopa K ' rjjbpa yiTpa, k' irtha tora k' fvra fitra,
K' rjvpa xbpra, andpTa, ]3Xtrpa, k' fvra horta, sparta, vlitra,
BXtrpa, ]3Xirpa, yiTpa, <p£rpa. vlitra, vlitra, fitra, fitra.
(Passow, 1860, pp. 227-8,11. 11-19)
I crossed the sea, / I did not forget dry land, / I even cut through the
waves, / I sowed, I saved, / / departed and left behind figs, I and a cross
and a haystack, / and now I've come and found green shoots, I and
found green vegetables, broom and greens, I greens, greens, green
shoots, green shoots.
The meaning of the swallow's words can be disentangled, but it seems

most unlikely that whoever was responsible for putting it in this form
did so to make this meaning clear. The meaning is contained in the
statements, 'I sowed, saved, and left at harvest-time', 'I crossed the
sea', and 'I have returned and found green shoots'. An obvious com-
ment would be that they are in the wrong order in the song, but the
song, with its theme of the seasons, is itself cyclical: the order of ideas
is only very loosely fixed. The lines in italics show a preoccupation
with the pure sound of words to which their approximately relevant
meaning seems incidental. Sika (figs) seems to have been chosen from
all the possible symbols for the end of summer for its assonance with
afika (I left behind), but this is not all. The same song continues with
139
One tradition or several?
an address to the lady of the house: Si ksdi ikokyra, which seems in-
nocuous enough until set alongside a variant of the same line in another
version: Siko si ka// kyra (get up, good lady of the house) (Passow,
1860, p. 229). The chain of sound-associations could be extended, and
the conclusion to be drawn is that considerable portions of these songs
have been generated through play on the sound of words which are
only loosely connected by their sense. Given a tradition of this sort, in
which the elaboration of nonsense plays a part and whose structure
resembles a cyclical series of incantations, one need not be too sur-
prised at the chaotic and inconsequential series of lines recorded by
Canon Benedict in the twelfth century.
The separation between this functionally determined tradition and
that of the folk songs we discussed previously is clear to see. The dif-
ference of structure between the helidonismata and the demotic tradi-
tion is further emphasised by the persistence in the former of a four-
stress metre, alternating between trochaics and iambics and between
lines of seven and eight syllables. This metre, which may have been the
direct ancestor of the more widespread political verse of folk song
(Baud-Bovy, 1973; and p. 76 above) is also found in Byzantine popular
acclamations (Maas, 1912) as well as, in rhymed form, in love songs,
children's songs and lullabies of the modern demotic tradition. The use
of this metre in the helidonismata does not itself distinguish these songs
from the demotic tradition, but the exclusion of all other metres of
folk poetry in these songs must be suggestive, especially when the
twelfth-century version seems to have been based on this same metre,
and the line-length in all later helidonismata is almost identical to that
of the opening of the ancient song.
Although the case of the helidonismata demonstrates the antiquity
of the tradition of quite songs in Greece, those which continue to be
sung at Christian festivals do not generally have the same unusual fea-
tures. The kdlanda (carols) sung on these occasions are recorded in col-
lections of folk songs in the common popular metres and are relatively
stereotyped in form, although some ingenuity seems to have been
lavished on the praises of householders and ways of asking for gifts
(Petropoulos, 1959, pp. 3-13; 21-34). Many of these carols which have
been recorded from oral tradition were formerly written, and there are
instances of kalanda which preserve the mixed formal and popular
language of ecclesiastical chapbooks despite their oral transmission
(Petropoulos, 1959, p. 8, No. 30). These chapbooks would have been
read in schools (which under Byzantine and Ottoman rule would have
140
been church schools) and the songs learnt by heart to be sung on the
appropriate occasions (Petropoulos, 1959, p. x). Needless to say the
liturgical theme of any Christian song in oral tradition is likely to derive
ultimately from a written source, and the contrast between the oral
demotic tradition and that of songs with a religious content is aptly
pointed in the kalanda for St Basil's day (New Year). The saint, newly
arrived from Caesarea, is questioned about his journey and asked to
sing a song. St Basil sanctimoniously replies that the Teacher from
whom he comes is not a teacher of songs and offers the alphabet
instead (Petropoulos, 1959, pp. 4-6). Similarly in the Byzantine and
modern helidonismata it is not impossible that the Mr Thwackum who
taught the caroUers the theory of financial gain also taught them the
song itself from written songsheets.
(ii) The 'Virgin's Lament'
Not all ritual songs are quite songs and none presents more complex
problems than the popular laments of the Virgin Mary, which combine
features of functionally determined ritual songs with the narrative tech-
niques and structure of secular ballads. In common with some of the
kalanda, these songs do not belong to a purely oral tradition, although
the oral element is certainly predominant (Alexiou, 1975, p. 135;
Bouvier, 1976, pp. 49-51). To complicate matters further there was
also a well-established literary tradition of laments on the same theme,
of which the sixth-century kontakion of Romanos, 'Mary at the Cross',
is the earliest datable example (Alexiou, 1974, p. 63; 1975, pp. 113-
16). The modern oral laments have several themes in common with
these literary versions, and of course the characters and background of
the crucifixion, against which the substance of the laments is projected,
all derive more or less directly from written sources in the Gospels and
the teaching of the Church. For this reason it is impossible fully to
separate the oral from the literary and popular religious traditions
which together have played a part in shaping the laments. On the other
hand, there is evidence of demotic formula-types associated with the
theme from as early as the fifteenth century (Bouvier, 1976, pp. 67-
71), and there is no doubt that the laments are constructed according
to the patterns of structure and of thought with which we are familiar
from the demotic tradition.
Many versions of the lament begin with a brief invocation, frequently
the well-worn demotic formula,
141
Sifyzepa fiavpoq ovpavcx;, oruiepa juaupr? juepa

(Baud-Bovy, 1935, pp. 51-2)
Today the sky is black, today is a black (unhappy) day
This may be followed by the scene of Jesus' betrayal and capture and
then, almost invariably, the news is brought to Mary his mother. The
Virgin immediately falls to the ground in a dead faint - in some versions
the action is punctuated by repeated swoons - and has to be revived.
Gathering her women friends and relatives together she then sets out,
and passes on the way the gypsy blacksmith who has forged the nails
for the Cross. He had been asked by the Jews to make three nails, but
from excess of zeal or simply by mistake has made five, adding the
gruesome instruction that the fifth ('and fatal') nail is destined for
Jesus' heart. (Here also a familiar demotic formula-type is used.) The
Virgin curses the gypsy to eternal vagrancy and goes to Pilate's court-
yard. At first she fails to recognise her son soaked in blood with the
crown of thorns on his head, but John takes her aside and gently points
him out. The formal question and answer between Mary and John
(often erroneously called the Baptist in the songs) follows a pattern
frequently found in the demotic tradition:
-'At ixov Tvcwvri ITpoSpo/xe /cat PannoTa TOV JLOV IIOV,

firiv eldeq fxe TO reavo piov, /cat ok TO Sda/caAo oov;
- Aev exco OTOfia va oov neb, yXcbooa va oov fxCKrjocj,
8ev exaj xeponaXaixo, bvavd oov TO 5et£co.
B\€7rw eaeivo TO yvfjpo, TO Tiapaitoveiievo,
onoi) <popec TTOVK&HIOO OTO alixa fiowioiievo;
'Eneivo Vat TO T&KVO OOV /cat iiev% 6 5da/caX6^ JJLOV.
(Baud-Bovy, 1935, pp. 51-2)
'My Saint John the Baptist and baptist of my son,
by any chance have you seen my child, your teacher?'
'I have no mouth to tell you, no tongue to address you,
I have no outstretched hand to show him to you.
Do you see that man there, naked and suffering,
who wears a shirt all soaked in blood?
That man is your child and my teacher.'
There is no transition from here to the scene at the foot of the Cross,
and the impression is often given that the Crucifixion actually takes
place in Pilate's courtyard. The Virgin approaches the cross and addres-
ses her son,
142
Aev ixov lAiXaStTrcuMia /xou, Sev jiov fiCkaq iratfiinov;

Won't you speak to me, my little child, won't you speak to me, my
child?
In some versions she continues by expressing a wish to die since life will
now be unbearable for her, for which Jesus reprimands her, 'If you die
the whole world will follow suit/ Otherwise he replies that nothing he
can say now will lessen her grief, but goes on cryptically to announce
the Resurrection: at midnight on Easter Saturday the church bells will
ring. In these laments the Resurrection is seen not as a real event of
momentous significance (as in the learned tradition) but as a recurring
ritual. The effect of anachronisms such as the church bells ringing is to
confer ritual status on the death and Resurrection of Christ rather than
to treat it realistically as a historical event. The mourners in the Good
Friday procession are not commemorating a distant historical happen-
ing but lamenting an annual death.
In other versions Jesus tells his mother to go home and to prepare
the funeral meal. This injunction in the song has given rise to the popu-
lar belief that the ritual of the funeral feast which is still practised when
someone dies in the villages, first began in this way; but as often hap-
pens in such cases the ritual is a good deal older than the myth by
which it is explained. The modern parigoria (funeral feast) is in fact a
survival from pre-Christian times (Alexiou, 197'4, pp. 71-2; Bouvier,
1976, pp. 257-8, 283-4).
The final episode of the lament, which is found in a small number of
versions, tells how the obscure personage Ayia Kali (St Kali, or Beauti-
ful) passes by the door as the funeral meal is in progress and taunts
Mary for sitting down to eat while her son is on the Cross. The Virgin,
who is portrayed throughout as a Greek village mother, immediately
curses the busybody and the episode and the whole song close with the
curious wish that this saint should never be venerated or have a church
built in her name except in the most remote and inhospitable places, on
the mountains or in the middle of the sea. The significance of this epi-
sode has never been satisfactorily explained but there is little doubt
that Ayia Kali is the direct descendant of a pre-Christian deity (Alexiou,
1974, pp. 75-6; Bouvier, 1976, pp. 276-84).
Although the form of ritual with which these songs have been asso-
ciated in modern times is not always the same, it is significant that they
are never sung on any occasion other than Good Friday. To do so,
according to several women singers, would be impious and even dan-
gerous. There are signs that the popular ritual of the Good Friday
143
One tradition or several ?
lament has been modified through the influence of the Church even in
quite recent times, and this probably accounts for some of the diversity
both in practice and in the texts of the accompanying songs. In its tra-
ditional form the Good Friday ritual closely resembled that still obser-
ved on the death of a real person. There are accounts of the laments of
the Virgin being sung by women at an all-night wake, gathered round a
likeness of Christ's tomb covered with spring flowers, and also on Good
Friday evening when this is carried in procession round the parish. The
grief of the women as they sing the lament in chorus is very real: as
they lament they become the Virgin and the women at the foot of the
Cross. It is as if, in the words of one, 'Christ were my own child'
(Alexiou, 1974, p. 77; 1975, p. 135; Bouvier, 1976, pp. 28-46, 52-5).
This ritual, with its echoes of ancient Greek cults, in particular that
of Adonis, seems to be chiefly responsible for the laments of the Virgin
that we know today. It would be a simplification to suggest that this
Good Friday ritual, which is not part of the official liturgy, was wholly
a pagan survival and that the modern laments are of pre-Christian origin.
As we have seen, the songs have been shaped over a considerable period
of time during which several influences have been brought to bear. But
the evident survival of pagan elements in the songs, together with the
ultimately pagan origin of the ritual to which they belong, indicates
that the tradition of such songs has been a very long one. The ritual
itself has changed far more than that of the helidonisma, as it has gra-
dually been brought closer to official liturgical practice, and as a result
the songs have been exposed to a greater degree of compromise with
other traditions. It would be possible to imagine a time, if this part of
the Good Friday ritual were to disappear altogether, when the laments
might lose their ritual function entirely and be sung for entertainment.
And it would be a likely prediction, if this were ever to happen, that
they would quickly become indistinguishable from other songs of the
demotic tradition, adopting new themes and having a wider range of
variants than their present ritual context allows.
(in) 'Pagan' songs

The ancient origin of a song in oral tradition can never conclusively be
proved, even if it contains features which seem ultimately to be of pagan
derivation. But the survival of ritual practices and observances over a
long period is often difficult to deny, particularly in Greece where clas-
sical and Hellenistic evidence can be compared with modern. Certain
144
practices and beliefs, such as those surrounding death and burial, un-
doubtedly represent an unbroken although not entirely static tradition
(Alexiou, 1974, passim), and it may well be true more generally that
rituals of this kind are more resistant to change than other cultural
traits. Songs which are merely associated with a seemingly ancient
ritual, such as the 'Mikrokostantinos' ballads in the Anastenaria, cannot
be assigned to such an ancient tradition, since these songs are more
integrally related to their variants which elsewhere fulfil a range of dif-
ferent functions than to one particular ritual. But songs whose text not
only reflects a given ritual but is determined by the actions to be per-
formed, and whose performance is restricted to the ritual context, can
and indeed must be assigned to a separate tradition, in which transmis-
sion is governed by the extreme conservatism and emphasis on exact
repetition which is part of the nature of ritual.
We have already seen that the helidonismata and elements of the
Virgin's lament show signs of such a long and conservative transmission,
and this was confirmed in both cases by evidence of long continuity in
the rituals to which they belong. To these must now be added two songs
which serve a similar function in local rituals of seemingly pagan con-
tent. The song and ritual of Lidinos in a single village on the island of
Aegina, and of Zafiris in the Zagori region of Epiros both celebrate
seasonal rituals. The former, lamenting the 'death' of summer, is cele-
brated in September; the latter, whose theme seems to be the resurrec-
tion of spring, takes place in early May. The song of Lidinos, in regular
trochaic octosyllables with only a few rhymes, has a formal archaic
character which immediately distinguishes it from the more personal
laments of the demotic tradition, while that of Zafiris (at least in its
present form) is not stylistically distinct from it. But what is most signi-
ficant in both cases is that the laments are addressed to an effigy
(Lidinos) or to one of the participants pretending to be dead; in both
cases it is understood (and stated in the song) that the death which is
now lamented will be followed immediately afterwards by a resurrec-
tion. This represents an important structural difference between these
songs and the laments of the demotic tradition in which the return of
the dead is never promised, and this difference is directly brought about
by the difference in function between the two traditions.
Once again, this separation between traditions cannot be taken as
absolute. The Zafiris song, in particular, includes formulas and imagery
from demotic laments and other lyrical songs, and neither contains
linguistic archaisms. Nothing can be said concerning the antiquity of
145
the texts as we now know them, but the undoubted antiquity of the
ritual in each case suggests that they come of a tradition which may be
much older than that of other folk songs in Greek (Kyriakidis, 1965,
pp. 59-61; Alexiou, 1974, pp. 78-82, including English translations of
the songs).
(iv) Work songs
No kind of folk song is more closely bound up with the function it

serves than the songs chanted by groups of men or women as a rhythmi-
cal accompaniment to a set task. The visible proof of this is the rapid
disappearance of these songs as soon as the kind of work they accom-
pany is superseded, as has tended to happen in Europe and America in
the last hundred years. Work songs, strictly defined, are not just songs
sung by people at work. There are several Greek songs recorded which
were sung by women at the loom or by shepherds out on the mountains
with their sheep, which refer to these occupations in a lyrical manner
but which are not therefore work songs (Politis, N. G., 1914, pp. 241-
3; Petropoulos, 1959, pp. 174-80). The distinction of the work song
proper is that the rhythm and the sound of the words are determined
by the nature of the work on hand and actually assist the singers in
their task. For this reason they are rarely solo performances, but are
chanted by a group, usually with a leader who may give the time and
lead off with a solo line which is then taken up by the others. The
waulking songs of the Hebrides, British sea-shanties and the songs of
American negro work gangs all belong to this type.
It has sometimes been supposed that because of its highly functional
nature and consequent lack of development in other directions, this
type of song represents the earliest and most primitive form of folk
song, from which all others have gradually evolved (Kyriakidis, 1965,
p. 52; Lloyd, 1975, p. 270). But the study of music in supposedly
'primitive' or undeveloped societies suggests that this is not in fact the
case. In such societies the range of different types of song has been
found to be surprisingly wide, and as for their work songs, 'Most of the
so-called working-songs are . . . intended for amusement; only a few
show any direct connexion with the rhythm of labour' (Schneider,
1957, p. 38).
Only certain types of work are likely to generate work songs in the
strict sense, and while it is possible that these songs might remain un-
changed over a very long period, this conservatism probably reflects no
146
more than an unchanging pattern of work. Although work songs can be

assigned to a tradition, it is a tradition which has almost no existence
apart from the activity to which it belongs. Far from being primitive
survivals, work songs may suddenly and unexpectedly spring into being
whenever they are required by working conditions, and as suddenly
disappear again.
Greek folk poetry, or such as has been recorded, is not rich in work
songs. At least two songs sung by women to accompany the action of
grinding flour by handmill are known from different parts of Greece,
and bear a striking resemblance in their opening words to a similarly
functional song recorded from antiquity:
Ancient: <5Xei, iivXa, dXei (Plutarch, Moralia, 157E)

Grind, mill, grind
Modern: 'AXe0e, fivXo you, aXede

(Politis, N. G., 1914, p. 241, No. 234)
Grind, my mill, grind
'AXeae, fibXe ji\ aXeoe oirapiv KCLI npiBapiv

(Petropoulos, 1959, p. 173)
Grind, my mill, grind wheat and barley
It would be rash to deduce from this evidence a continuous song tradi-
tion from antiquity to the present day, although one need not doubt
that the grinding of flour has always been done in much the same way.
The dependence of the song on its function is such that, if the custom
of singing an accompaniment to the milling of flour had at some time
fallen into disuse, and then been resumed after a long interval, these
almost identical words could quite naturally have been readopted for
the purpose, even though no oral tradition had preserved them in the
meantime.
With other work songs in Greek we have no information about the
possible length of tradition involved. Kyriakidis quotes a fire-lighting
song from the Mani and a rowing song from Karpathos in the Dodeca-
nese which admirably highlight the functional character of these songs
(1965, pp. 52-5). Songs such as these must have had a long currency
but this is not a necessary characteristic of work songs. The tradition of
British sea-shanties lasted for little more than fifty years (Lloyd, 1975,
pp. 271-8), while that of Greek milling songs may scarcely have
changed over two millenia.
147
B. RHYMING DISTICHS
It is a general though not an invariable rule that songs of the demotic
tradition do not use rhyme. The single consistent exception is the dis-
tich known variously as mantinada (Crete, Dodecanese), patindda
(Hios), tshidttisma (Cyprus), amanes (AsiaMinor), kotsaki (Cyclades) or,
generally, lianotrdgoudo (Kyriakidis, 1947). These couplets, which are
sung and improvised today in all parts of the Greek-speaking world,
share most of the characteristics of the demotic tradition, and it would
be pedantic to assign them to a separate tradition merely on account of
their rhyme. The rhymes are, however, an important distinguishing
feature, since it is rhyme that gives the punch to the epigrammatic
statement, and largely determines the structure of what precedes it.
Although the balancing and patterning of half-lines is retained in these
couplets, the overall structure of only four half-lines limits the extent
of these patterns and throws greater emphasis on the balance or
antithesis between the two rhyming lines.
These distichs are especially popular today in Crete, the Dodecanese
and Cyprus, where the art of spontaneous improvisation in this form is
highly prized and (in Cyrpus) even organised into contests. The subjects
suitable for expression in these couplets are almost limitless. The praise
of a girl's beauty, innuendo directed at another person, direct insult
(especially in the competitions), obscenity, and even political satire are
all commonly found in these topical, social songs. A more lugubrious
note is sounded in the amanedes of Asia Minor which, whether in Greek
or Turkish, lament the futility and transience of earthly life with a
passionate world-weariness that seems to have been common to all the
inhabitants of the cosmopolitan cities of the late Ottoman Empire; and
the couplet form is also frequently used by the women in the villages
who improvise laments to the dead.
These distichs, with their integral use of rhyme, can be distinguished
from the rest of the demotic tradition by their structure, as the ritual
and work songs we have been discussing were distinguished by their
function. Although in the case of distichs the distinction is not suffi-
cient for them to be assigned to a tradition of their own, an understand-
ing of the origin and development of their peculiar structure is essential
in dealing with the rhymed epic-style songs of the 'historical tradition'
which will be the subject of the next chapter.
Rhyme was never systematically used by the ancient Greeks, or in
148
Rhyming distichs
any of the literary forms which flourished under the Byzantine Empire.
Its appearance in the Greek world came late, and through the medium
of western European literature (Baud-Bovy, 1936, pp. 129-30; 1956;
Dimaras, 1974, p. 72). The use of rhyme therefore spread from those
areas under French or Italian rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, and from the literary poet who had read foreign originals to the
non-literate villagers or poorer townspeople who could only have heard
him recite. By the early nineteenth century, we know from Fauriel,
rhyme was general in the songs of the towns and islands (1824, p. cxx),
the most common of which appear to have been distichs (1825, p. 267),
but was unknown on the rural mainland. The association of rhyme with
the 'Franks', or westerners, and with literature, both equally effete in
the eyes of the rural mainlander, was preserved, even in FauriePs day,
in the contemptuous dismissal of rhymed songs by the highland Greeks
as proof of sexual deviancy (see p. 104 above).
It has been suggested that the couplet form predates the use of
rhyme, and examples have been quoted of two-line epigrams from
ancient and Byzantine sources (Soyter, 1921, pp. 386-91). Of course,
the occasional sense-unit of exactly two lines is quite likely to occur in
any non-rhymed poetry, but cannot be regarded as significant unless it
is systematically employed. The adoption of rhyme or assonance as a
regular principle makes this possible, and there is in fact no systematic
use of the couplet form in Greek before the introduction of rhyme. The
earliest datable manuscripts in which rhyme appears are of the fifteenth
century, and by 1500 at the latest the rhymed couplet had become
standardised in Crete (Morgan, 1960, pp. 78-81). 5 It is quite possible
that these early rhymed poems were composed to be sung (Morgan,
1960, pp. 75-5, 77-8), but no less certain that men like the Cretan
Sahlikis and the Rhodian Georgillas (Politis, L., 1973, pp. 40-1, 39)
had a first-hand knowledge of literature and were themselves educated,
writing poets.
Two manuscripts which include distichs in popular style have been
dated to the second half of the fifteenth and the beginning of the six-
teenth centuries respectively (Hesseling and Pernot, 1913; Pernot,
1931). The first, entitled Erotopaignia by its editors, contains only
twenty-three distichs, most of them unrhymed. The second has a
greater number of distichs, of which some are unrhymed, others rhymed,
and others again employ assonance or half-rhyme which their editor
considered to be 'embryonic' (Pernot, 1931, p. 12). Both of these
manuscripts contain material in the style of the demotic tradition, and
149
Baud-Bovy has noted interesting examples of non-rhymed couplets and

larger groupings in the Erotopaignia which seem to have been norma-
lised as rhyming couplets in modern oral tradition (Baud-Bovy, 1936,
pp. 372-5); but as with other early rhyming poems in Greek there can
be little doubt that both collections were the work of writing poets.
Many of the poems are even in the form of love letters.
The evidence of these two manuscripts and of the early works of the
Cretan literary renaissance seems to indicate that the strict couplet
form became stabilised after a period of experiment in which the mutual
dependence of rhyme and the couplet form was discovered by trial and
error. The impetus for these experiments must have been the influence
of western literature, predominantly French and Italian, and their ver-
nacular character can also, in part at least, be attributed to the same
source. In Italy, Dante Alighieri had espoused the cause of the verna-
cular in his De Vulgari Eloquentia (shortly after 1300) and throughout
western Europe in the late middle ages there had developed a taste for
refined poetry in the vernacular, as opposed to Latin. Sahlikis,
Georgillas and the anonymous writers of the love poems would naturally
enough, as men of the western Renaissance, have turned to their own
vulgar tongue for inspiration. And it is equally natural that as a result
their poems should both resemble folk songs and in turn have exerted
an important influence upon the latter's subsequent development. It
was in this way, with the recitation or even singing of written poems
among which the new form of the rhyming distich quickly became
stabilised, that rhyme and the distich entered into Greek folk poetry.
150
9. The Historical Tradition
There is a tendency, among admirers of folk poetry, to equate the 'folk'

or 'true folk' with what is 'good'. As a result, understandably little
attention is paid to types of folk poetry which from an aesthetic point
of view are more often mediocre or bad. One may chuckle at the lack
of dexterity shown by the English broadside balladist in the lines,
A handkerchief she said she tyed
About his head, and that they tryed;
The sexton they did speak unto
That he the grave would then undo (Child, 1957, No. 272)
or at the incongruity of the Cypriot farmer, who on his own admission
could neither read nor write, including in a song of Diyenis the line,
Tpcupovv TO TCL j3i/3\ta /me, Se> elvai -napaixudi
(Notopoulos, 1959, p. 17 and gramophone record)
It's written in our books, it's not a folk tale
These absurdities, together with an irritating exactitude about dates
and a tendency to moralise, are found in certain Greek songs, as in
British broadside ballads, and a number of prominent scholars, such as
Francis Child for the British and Stilpon Kyriakidis for the Greek, have
in effect refused these songs recognition as part of the folk traditions
in which they are found (Child, letter to Grundtvig, in Hustvedt, 1930,
p. 254; Kyriakidis, 1965, pp. 107-11). But the mere existence (and
persistence) of these incongruous and irritating tendencies in such a
wealth of material as the British broadside and the Greek rimes, as they
are sometimes called, deserves attention. Both types of song belong un-
questionably to folk poetry, if that term is to have any meaning at all.
Yet there is an immediately perceptible difference between the broad-
side 'Suffolk Miracle' and, say, 'Lord Randal' or 'Edward', which is
151
The historical tradition
oddly difficult to define. Similarly, Greek scholars have generally
recognised that the rhymed and often topical narrative poems of Crete
and Cyprus seem not to be quite 'folk' on internal grounds (Petropoulos,
1954, p. 374), but, naturally enough, have been unable to suggest what
else they might be. With the Greek rimes SL number of important ques-
tions come into being which are also posed by the broadside tradition
in Britain. What, for example, is the status of a tradition of 'folk' or
popular poetry which makes some use of writing, is topical and sensa-
tional and yet uses the forms and some of the cliches of 'traditional'
poetry? Does this kind of song represent an intermediate stage between
the oral and the written? Why is it inferior to 'traditional' folk poetry?
And how is it to be defined in relation to the 'traditional' poetry of
the demotic tradition?
A. THE POET
It is often said that the traditional folk poetry is by its nature anony-
mous. As it happens this holds true for the Greek songs of the demotic
tradition as well as for traditional British balladry. In neither type of
song is an author ever alluded to nor is there any other kind of evidence
which would enable us to name a song's originator. But it is not true of
oral traditions in general. Ruth Finnegan cites examples of poets whose
names are known to us and who are nonetheless both oral and tradi-
tional, and points out that the supposed anonymity of a poem 'is some-
times a mere function of our ignorance (rather than that of the people
themselves) or of the theoretical assumptions of researchers who felt it
inappropriate with oral art to enquire about the names of the poets'
(1977, p. 202). A. L. Lloyd has gone further, with the assertion that
the identity of the lower-class singer has tended to be ignored for social
reasons, and so that 'the famous anonymity of folk song is, in the main,
an economic and social accident' (1975, p. 24).
The true reason for the anonymity of the singer in the Greek demotic
tradition is simpler. In an important sense he is not anonymous at all:
his audience all know him personally and he has no need to recommend
himself to them. A good singer in a Greek village is respected as a mem-
ber of the community, one of themselves to whom people will listen.
He is in no sense a professional, although bank notes will quite often be
slapped on his forehead or stuffed down his shirt front, and it is a mark
of honour to be seen to appreciate a performer in this way. What is
more, like the Yugoslav bards (some of whose names we know only
152
The poet
because they happened to be recorded by Parry and Lord) he will never
claim that the song is his own invention; nor would it occur to his
audience that a new performance or version of a well-known song could
be the creation of the performer. Although we know that the singer
does play an important part in shaping the song, recomposing it in a
way which may diverge considerably from those of other singers, we
also saw (in Chapter 4) that neither he nor his audience recognises the
importance of this fact. There is no reason therefore for the singer's
name to be especially remembered. The 'anonymity' of this tradition
consists merely in the fact that the singer never draws attention to him-
self in the song - and that for the simple reason that he has no cause to
do so.
If a singer mentions himself in his song, either begging indulgence,
and perhaps money, for his performance or claiming that the song is his
own composition, then he is not addressing his audience on an equal
footing. He may be a courtly poet-musician enjoying some social stand-
ing and protection in an aristocratic house or he may be a blind beggar
at a fair. Whatever the case his relationship with his audience depends
on his being able to entertain them. In this sense he is a professional,1
and in marked contrast to the singer of demotic songs, whose talents
may increase his social standing among his peers but who is not depen-
dent upon them for social recognition. The professional poet, whether
bard or beggar, stands in a different relation to his audience and this
affects the content of his songs. First of all he must entertain and, as an
outsider, he will not do this by merely repeating songs which his
audience already know and would rather hear sung by 'one of their
own'. His surest course is therefore to avoid the themes of traditional
song and compose or adapt pieces of topical and current interest. And
secondly, he must make sure that he is adequately rewarded. To this
end he may flatter his audience and their locality, invoke God's blessing
on them, and commend himself to them as deserving his reward.2
The status of this kind of poet is liable to be precarious. In the
middle ages patronage guaranteed many minstrels some stability and
these conditions are probably reflected in the high quality, for example,
of much trouvere and troubadour poetry. And in present-day Cyprus
the pyitaris enjoys considerable popularity, especially in the rural dis-
tricts (Petropoulos, 1954). But the profession is more at the mercy of
circumstances than most. These poets have never gained a secure posi-
tion on the mainland of Greece, although we hear of the temporary
success of a few who were adopted by kleftic chiefs to sing of their
153
campaigns during the War of Independence, and some rimes recorded
at the time are probably their work. Otherwise the minstrel without a
regular audience and without the benefits of patronage became a target
for contempt and abuse, and was obliged, at any artistic sacrifice, to
ingratiate himself with his audience.
An early Greek example of the contempt in which the cheapjack
professional could be held is the remark of Bishop Arethas of Caesarea
in the tenth century, quoted on p. 77, and wrongly supposed by many
scholars to refer to singers of the demotic tradition. The remark may be
compared to that of an English bishop, John Earle, writing some seven
hundred years later, who described
a man and a fiddle out of case: and he in worse case than his fiddle.
One that rubs two sticks together (as the Indians strike fire) and rubs
a poor living out of it: Partly from this, and partly from your charity,
which is more in the hearing, then giving him, For he sells nothing
dearer then to be gone: He is just so many strings above a beggar,
though he have but two: and yet he begs too, only not in the down-
r i g h t F o r G o d ' s s a k e , b u t w i t h a shrugging G o d bless y o u . . . A g o o d
feast shall draw him five miles by the nose and you shall track him
again by the scent. His other pilgrimages are fairs, and good houses
where his devotion is great to the Christmas: and no man loves good
times better. (Quoted in Woodfill, 1953, p. 128)
Fauriel claimed that the only professional itinerant singers in Greece
were beggars, and since begging was an ignoble occupation for a healthy
man, he further inferred that all Greek beggars were blind (1824, p. xc).
On this evidence Fauriel considered that many topical, historical songs
were the work of these blind beggars, or 'rhapsodes' as he preferred to
call them, after the ancient tradition. The notion that this class of per-
former is exclusively made up of the handicapped and decrepit, for
whom no other employment can be found, has a specious attractive-
ness,3 and might help to account for the hack quality of so many of the
rimes. But in reality almost anyone could become a singer-composer of
this kind. The Homeric scholar James Notopoulos described the Cretan
lyraris as one who 'is usually poor, old, disabled and goes from one vil-
lage to the other singing his verses during religious festivals' (1952, p.
238). But Professor D. Petropoulos, who accompanied Notopoulos on a
collecting trip to Crete and Cyprus the following year, described singers
of greater vigour if not youth, and pointed to the high esteem in which
they are held, especially in Cyprus (1954).
154
The Cretan rimadori
There is considerable variety among professional singers, and the

only characteristics which seem generally to be shared in Greece and
Cyprus are poverty, talent and a very elementary education. If he was
slightly more affluent or had a wealthy patron, and had been better
educated, such a singer probably became a writer in the 'art' tradition
of his time. Given even less schooling and a position in a traditional
community, there would have been no need for his repertoire to extend
beyond the more conservative demotic tradition. In addition to their
professional status, only one other generalisation can really be made
about the singer-composers of the rimes: that they were semi-educated,
with just enough education to aspire to personal composition and to
have acquired the taste for novelty, but falling well short of the sophis-
tication demanded by readers of written ('art') literature.
B. 'DASKALOYANNIS' AND THE SONGS OF THE

CRETAN RIMADORI
In 1770 the Cretans of Sfakia, in the mountainous south-west of the
island, rose against their Ottoman rulers. The rebellion seems largely to
have been prompted by promises of Russian aid, and when this failed to
materialise it became evident that the Sfakiots, under the leadership of
Daskaloyannis, were bound to be beaten. To avoid greater losses
Daskaloyannis accepted a treacherous invitation from the Pasha to go
to Kastro (modern Iraklion) to discuss terms, and was flayed alive for
his pains. The story is told in an epic of 1,034 lines, in rhyming coup-
lets, which was written down shortly afterwards from the dictation of
one Barba-Pantzelios, a cheese-maker of Sfakia. In an epilogue to the
poem, the amanuensis describes the recitation:
'E700 'Avayvdoorris TOV liana 6 2??î?<r TOV ?jK0p8i\ri,

aw a nov oas 677717 #77*02 i±e ypdnna, fie KOVTLXL.
'Kpxivrfea Kal rd 'ypatpa XLJCLKL Ka&e fie pa
K ' ek 77? Uanovpa uddovfiovv OTO Ttdfiepf dnb nepa.
Efc 777 Uanovpa nd&ovfiovv, JULT* fifiovv ymXovdfioq,
/cat fie TOV iindpixna-X\avT$e\u), dnov *TOV Tvponoiioq.
'E7C0 eKpd&iovv TO xapTi /a eapadiovv Kal rq [xnkva,
KL eneivos iiovbrpfdTOve nai Ta ypaxpa eva-eva.
Td /zd#ia TOV SaKpvôvoi, odv TO d
bines nov TO SrjyaTOve TOV AdonaXov TO
*H yibiiCkvd TOV KO&yeTax, ovWoyvaoixoi TOV ntdvov
155
KOX navpovs divaoTevanoiK TCL ooj&uca TOV fiyavov.

TpayooSixra nov TCL *\eye9 yiaT' eivai pqiadopoq,
yean £x e * K t &nob TO 0eo TO TTXLCL iieyako dc
T)aa 8ev el8e ^/cdrexe, /a boa elde 8ev TCL
yuin exet Kai &viir\TUi6 7rXiorep' amb Kiaveva.
(Laourdas, 1947, pp. 48-9,11. 991-1002; 1009-12)
I, Sifis, the Lector, son of the priest Skordilis,
have told you the tale, in letters and in writing.
I began to write it a little every day
while I was living at Papoura beyond Givert.
I was living at Papoura minding milk-sheep,
and with me was Barba-Pantzelios the cheese-maker.
It was I who held the paper and held the pen,
while he told the story and I wrote down every word.
His eyes were full of tears as he related it,
as he told me of Daskaloyannis' pitiable state.
His voice would break off, he would be lost in thought,
and heave up unhappy sighs from the bottom of his heart. . .
He told it me in song, because he is a rimadoros,
because he has of all God's gifts the greatest.
Whatever he hadn't seen himself he knew about, and what he had
he doesn't forget,
because his memory is better than any man's.
The humble occupations of both men should be noticed. Barba-
Pantzelios himself was presumably illiterate, and Sifis would only have
learnt to write because his father was a priest. The recording of the
poem was probably a laborious business, if it was done 'a little every
day' and the fact that it was done at all under these conditions is a sure
indication that with 'Daskaloyannis' we are dealing with something very
different from the songs of the demotic tradition. Barba-Pantzelios,
unlike the Yugoslav epic singers to whom Notopoulos compared him
(1952), is known to us by name not through an accident of collecting
but because he wished to be. In the recording of 'Daskaloyannis' in
1786 we have the first hint of a sense of copyright, of authorship as the
creation of something new which belongs to the creator, a sense sum-
med up by the Greek expression pnevmatiki idioktisia (spiritual
property). Not only that, but Sifis' praise of Barba-Pantzelios' talents is
a form of discreet advertisement for his version of the story as the most
authentic and emotionally affecting.
156
The Cretan rimadori
There are other features which the song of Daskaloyannis shares
with shorter and more recent compositions by rimadori.4 These are the
pious beginning and the statement, in the first person, of the intention
of singing about a particular person or event; the generally bald, often
pedantic narration of events; and, in the epilogue, the insistence on ver-
sifying the date on which they took place:
Srd x^Xta e^proKoowi crydonKOVTa e£e eroq,
'nob rob AaoKakov rbv naipb Se/cdife xpbvm aperoq
(Laourdas, 1947, p. 49,11. 1017-18)
In the year seventeen hundred and eighty six,
sixteen years this year from the time of Daskaloyannis. . .
As one might expect, the language and style of 'Daskaloyannis' are
significantly different from those of the demotic tradition; and yet we
have the evidence of Sifis that 'Daskaloyannis' was orally composed.
There is no reason to believe that the demotic tradition ever ran to
songs of this length, and the kind of formulaic composition which we
analysed in the second chapter would clearly have been of little help
to Barba-Pantzelios. In 'Daskaloyannis' we encounter oral composition
of a different kind.
The key to this is to be found in the invariable use by Cretan rima-
dori of the rhymed couplet. In 'Daskaloyannis' the use of rhyme is far
more than a stylistic device. Every couplet is a completely self-contained
statement, ending with a full stop or with the possibility of one. The
poem is in effect nothing but a series of distichs. The importance of
this is clear when we examine its structure, and the ways in which these
self-contained distichs are linked to form a narrative.
Ilicu>ei, fiovXtovei JJHA ypcupf) neinrei rr\ orb

77? vd oriKGjoei rriv Tovpnui anob TX\V KprjT' andvu),
77? vd orjKcoaet TrivTovpnid a-nob rd rpia KdoTprj
yi\ &a TOO na/iei nbXefio KL oiiXa &a TCL xaXaoei.
(Laourdas, 1947, p. 19,11. 119-22)
He writes and seals a letter and sends it to the Sultan:
either he takes his Turks away and leaves Crete alone,
either he takes his Turks away and gives up the three Castles
or [Daskaloyannis] will make war on him and lay everything waste.
UbXetiov eorjKcooaoi TOOL Tovpnovs vd $vy(b%ov
OTaupb vd npoonvvrioovoL, yf? oiiXovq vd TOOL OKOTCOOOV.
157
Uokefiov torjKcooaot, Keyaki TO' cupeSvdq oov,
vd ndpovoi TOOL TOTTOV? OOV, vd hdo%ov TCL navbvd oov.
(Laourdas, 1947, p. 20,11. 131-4)
They have risen in arms to bring the Turks to heel,
to make them worship the cross and if not, to kill them all.
They have risen in arms, O [Sultan] our master,
to take from you your lands and drive your children into exile.
Each couplet consists of two main statements, contained in the first
half of the line, and two subsidiary statements, including the rhyme-
words, in the second half-line. In the first case, the sense of the first
couplet has been carried over and elaborated in the second by the repe-
tition of the second main statement of the first couplet as the first main
statement of the second. And in the second case two couplets have
been devoted to the theme of rising up in arms by the restatement, in
the second, of the first main statement of the first.
This is not the most inevitable way of building up a sustained narra-
tive, and would certainly not have been necessary had the epic been
composed at leisure, on the page. But more interesting still is the fact
that these at first sight curious structural devices are precisely those
used in the traditional genre of improvising mantinddes. Both structures
are used to connect this modern series of mantinddes, in which the
repeated main statement is underlinded:
'AXdpyo /x' e&pioave dyia vd oov £exdaco,

naXkid vd 0dco ixnaXoodid, napd vd TO Xoytdocj.
KaXXtd vd 0da? /ZTraXcoflcd V6 'vav ndkb natyvLcbrn,
napd vd TTJV amapvrfiGi TT\V anptfii] oov vv6rr\.
KaXXtd vd 0dco inrdkcodui, KaXXid vd 0dco ixnaka,
napd vd r' dpvrfiCd Trore rd iiddta oov rd jiavpa.
(Lioudaki, 1936, p. 200, No. 115)
They've sent me into exile far away, so that I'll forget about you.
Fd sooner be shot than think of it.
Fd sooner be shot by a good marksman,
than renounce your precious youth.
I'd sooner be shot, I'd sooner be shot dead,
than ever give up those black eyes of yours.
In the last chapter we saw that the art of improvising mantinddes is

highly prized in Crete, and no one who has heard a dialogue built up
158
The Cretan rimadori
between two skilled improvisors could doubt that a narrative of over a

thousand lines could be composed in this way, given the talent and the
urge to do so. While mantinddes are still improvised in large numbers,
many are also traditional, and a particularly well-turned mantindda is
valued and remembered for several generations. The rhymes serve a
mnemonic function, and many Cretans today remember dozens, perhaps
even hundreds of these couplets which they have heard. Some even
bear a surprising resemblance to couplets written down in the late
fifteenth century (Baud-Bovy, 1936, pp. 342, 270-9).
If the poem is seen as a series of self-contained mantinades, the
singer's task of remembering his composition will not then seem impos-
sibly demanding, as he can omit or add distichs at will, and all he need
remember is what he wishes to say and the pair of rhyme-words he used
last time, to reproduce a passably similar version. That such composi-
tions were actually transmitted in this way can be demonstrated in
practice. In Barba-Pantzelios' version of 'Daskaloyannis', the hero's
escort to the Pasha is described:
*Eoepvaoip rove noXKoi, neôi KOX JL-dnXfjSec,

orb Spbfio ribv enpbreive vd yipovv ptrfarff?5ec.
(Laourdas, 1947, p. 37, 11. 691-2)
Many people dragged him along the way, men on foot and horse-
men,
and as they went he asked them if they would plead his cause.
And in a nineteenth-century version, in which the whole story has been

compressed into only thirty-eight lines, we find the same idea and the
same unusual rhyme-words, although the rest of the distich has been
completely re-formed:
To Aaonapov rpiyvpiocw oapcwranevr'

KL avrb TO KdKOpftiKO efiave pirfarfTjSe?:
(Jeannaraki, 1876, pp. 24-5, 11. 17-18)
Daskaloyannis was surrounded by forty-five horsemen,
and he, ill-fated man, set them to plead his cause.
In another version the departure from the written text is greater, but
the same point in the story is told with the same thyme-sound, and one
of the rhyme-words is again a Turkish loan-word of slightly unusual
character:
159
inpcK rove \a\ovp

K ' exovv Kai ra onafita ySvfiva KCLL <l>aivowT'
(Academy of Athens, 1963, pp. 142-3,11. 35-6
Right in front of him were gossiping forty gaolers,
and their swords were drawn and you could see the blades.
Part at least of the inspiration for this practice of composing and

memorising texts in the form of rhyming couplets must derive from the
popularity of Erotokritos and other literary works written in this form
in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The same motive, as well as
the same method, for relatively accurate transmission is surely respon-
sible for the preservation of several of these renaissance works in con-
temporary oral tradition. Not only are sections of Erotokritos still
performed in Crete as folk songs, but many Cretans whose formal edu-
cation has been minimal and who have certainly never read the text of
the poem can recall several thousands of lines from it with considerable
accuracy. Nor is this phenomenon confined to Erotokritos: sections of
the sixteenth-century tragedy Erofili have been preserved by oral tra-
dition, in a mixture of rhyming couplets and prose summary, as has the
pastoral poem Voskopoula, which was written about 1600 (Doulyerakis,
1956). These works clearly entered the oral tradition through being
sung or recited, and it was natural enough that the more ambitious of
an emergent class of professional composers should have imitated their
technique and style, as well as aspiring, by as accurate a means as pos-
sible, to confer on their own oral compositions the permanence of the
written text.
Perhaps because of this there has always been a clear separation in
Crete between the rimes, with their ill-assimilated borrowings from
literature and persistent hankerings after the written word, and the
demotic tradition. The latter has survived in Crete only in the conserva-
tive rizitika tradition of the mountainous west of the island, and in the
art of extempore composition in mantinades. In the rizitika the uni-
versally popular rhyme is unknown; and as the professional composi-
tions of rimadori have courted length and a discursive style, these tra-
ditional songs have become extremely brief and lyrically concentrated.
The average length of a rizitiko song is only about ten lines.
These two traditions of folk poetry, clearly separable in their main
characteristics, have flourished side by side in Crete for something like
four hundred years. They have not done so in mutual isolation, and the
signs of a long period of coexistence are easy to see. Although there
160
The Cretan rimadori
seems never to have been much professional influence on the rizitika,

the rimadori were content to adopt demotic formulas and use them in
their own way. Returning to 'Daskaloyannis', for instance, we find
traditional formulas depicting defiance against Turkish authority, which
are more familiar from the songs of the mainland klefts that were being
sung at about this time, than from the Cretan rizitika; and in any case,
in the text of 'Daskaloyannis' they have quite a different structural
role, functioning as little more than cliches.But in the course of trans-
mission 'Daskaloyannis' has become more like a song of the demotic
tradition, with greater use of demotic formula systems. In this version
I have underlined the half-lines which belong to formula systems com-
monly used in the demotic tradition:
orpcvra roq enforce 6 A&OKaXoq
TOO 2<pa/ao3, ror\ KprjTris TO \vovrdpi.
Xvpvei TO jiaxcupcuci TOO an' apyopb i
nai iieoa r<k eimriKev-e yvovpovoi Toq-e
e, orb e/fya bob xtAtaSec,
/cat OT'onopyov TOO ybpiona ei^VTabob naoabes.
(Mango, 1954, p. 51)
On their way they were met by Daskaloyannis,
the kapetanios of Sfakia, the lion of Crete.
He drew his dagger from a silver sheath,
and went among them and attacked them.
^4s he went in he cut down a thousand, and as he came out two
thousand,
and on his fine return, sixty two pashas.
In other versions the assimilation is less advanced, but all show a ten-
dency to abbreviate the epic expansiveness of Barba-Pantzelios in
conformity with the taste in the demotic tradition for brief, more
effectively concentrated pieces.
The tradition of which Barba-Pantzelios is the earliest known expo-
nent has continued to thrive well into the twentieth century, with the
singers being known nowadays simply as 'poets' (pyites). The functions
of these professional singers have gradually been usurped by other
forms of popular entertainment - newspapers, comic strips, the cinema
and most recently television. But as late as during the Second World
War the tradition of the rimadori was as active as ever, and when
Notopoulos and Petropoulos visited Crete in 1953, in what has pro-
bably been the only systematic attempt to collect songs of this kind, 5
161
they recorded no less than fifty compositions in which episodes of the
German occupation of the island were recounted (Petropoulos, 1954,
p. 393 n). One of these, which the collectors heard performed orally by
its composer, amounted to 'about 480 lines', that is, almost half the
length of 'Daskaloyannis' (Petropoulos, 1954a, p. 231). And the song
of Anoyia, the village on Mount Psiloritis destroyed in reprisal for the
abduction of General Kreipe, was composed by two women of the
village, reportedly improvising alternate mantinddes:
AovXovdia nr\v aj>0tfere nouXui iir\v i
r' 'A^dryeta yaq eKaâve /cat va TCL \
Mtd*> Kvpyiaur}, fitd raxw??, cipa TTOV Xevrovpyovoi,
IdnfjKav of Avcjyeia yepLiavol TO' avT&pTeq /cat j
AVT&PT€<; Sev evprjuave /cat /cd/xaê TO /co/z/ia
yepovs /cat yvvaucb'na&a KOLTCO TCL 'nanav 6Xa.
Uavpa (popovve TCLfiovvaKC 6 yepai î?Xopetn?c
-nevdovv f Avooyeta TO Xojpyvb /cat TO- rjpcoeq TOT) Kp^rr^c. . .
T' AyOVOTOV etc TC 6e/ca rpetc, KaTapaLxewq cipa,
iiitd au0opd judc nXancooe /cat jutd ney&Xr} jjnrbpa. . .
(Frangakis, 1950, p. 772)
Flowers, do not bloom and birds, do not sing,
they have burnt down Anoyia, our village, so be sad.
One Sunday morning as mass was being said,
the Germans came to Anoyia looking for partisans.
They found no partisans, and started slaughtering people,
old men, women and children, they slaughtered them down below.
The mountains wear black, even old Psiloritis,
and mourn the village of Anoyia and the heroes of Crete. . .
On the thirteenth day of August, an accursed hour,
a disaster fell on us and a great cataclysm. . .
C. THE CYPRIOT PYITARIDES

The custom of composing rhymed songs in an epic manner upon events
of topical interest is even more widespread in Cyprus, although there
too the art seems to have declined rapidly in recent years and for much
the same reasons. The professional poet-singer in Cyprus is the pyitdris,
a term which seems to cover as wide a range of diverse individuals as
the corresponding Cretan rimadoros. Of his professional and specialised
status, however, there can be little doubt. The suffix -axis in the
162
The Cypriot pyitarides
Cypriot dialect denotes the production of or trade in a commodity
(Papadopoullos, 1967, p. 4), so that the pyitdris literally is a 'purveyor
of poems'. A vivid description of a performance by one of these poets
is given by Konstantinos Yangoullis:
I remember him, when I was still at primary school, coming to my
village every Sunday to cry his wares. He would take up a position
where he could be seen and from there would begin the recitation of
his poems. Around him a crowd of people would listen with bated
breath to the murder, love affair or disaster sung by the pyitdris
Aristotelis to a long-drawn-out melody. When the recitation was over
he would sell his poems to the audience, and then go on to another
cafe and do the same all over again. And this he would repeat every
Sunday and in every village. In this way the pyitdris became famous
throughout the district and people took to calling him 'old Aristotelis'
or 'the poet'. (Yangoullis, 1970, p. 35)
Aristotelis Nikolaou was about seventy at this time but, as in Crete, the
dearth of young poets today is probably due to comparatively recent
circumstances. Certainly, around the turn of the century, there were
young pyitarides as well as old (Menardos, 1921, p. 181).
Although the songs of these pyitarides, like those of the rimadori
in Crete, are the work of semi-educated poets to some extent emulating
literary texts, there is no single group of poems or plays comparable to
those of Kornaros and Hortatzis in Crete which could have inspired
them. The most likely source of inspiration for the pyitarides would
probably have been the popularising chronicles of late Byzantine litera-
ture, but even so an important question is left unanswered. This has to
do with the relation between the two folk traditions in Cyprus.
In Crete the development of the rimes into something like an epic
tradition was counterbalanced by an opposite trend in the traditional
folk songs which became exaggeratedly brief and concentrated. But
while the professional, topical compositions of the Cypriot pyitarides
cultivate the style and dimensions of epic, it is also in Cyprus that many
of the traditional panhellenic ballads achieve their most extended form.
Ballads of such mythical heroes as Diyenis, Kostantas and Porfyris in
Cyprus acquire epic characteristics which are matched nowhere else in
the Greek-speaking world, and for this reason are often regarded as
earlier versions from which the shorter Greek ballads derived. On the
other hand the historical compositions of pyitarides share many of the
same epic characteristics, but their origins are less romantic and much
163
less remote in time. 6 Is there, then, only one tradition, and do all
Cypriot narrative songs belong to an oral epic tradition perhaps going
back, as some would have it, to the early middle ages? Part of the
answer to this question is to be found in the role of the pyitarides.
These poets have been relatively little documented in comparison
with the work that has been done in publishing and studying their songs,
with the result that agreement has still not been reached among scholars
on who may and may not be termed a pyitaris.1 The most important
question which has still to be resolved is whether these professional
singers also sing and transmit traditional songs. It was categorically
stated by N. G. Politis that they did (1915, p. 506) and equally cate-
gorically asserted by Kyriakidis that they did not (1915, p. 650). The
first authoritative account of these poets offered a kind of compromise,
showing that the term pyitaris has a broad range of meaning covering
three distinct classes of singer: those who sing traditional songs, those
who sing their own compositions, and those who compose and sing
distichs (Pantelidis, 1923) and this seems to have been confirmed in a
general way more recently (Petropoulos, 1954). Since then, however,
Yangoullis (1965) has returned to the proposition that the pyitarides
are exclusively composers of their own songs and a new compromise
has been offered by Theodoros Papadopoullos (1967): that the classes
of pyitaris are not distinct and that the topical, historical type of song
was a development of the demotic tradition which grew up in the nine-
teenth century with the introduction of printing into Cyprus.
Scholarly confusion here probably reflects a real confusion. Whether
or not a pyitaris, strictly defined as a composer of his own songs on
topical subjects, may also perform songs on traditional themes, there is
no doubt both that professional pyitarides do handle traditional
material, adapting it according to their own requirements, and that non-
professionals such as women, when they sing traditional songs, do so
after the manner of these professional singer-composers. A version of
The Death of Diyenis' which Notopoulos recorded from a non-
professional 'shows that the singer is following closely the tradition of
these itinerant bards in the island [the pyitarides]' (1959, pp. 15-21).
Notopoulos' singer had learnt his version of the traditional ballad either
from hearing a professional pyitaris or from a broadsheet; and, to con-
fuse the issue still more, this oral version by a non-professional can be
traced back to a broadsheet published in 1906, itself a hybrid 'compo-
sition', mixing traditional lines with the characteristic style of the
pyitaris (Papadopoullos, 1967, pp. 20-4).
164
That pyitarides have been aware of the different types of material in
their repertoire can be seen in the different formulas they tend to use
for 'signing off. The formula,
'EKeivos bnov TO ^yakev ocw Ttoir\Tr\<; Xcxydrcu,
neivov npenei ovyx&pecrn KI tuevave o-noWdre
He who composed the song is regarded as a poet,
he deserves your indulgence and I your good wishes,
directs the audience's attention to the performer and reminds them
that he hopes to be rewarded. But he askes no more than his fair share:
he is not the composer of the song, merely the singer. This disclaimer is
so common in Cypriot songs that one might suspect it has become as
conventional and meaningless as the appeals to non-existent sources in
western medieval romances. But it is noteworthy that this formula
occurs much more frequently appended to songs whose themes are tra-
ditional than to evidently personal compositions. In another type of
formula the singer may either leave out all mention of the composer of
the song and merely seek his audience's indulgence on his own behalf,
&v exere Xkiyov Kpaoiv, npenei va yds Kepvare,
r% dyiov npeTret 86%aoi KCLL k[xkvav r' cbc TroXXd Ye
(Papadopoullos, 1975, pp. 23-4,11. 50-1)
if you have a little wine, you ought to let us have some,
give praise to the saint and to me your good wishes;
or he may indicate that he is himself the author:
'I5oi> TO TeXoq enaiia, yia vd j3ej3aico0T?re,
KOLL boot TO dKovoeTe xpbvovs noXkoix; vd $r\Te.
(Papadopoullos, 1975, pp. 115-23,11. 315-16)
See, I have made an end, so that you know what happened,
and to all who have listened [I wish] a long life.
These formulas, in contrast to the first type, are used with greater fre-
quency in songs which appear to be personal compositions o£pyitarides,
showing that a real distinction, although naturally not an absolute one,
exists in the minds of these poets between original and received
material.
The academic confusion arises because the roles of different types of
singer are not clearly defined; in other words, in Cyprus, in contrast to
165
what happens in Crete, the transmission and development of the
demotic tradition are largely in the hands of the same professional singers
who have created and developed the topical, historical tradition, and of
their non-professional admirers.
It would seem from this that the epic length of traditional songs in
Cyprus is due not to the preservation of a medieval epic tradition lost
in the rest of the Greek-speaking world, but to the influence of the
pyitarides and the development of narrative as a means of professional
entertainment. As a result we find that the Cypriot traditional songs,
although much longer than their mainland counterparts, contain little
or no more actual information, the greater length being achieved by a
variety of devices such as excessive repetition, prevarication, and the
inexpert tacking together of self-contained episodes. One of the most
glaring instances of repetition used for this purpose is in the two Cyp-
riot variants of 'Mikrokostantinos' mentioned in Chapter 2 (examples
7-8), where the recognition is effected by the wife's repeating the entire
song, word for word, up to the penultimate scene. On a smaller scale,
the desire to gain length by repetitions which hold up the action and
hopefully create a mood of suspense in an audience can be seen in the
use in very many traditional songs of stereotyped formula sequences
such as this:
Upcbra did wvq JJLOVOTOWLCLV rfat vorepa pcord wvq:

- Ilere fxov9ftoeKaToiyyavoi, elvTa V noi) e^dare;
Tfat nere fiov rfai, TO noi^fxav OTTJV cupKonoTajiovoav.
- XajUMafo/iea' ae, Aievq, TCL Xayta nod jua? Xeeis.
Ilpcora 8idq iiaq fiovoTOwiav rfat vorepa pcordq iiaq.
"E7rap' JJLCK; XXtT?^ ô[iovi\v, Xki'qp Kaprepooovvriv,
va yepow ipcjq TCL ntxaSKuifJiac; T$ai vow 17 Tê^poXr] fias
T$ai XoloiJibv TCL //77A77 fias T%CU jtzeic va oov TO novfiev.
Uaipvet TOW; Xki'qv nofiovrjv, Wvqv KapTepcoovvqv,
eyepcup </?coc TCL miaSiaa TOVS rfat vow 17 rf eya\ri TOW;
T$ai Xolofjibv TCL iiriXri TOVS, OTOBTIKCW vd TOV TTOVOLV:
(Kyriakidis, 1926, pp. 140-9,11. 24-34)
First he gave them a slap in the face and then he asked them:
'Tell me, Katsingani, what's that you're talking about?
And tell me this poem of yours here by the river's edge.'
'You amaze us, Dienis, speaking such words.
First you give us a slap in the face and then you ask us.
Have a little patience with us, wait a little,
166
while our eyes find light and our heads good sense,
and our limbs find reason, and then we'll tell you.'
He had a little patience with them, waited a little,
while their eyes found light and their heads good sense
and their limbs found reason, and then they stopped and told him:
This looks like a parody of an oral style, especially when the same
sequence is trotted out time and again whenever a question has to be
asked.
There are other ways too by which the Cypriot singer may prevari-
cate and lend the appearance of epic length to the material of tradi-
tional ballads. In one song in which Kostantas' bride is stolen and he
rides out on his supernaturally swift horse to recapture her, the action
is suspended at the crucial moment by twenty-three lines describing a
clowning interchange between the hero and his talking horse (Sakellarios,
1868, pp. 3-8, 11. 97-119). This is a piece of invention inspired by the
single line in a number of ballads where the horse asks its rider not to
use his spurs. Another such case of prevarication is found in one of the
songs where Diyenis carries off his chosen bride, who was supposed to
be marrying someone else at the time. In this song his old mentor
Filopappos is at first unwilling to help him and a trivial argument ensues
in which the old man's objections are overcome. Once again the singer
creates an atmosphere of suspense by throwing a trivial obstacle in his
hero's way, and more exciting things must wait until it has been sur-
mounted (Sakellarios, 1868, pp. 11-13).
Another means of obtaining the required narrative interest was to
juxtapose loosely connected episodes. This is a perfectly valid means of
traditional composition, but some of the Cypriot examples of 'compo-
site' songs fail to make any rational connection between their compo-
nent stories. A song in which three different versions of Diyenis' death
are told consecutively clearly illustrates this (Kypriake Spoude 37,
1973, pp. 15-18). Even more revealing is the song of Kostantas already
mentioned. The first part of this song tells of the rival Fteropoullos'
resolution to abduct the hero's wife, his asking his parents' blessing in
the enterprise and their attempts to dissuade him. This rather trivial
introduction is an addition to the traditional theme, as in most other
versions the singer has preferred to concentrate on Kostantas' passivity
in the face of a brash wife-stealer, and his correspondingly merciless
efficacy in recovering his wife and punishing the abductor. In this intro-
ductory part of the story the text is highly confused: there are several
unattached half-lines and a predominant but inconsistent use of rhyme.
167
Once the introduction is over and the story proper commences, the
singer seems to have got into his stride. The rhymes practically disap-
pear and there are no loose half-lines. In this song a pyitaris (or an
amateur entertainer influenced by the craft of these poets) has com-
bined a retelling of an unrhymed traditional song with a composition in
his own style, based on the couplet form, in order to give it epic dimen-
sions.
That pyitarides actually did this was confirmed by Pantelidis:
Often one comes upon lines wholly foreign to the narrative, which
the pyitarides have introduced themselves for the sake of a rhyme
for the following line of the narration; but they admit that 'these
are our own, to make the song fit'. (1923, p. 117)
There are numerous examples of songs in a mixture of rhyming coup-
lets and unrhymed lines which show how the pyitarides have 'stretched'
the traditional material to make it suitable for audiences attuned to the
style of their own compositions.
Sometimes it is difficult even to tell to which tradition a song
belongs. What are we to say of the song of Arodafnousa, which in its
many versions has become almost a Cypriot national epic? The tale of
royal jealousy seems to have had its origin in a real event of the four-
teenth century (Petropoulos, 1958, p. 98), but the historical names
have all disappeared, as have all the trappings of professional composi-
tion - the dates and circumstantial details. Most of the versions can now
only be ascribed to the demotic tradition, although the song may well
have started out in life as a professional piece of journalism.
D. PROFESSIONAL COMPOSITION IN MAINLAND GREECE

On the mainland of Greece no comparable proliferation of profes-
sional, personally composed songs has been recorded. In the early nine-
teenth century, however, during the period of the War of Independence
from the Ottomans, we know that bards in some respects similar to the
rimadori and pyitarides of Crete and Cyprus existed and composed
songs inspired by the events of the times. Probably the earliest of these
poets known to us is Panayotis Kalas (Tsopanakos) of Dimitsana in the
Peloponnese. Born in 1789, Tsopanakos was a hunchbacked dwarf
gifted with a fine voice and a talent for improvising verses. In this
capacity he attached himself to the chieftain Nikitaras, for whom he
composed many songs, frequently humorous or satirical, until his death
168
Professionals in mainland Greece
in 1824 from an overdose of unripe plums (Politis, N. G., 1915, pp.
501-4).
Fauriel, in describing the 'blind rhapsodes' he had heard about from
his expatriate informants, painted a vividly accurate picture of the
modern Cypriot pyitdris:
Toujours par voies et par chemins, toujours en quete de ce qui peut
emouvoir leur imagination ou satisfaire leur curio site, aucun bruit ne
leur echappe de ce qui se passe dans les villes, dans les villages et dans
les campagnes. Us tiennent note de tout, chantent sur tout; et avec
leurs chansons se repand peu a peu dans la Grece entiere la renom-
mee des aventures et des hommes qui en font le sujet. (1824, p.
xcii)
But if these professional singers were at any time so numerous on the
mainland of Greece, the songs and the fame of almost all have proved
remarkably transitory. Fauriel's insistence on universal blindness among
these singers, his use of the ancient term 'rhapsodes' to describe them,
and his mistaken description of the modern lyra which they, played as
the lyre of the ancients, all suggest that his account may have been
exaggerated by an enthusiastic confusion of ancient and modern in
Greek affairs which was all too common in the last century. We are pro-
bably on safer ground with his description of Gavoyannis, a blind singer
and improvisor who lived in Thessaly and, unlike the 'wandering rhap-
sodes', spent all his life in his native village. This man became rich and
famous in the district for his songs describing the activities of the klefts,
and would receive visits from chieftains or adventurers seeking poems
to commemorate their deeds. Such was his success, from a professional
point of view, that
Les Albanais a la solde des pachas qui ne trouvaient pas aisement des
panegyristes de leurs exploits parmi les rhapsodes des Klephtes, et
qui, dans leur humeur fanfaronne, voulaient cependant etre aussi
chantes, avaient souvent recours a ce vieux Gavoyannis pour obtenir
de lui des vers a leur louange, qu'ils lui payaient bien. (Fauriel, 1824,
p. xciv)
It appears that 'rhapsodes, of the klefts' did exist, although little

reliable information has been recorded about them. Two accounts
describe ancient, blind and decrepit singers, long after the War of Inde-
pendence was over, begging in the streets and singing the songs they
claimed to have composed for their guerrilla chiefs in the days of their
169
prime (Politis, N. G., 1915, p. 509; Vlahoyannis, 1938, pp. 167-8). But
it is now generally agreed that, with very few exceptions, the surviving
songs of the klefts are non-professional compositions and there is no
evidence to suggest that the patronage of professional singers by leaders
of the klefts was either a widespread or a long-lived practice (Politis,
A., 1973, pp. xl-xlii). The most that can be said is that the events of
the War of Independence gave a probably brief stimulus to professional
singers whose status, both before and after, was in general much lower
than that of their counterparts in Crete and Cyprus.
Few songs survive which can certainly be attributed to professional
singers. Most are appalling, and all of them are much more closely
derivative from the demotic tradition than are the Cretan and Cypriot
equivalents, suggesting that they come of a less developed tradition. In
1828 a series of thirteen songs was recorded from a blind /yra-player in
the south-west Peloponnese, Yannos Panayis (Melahrinos, 1946, pp.
3-13). They are bald, inexpert narrations of the deeds of minor heroes
of the War of Independence, full of formulas borrowed from the demo-
tic tradition, but tacked together with none of the dexterity and tight
construction of traditional Greek song. The extent to which they are
derivative is revealed by the first song, about the rising in Crete, whose
opening formula and rhyming structure indicate clearly that Panayis
had learnt it from a Cretan rimadoros. None of his other songs employs
rhyme, and most of his opening formulas are demotic in origin. But,
derivative and plodding though they are, these songs seem not to have
been memorized word for word but have been re-composed by Panayis.
The extreme monotony of the twelve texts other than the Cretan can
be attributed, on examination, to poor-quality oral composition. The
events in each of the songs are almost exactly the same, the sentiments
are identical, and all are built up from a very restricted number of for-
mulas which hardly vary, and which probably represent the singer's
entire repertoire.
Somewhat different from these are two songs commemorating the
kleft Kitzio Andonis (Katsandonis) recorded by Martin-Leake, probably
about 1810 (Marshall, 1935, pp. 42-5; English translations in Clogg,
1976, pp. 70-1). The first describes, at slightly greater length than is
common in the demotic tradition, how the Turkish authorities and
Greek village notables resent the depredations of Andonis, and an expe-
dition is mounted against him. The result is a single combat between
Andonis and Veli Gekas, an Albanian derbendaga (captain of the
passes) known for his courage and cruelty. Andonis shoots the Alba-
170
nian, mortally wounding him, and Veli Gekas cries out to his comrades
to cut off his head so that it won't fall into the hands of the klefts. The
second song describes the capture and death of Andonis, whose arms
and legs Ali Pasha commanded to be crushed with heavy hammers.
The first of these events took place in 1806, and the second a year
or so later,8 so that the songs Martin-Leake recorded must have been
composed very shortly afterwards. There are a number of reasons for
supposing that these were professional compositions. The first song, in
particular, is long and rather circumstantial, and while its second part,
describing the meeting of Kitzio Andonis and Veli Gekas, is paralleled
in traditional versions, the first twenty-four lines resemble a profes-
sional singer's preamble, designed to hold back the action and catch
an audience's attention. This song also begins with the pedantic detail,
ores beKdxpra rov akoovapyuov, ores reooapes AVJOVOTOV

(Marshall, 1935, p. 43)
On the fifteenth of Alonaris, on the fourth of August.
The month of Alonaris is normally July, but here refers to the Revo-
lutionary Fructidor which began on 19 July. To specify the date of an
event with reference to two different calendars is surely the act of a
singer determined to show that he has been to school. And the second
song, although in many respects a traditional lament for the death of a
kleft, is distinguished from all the demotic versions of the death of
Katsandonis in that it relates the true manner of his execution. Of the
demotic songs, some tell only of an ambush and the kleft's determina-
tion to die fighting, while others describe him being shot down, using
the type of formula which also described the death of Veli Gekas
(Passow, 1860, pp. 76-82).
There are signs that at the courts of ambitious, practically indepen-
dent local rulers, such as the Greek beys of the Mani, of whom the last,
Petrobey Mavromichalis, is the most famous, and the Albanian Ali
Pasha in Ioannina, some form of professional epic-style poetry was
encouraged. It is possible that these songs of Kitzio Andonis, which
reflect exasperation more than admiration for the kleft's heroic activi-
ties, were in fact composed at the court of Ali, who had him put to
death, rather than among his fellow klefts.
There are other indications too that professional composition was
more prized in Ioannina than elsewhere. N. G. Politis mentions an
'Alipashiad', an epic in which the notorious pasha's exploits are extol-
led, by an Albanian Moslem, Hadzi Serket, interestingly enough in
171
Greek (1915, p. 513). Two other poems from the court of Ali are
unusual for their use of rhyme: a banal account of his revolt against the
Sublime Porte in 1820 said to have been composed by one of his sons
(Fauriel, 1825, pp. 347-53), and the famous lament for Kyra Frosyni,
the Greek mistress of another son of the Pasha, who was put to death
in 1801 (Petropoulos, 1958, p. 165); and although these poems are very
different in style, the fact that in Ioannina almost alone on the Greek
mainland at this time, rhyme was used in songs on historical subjects,
suggests that a class of professional singers, comparable to those of
Crete, may have begun to emerge for a brief period under the patronage
of Ali Pasha.
A tradition of the same sort may also have floursihed for a time at
the court of the powerful beys of the Mani. When Dimo and Nicolo
Stephanopoli, Corsicans of Maniot descent, visited Mani on a diploma-
tic mission from Napoleon, they recorded a song in eighty-seven politi-
cal lines to which they gave the title 'The Complaint of Roumeli'
(1800, II, pp. 74-83). This was performed by three women, singing in
turns, and accompanied by an old man playing 'une espece de guitare',
probably a tambourds. The performance seems to have been part of a
formal occasion, as it was put on at the bey's command to entertain his
diplomatic guests and emissaries from other parts of Greece. In form
the song owes something to the demotic tradition, and it opens with a
theme which we know well from other contexts:
6 KOOIMX; x^tperat* All the world is glad;

"OXoi fiapovv naiyvi&ia' and everyone is at play;
*H 'PoujueXr? /cat TCL vqova [but] Roumeli and the islands
HT€K.ovve rnKpajd/Jieva. are grieving bitterly.
Tou/ieXr?, ytd 8eu xa*P6a°u> Roumeli, why are you not glad,
Fid bev j3apetc naiyvi&ui; why are you not at play?
(Legrand, 1870, p. 9) 9
In the demotic tradition a series of formulas of this kind is often

used to introduce a brief lament for the plight of a city besieged or cap-
tured by the enemy. But here these lines serve only as a rhetorical
device to introduce a long series of grievances against foreign tyranny,
reminiscent of the political pamphlets of the time which were in fact
largely inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. Roumeli, reply-
ing at length to the stranger's question, details the miseries of Ottoman
yoke with the trite rhetoric familiar from the revolutionary propaganda
of the middle classes:
172
u
Onoioq Kai dv eioai, &voi%e Whoever you may be, open
T?7^ ioToplav, Kai ffie the history book, and see
what Greece once was
T* fiTOV f? F p a k i a ilia <popd,
Kai aKOVoe f eivai rcopa. and hear what she is now:
Uov 6 wpavvoq ixov kprnia%e how the tyrant has laid waste
To yevoq T<I)V Tco/xata;^. the Romaic race.
Uov eivai r? Adrjva fiov, Where is my Athens,
Uov eivai Keivq f? ' where is that Athens,
Uov 6 Koofioq that the world once held in awe
Kai oefierai and still reveres?
'EK ei €npojTapdv7}K e There for the very first time
*H k\evdep'va ek rbv KOOIXOV freedom came into the world;
'E/c ei 6taXdXi?ae 6 There did Solon proclaim
Tco^ 'AdrjvaiGJV TOVS his laws to the Athenians;
'E/c eieTpexav vd VGJTIOO Thither did the nations of Europe
Tf}<: Evpwnfis TCL edvr\' hasten for enlightenment;
Kai, and rd nepara Tfjq And from the ends of the earth
"Epxovvrov orriv A6r}va there came to Athens
Tco^ paoikecov TCL TratStd the children of kings
Xreprias Kai TOV ireXayov, by land and sea,
'AXXa vd idovv r d some to see the handiwork
Tcov davjiaoTcbv of marvellous craftsmen;
'AXXa vd oni£ovv TOW Others to mix with wise men,
Nd iidOovv e-niOTriixais' and taste of learning;
N' cLKoboovv -napabeiyiiaTa To hear examples
And Tovq ipikooapovq' from the philosophers.
'Eneivr) f? Adrjva noi) dypoinaq That Athens you hear tell of
Uov £\afie Toorjv ^rfniriv, that won such fame,
Tcbpa 17 OK\afivd TTJV e^paye, is now engulfed by slavery,
Tcbpa 8ev eivai nXeov. and now exists no more.
Tcbpa oi Sui^dTaiq nov nepvovv, Now the travellers who pass through,
Ot %evoi nov Siafkiivovv, the foreigners who travel,
'AWov e/cet 5e^ Ppioicovve, find nothing there,
'AWov €K€i dev $\enovv see nothing there
Uapd eva epriixov x but a deserted village
Keinov T\TOV rj AQr\va' where Athens used to stand;
Kai evav yikdpyvpov ' And a money-grubbing Aga
UTOV Tonov TOV Apeondyov. in place of the Areopagus.
(Legrand, 1870, pp. 10-11)
173
The historical knowledge betrayed here, together with the poet's

interest in such things as the classical past and the doings of the 'nations
of Europe', clearly reveal that, for all its borrowings from tradition as
regards its form, the content of this song precludes it from being in any
sense traditional. But neither does it appear to be merely the work of a
literary hack. Whether or not it was composed on the page, and the
number of literary and historical allusions suggests, although it by no
means proves, that it was, the 'Complaint of Roumeli' was evidently
intended for oral performance, and it is not hard to imagine how com-
position in this oddly mixed style might have been fostered, at this
period, by the arrogant and independent Greek beys of the Mani.
E. THE EMERGENCE OF THE HISTORICAL TRADITION

The songs we have so far been considering, which together comprise
what I have called the historical tradition, mostly belong to two main
branches, the Cretan and the Cypriot. It would be rash at this stage to
speak of the 'origins' of either branch of the tradition, but both have a
surprisingly long pedigree for a type of song which might have been
taken for a kind of transitional growth between oral and written tradi-
tions. There are, in fact, three kinds of evidence that a historical tra-
dition, from which the modern Cretan and Cypriot branches have
grown, has flourished since at least the fifteenth century.
First of all we have the evidence of historical songs which narrate, in
the detailed and even pedantic manner of this tradition, events of past
centuries. Examples are the Cypriot songs of the siege of Malta in 1565
and the fall of Cyprus to the Ottomans in 1570-1 (Sakellarios, 1891,
pp. 181, 55), and the song 'The Death of the Emperor Constantine
Dragazis' recorded from oral recitation in the island of Kythira in the
nineteenth century, which describes the fall of Constantinople (Legrand,
1874, pp. 74-7). Some of the arguments that were used in Chapter 6
against dating demotic songs to the time of the events referred to must
obviously apply in these cases also. There is no guarantee, for instance,
that a pyitaris in the nineteenth century did not merely read of the
events in a book and versify them as he would a contemporary 'shock
horror' story. Indeed the inclusion in the Constantinople song of the
legend that the last Emperor was buried under a laurel surely dates the
first composition of the song in its present form to at least a hundred
years after the event, when according to Legrand, the legend became
current. On the other hand, one of the features of the historical tradi-
tion which strongly contrasts it with the demotic is the emphasis placed
174
Emergence of the historical tradition
by singers on accuracy in reporting and on the recording of details for

posterity.
It is not inconceivable therefore that these nineteenth-century ver-
sions derive ultimately from the oral compositions of professional
singers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and we have the evi-
dence of de Lusignan that a song about the siege of Malta was circulat-
ing and widely popular in Cyprus within a few years of the event (1580,
p. 221). But it is no less likely that all three songs were composed at a
later date in imitation of written poems in a popular style. For both of
the Cypriot songs there exist written parallels which we know to be
roughly contemporary with the events in question (Prousis, 1945, pp.
24-9), and which may even prove to have been the direct originals of
the oral narratives. The song of the fall of Constantinople certainly
shows signs of a tenacious oral memory, in that the precise date of the
event and many details which are left out in the oral demotic laments
have been included, but here too it is impossible to hazard a safe guess
at its date of composition. Written historical laments on the subject
certainly existed in this case too, and as we saw in the case of Cretan
renaissance literature, oral transmission in Greece of written texts can
be strikingly accurate over long periods, perhaps owing to the popular
association of the written word with permanence and even pedantry.
The second kind of evidence is more satisfactory. This is to be found
in poems of the late middle ages and the two centuries following the
fall of Constantinople, which appear to fulfil a closely similar function
to that of the professional compositions of the more modern historical
tradition. One of the most contentious examples is the fourteenth-
century Chronicle of the Morea, the enormously long verse narrative
which tells, in the vernacular, of the Frankish conquest of the Pelo-
ponnese at the end of the century before. A recent study, using com-
puter techniques, has shown that the text of this poem is highly repeti-
tious, and may be the product of formulaic oral composition (Jeffreys,
1973). But, unlike some of the Cretan and Cypriot poems to which it
bears a sometimes uncanny similarity of style, it was undoubtedly com-
posed to be read, and may even be a translation from French. This
confusion of a popular, perhaps oral, style with the role of chronicler,
which almost by definition presupposes a man well educated in a writ-
ten tradition, is also found in the professional compositions of rimadori
and pyitarides, and it is curious to note that some of the most fre-
quently recurring 'formulas' in the Chronicle are still current in the
historical tradition.1 °
175
The opening lines of the poem, with the poet's declaration of intent
and computation of the date when his story opens from the beginning
of the world, are strikingly similar to more recent examples from
Crete:
0eAco va oe dcjyqyrjdd) d(lnryr}oiv neyakriv'
KL dv 0eXr?c va fxe anpoaoTfis, dXni^co va d dpeor}.
°OTOV TO ZTCX; rtrove, am urioecos tcdoixov,
Kai ScoSena kviavrow, rboov /cat ovxl nXeov

(Schmitt, 1904, p. 3)
I want to tell you a tale, a great tale;
and if you want to hear me, I hope it will please you.
When the year was, from the creation of the world,
six times a thousand and six times a hundred
and twelve years, so much and no more. . .
'£ ra xiXta 6XTOK6OUL eixooioxTCo, ixiav Tpirr?,
'AypovnaorfiTe va oas TTCJ 671a rr\ jiavpriv Kp^rr?.
(Jeannaraki, 1876, p. 66)
In eighteen hundred and twenty eight, on a Tuesday,
listen while I tell you what happened in wretched Crete.
There is one interesting difference, however. While the Cretan poet,
like all the Cretan and Cypriot poets who address an audience directly,
uses the plural form of the verb, the author of the Chronicle tellingly
has the singular - he is addressing only one person, the reader.
Other characteristic techniques of more recent professional com-
posers are to be found in two poems dated a century or more after the
Chronicle of the Morea. These are the 'Plague of Rhodes' by Emmanuel
Georgillas (1498) and Manolis Sklavos' 'The Disaster of Crete', a
seemingly contemporary account of an earthquake in 1508. Their
subject matter is enough to provide an immediate link with the later
historical tradition, but the resemblance does not stort there. Both are
among the earliest examples of the fully developed couplet form, which
as we saw was integral to the composition and transmission of the
Cretan and Cypriot poems, and Sklavos twice refers to the fact that his
poem is a series of distichs. Georgillas, starting off in his first line with
the date of the plague, several times refers to himself by name and tells
us something of his circumstances and that he was an eyewitness of the
events he describes (Wagner, 1874, pp. 32-52). Sklavos' poem begins
176
Emergence of the historical tradition
with a familiar invocation to the deity and continues with the conven-
tional statement of intent, followed by no less than seven lines spelling
out the date and time when the earthquake struck. The end, in which
the poet declares his identity, also has later Cretan parallels:
SKXCZJSOS jie onovdrj nal fjte ixeyakov KOTTOP

TOVTOL TCL bionx ^/fyaXXa 5 id Bprivov TCOP avdpcjntop.
(Wagner, 1974, pp. 53-61,11. 279-80)
Manolis Sklavos am I who, with study and great pains,
composed these distichs for the lamentation of men.
TICK; TOV nairna ^lepajpvuov, Zerauxk

XapKLOJTT}q elv% 6 TroiTjnfc rr\$ ioropias 8X17?.
(Fauriel, 1825, p. 360)
Son of Ieronimos the priest, Manolis from Sitia,
[surnamed] Harkiotis, is the poet of this whole story.
That these and other techniques were in continuous use from the
fifteenth century is suggested by a passage in an eighteenth-century
literary work of Kaisarios Dapontes. The second chapter of his 'Garden
of Graces' begins,
'EX0cb*> \OUTOP amoq e5co ete \popovq row

KOJL nePTe Kai rpvaxopra km kirroKOoiouq
(Legrand, 1881, p. 11)
Myself, then, arriving here in the year one thousand
and five-and-thirty above seven hundred. . .
Dapontes was a monk and in no sense a folk poet, but his use of this
unpoetical device suggests that it may have been a well-known cliche
of popular literature in the first half of the eighteenth century; and
before the end of that century we find it again in folk poetry, where it
is used in all seriousness in the epilogue to 'Daskaloyannis'.
The third piece of evidence for the continuity of the historical tra-
dition is that competitions in improvising rhyming distichs took place
in the islands in the sixteenth century (Kyriakidis, 1965, p. 82 n). We
do not know whether these competitions were between professionals,
as often happens at modern Cypriot festivals. But the Cypriot word
tshidttisma (rhyming distich) comes from the Turkish gatmak, whose
meaning involves the idea of confrontation, suggesting that this may
have been among the earliest functions of the distich in Cyprus. This
177
fact, taken together with the importance that Manolis Sklavos evidently
gave to composition in distichs, tends to confirm the impression that
some of the impetus for the rise and subsequent popularity of the his-
torical tradition came from the success of the couplet form in the
fifteenth century.
Inseparable from the rhyming distich, as we saw at the end of the
last chapter, is the western literary tradition in which it originated; and
the development of a new vernacular literature on western models in
Crete and Cyprus coincides with the last period of western rule after
the fall of Byzantium, in both islands. It would not therefore be entirely
coincidental if the same period had also seen the rise of a new form of
folk poetry, inspired by a literary development which had itself
approached so closely to the style of popular song. But probably this
was not quite the beginning of the historical tradition. Undoubtedly
the stature and popularity of poems such as Erotokritos and other
works of the Cretan literary renaissance had a decisive effect upon the
later development of the professional folk poetry of the rimadori. But
the epic characteristics of the Cypriot songs can owe little to the
refined Petrarchan love poems which were the height of literary achieve-
ment on the island in the sixteenth century. Similarly, although the
importance of rhyme in the historical tradition cannot be denied, it is
probable that in its essentials the tradition predates the introduction of
rhyme, in works such as the Chronicle of the Morea. And the existence
of unryhmed songs in this tradition as late as the nineteenth century
in mainland Greece suggests that songs advertising novelty and record-
ing spectacular history could be and have been composed without using
rhyme. If the ultimate 'origins' of the historical tradition are to be
sought it must be in the chronicles and romances of the fourteenth
century and earlier, rather than in the literary renaissance of the
Aegean which has shaped its more recent development.
178
10. Greek Folk Poetry and Writing
A. WRITING AND ORAL TRADITION

There was never ane o' ma songs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel'
and ye hae spoilt them a' thegither. They were made for singing and
no for reading, but ye hae broken the charm now and they'll never
be sung mair. And the warst thing o' a', they're nouther right spell'd,
nor right setten down. (Hogg, quoted in Wells, 1950, p. 249)
With these words James Hogg's mother, one of the sources on whom
Walter Scott had drawn for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish border, dis-
missed the publication and the well-meaning attempt to preserve oral
folk poetry in print. The charge levelled against Scott appears confirmed
by subsequent history, to the extent that it is now almost a commonplace
that literacy is incompatible with a healthy oral tradition.
In Greece, as elsewhere in Europe, there has been a gradual break-
down of traditional oral poetry, beginning, so far as one can tell, about
the time that songs began to be collected and distributed to a reading
rather than to a listening public. It seems now to be widely believed
that the growth of literacy during this period is predominantly respon-
sible, and in the study of other folk cultures the idea has recently been
refined. Albert Lord, in contemplating the visible decline of oral com-
position in the Yugoslav epic tradition, laid the blame not so much on
literacy (which has existed in Yugoslavia for the last thousand years) as
on the post-war drive to extend its use throughout all classes of the
population. As a result, Lord affirms, oral singers have been confronted
with written texts of their own songs, and he concludes, 'an oral tradi-
tion may die; not when writing is introduced, but when published song
texts are spread among singers' (1960, p. 130). And again, 'It seems
clear, then, that it is not literacy per se but the idea of fixity that will
eventually destroy the oral poet's power to compose oral poetry' (1968,
p. 5). This argument was given a further refinement by Jeffreys, who
179
Greek folk poetry and writing
pointed out that in earlier periods (in Anglo-Saxon England and the
middle ages in Europe) an oral poet who learned to read and write
would almost inevitably do so in the written language - Latin in the
west and Atticising Greek in the east - so that it is only in principle
since the invention of printing and in practice quite recently that this
confrontation between the oral singer and mass-produced, fixed texts
of vernacular material could have occurred (1973, pp. 168-9).
Lord's conclusions are based on personal observation over many
years and one need not doubt the role played by the increase in general
literacy in Yugoslavia since the war in the breakdown of oral tradition
there. It may be, however, that this happened in subtler and more
diverse ways than Lord envisaged. For example, once his erstwhile
audience had learnt to read and newspapers and comic strips became
popular in the cafe where he had formerly sung, it may have been
immaterial whether the singer himself was greatly affected by the con-
frontation with printed songsheets. And how easy was it to hold the
attention of an audience who had heard of dialectical materialism and
Yalta with the old-fashioned heroism and stylised narrative of the
Battle of Kossovo?
It is not only literacy that has been able to coexist with a thriving
oral tradition without detriment to the latter. In England the introduc-
tion of printing, far from destroying the oral tradition, stimulated the
enormous broadside ballad industry, producing, alongside a mass of
trivia, songs whose career over several centuries seems to have embraced
both oral and written transmission, to the extent that it is now often
difficult (and perhaps not important) to determine whether particular
ballads began in life as traditional (oral) songs or as broadsides (Shepard,
1962, p. 77; Lloyd, 1975, pp. 24-32; Finnegan, 1977, pp. 162-4). The
qualitative difference mentioned in the last chapter between traditional
and broadside ballads in Britain has still to be kept in mind, but it must
not simply be assumed that this distinction arises because the latter
were written. Broadside publishers sent out agents into the country to
report traditional songs which could either be printed as they stood or
cannibalised in the preparation of a new, professional composition; and
most broadsides have at the top an indication of the tune to which the
ballad is to be sung. The broadsides were often therefore oral in origin,
and almost always oral as regards performance: although written and
distributed through the medium of print, these ballads were not com-
posed to be read, like a detective story, but to be sung.
It is part of the old romantic approach to 'traditional' song, to which
180
Writing and oral tradition
even Lord was not immune, to suppose that total orality is a condition
of this material and one which marks it off decisively from other kinds.
Lord seems to have envisaged the relation between oral and literary
traditions as one of transition, as though the one necessarily followed
the other in time. This may be one of the reasons for his conclusion
that there was no such thing as a 'transitional' text (1960, p. 132),
since a truly transitional text would have to have been written by an
oral poet while in the process of becoming a literary one. And there is
no evidence (pace certain Homeric scholars) that this has ever happened.
The people who first use writing to record folk poetry are by no means
always the poets themselves, but they are never oral poets who at the
same time are emergent literary figures - unless we are to cite Sir Walter
Scott as an oral poet. This confusion has to be removed because tran-
sitional texts do exist, in the sense of songs not fully oral in the
demanding sense extrapolated by Lord from his experience of Yugoslav
tradition, but yet not belonging to literature either. The British broad-
side ballads would seem to be a case in point, as would the historical
tradition of Crete and Cyprus, and both have flourished for too long,
and alongside both oral and literary traditions, to be described as 'tran-
sitional' from one to the other.
One solution would be to distinguish, as does David Buchan, between
'non-literate tradition' which he calls oral, and 'the word-of-mouth
tradition of a literate culture', to which he gives the term 'verbal' (1972,
p. 2). Applying this distinction to the ballad tradition of the north-east
of Scotland, Buchan determined that this tradition was 'oral' up until
the mid-eighteenth century, since when, following the spread of literacy
in the area, it has been a 'verbal' one. Buchan's book is in large part an
attempt to apply Lord's theory of oral composition-in-performance to
Scottish balladry, and in this, because his analysis is sensitive and un-
dogmatic, he is largely successful. But as a consequence of following
Lord's lead, and adopting his general theory of oral tradition as a
package rather than critically, Buchan could not avoid what might be
termed the romantic fallacy of oral tradition: that a tradition is oral
either totally or not at all.
According to this fallacy, Buchan's excellent analysis of Scottish
ballads in terms of formulas, themes and architectonic patterns, required
as a precondition the total orality of the poems analysed - and con-
versely, if successful, would automatically prove it. Buchan's distinction
between 'oral' and 'verbal' traditions was a way out of a logical corner
but may not, as a generalisation, be really as helpful as it first appeared.
181
The more recent tradition of the Scottish north-east is in no sense
'totally oraP, but it is no easy matter to prove that it ever has been in
the past either. How can we be certain that, even when the tradition
included a greater degree of, say, re-composition in performance than
it does today, it was at any time a truly 'non-literate' tradition? Buchan
aptly shows how Mrs Brown, in his opinion the last of the Scottish 'oral'
singers, in the eighteenth century, altered the texts of her songs from
one singing to the next like the Yugoslav bards, and did not write them
down. But, far from being illiterate, Mrs Brown was the daughter of a
professor at Aberdeen University, and her letters show that she was a
woman of considerable education. Even pure 'traditional' folk poetry
does not require illiteracy, or 'total orality', in order to flourish.
Recent work by Professor Jack Goody and others on literacy in
traditional societies has tended to confirm this. According to Goody
the number of communities anywhere in the world which are entirely
without literate influences is much smaller than is often supposed:
at least during the past 2,000 years, the vast majority of the peoples
of the world (most of Eurasia and much of Africa) have lived . . . in
cultures which were influenced in some degree by the circulation of
the written word, by the presence of groups or individuals who
could read and write. They lived on the margins of literacy. (Goody,
1968, p. 5)
The 'margins of literacy* surely accurately describes the greater part of

rural Greece (or Scotland) before the nineteenth century, and in dis-
cussing the oral folk poetry of either society we must account for the
relation between literate and oral traditions in more ways than by the
rise of the one at the expense of the other.
The written word has existed in most of Europe for at least two
thousand years, in Greece for nearly twice that long. In Greece the
interaction between literate and oral traditions (leaving aside the prob-
lems associated with Homer) goes back to the time of classical Athenian
tragedy, whose stories were for the most part culled from a wide variety
of often conflicting oral traditions, and may have become oral once
again in the performances of popular pantomimes in a later period. And
elsewhere in Europe signs of this complex interaction are beginning to
be examined. Peter Dronke, in an excellent study of a medieval Latin
ballad, shows how a poem belonging to the literary tradition, besides
reflecting identifiable literary influences, seems to derive from earlier
182
The demotic tradition and writing
forms of surviving folk ballads on the theme of the lover's ghost.
Dronke suggests a two-way influence as early as the tenth century if not
before: not only, he believes, did literate poets who knew their Ovid
and wrote in the learned language, Latin, allow themselves to be
influenced by folk poetry, but one of the pervasive influences on all
European balladry was the (written) Song of Songs, disseminated
through the church (Dronke, 1976). One need not accept all of Dronke's
arguments in detail (although I find them persuasive) but there is ample
evidence to support his main conclusion that literary and oral traditions
in Europe have not grown up in mutual isolation (cf. Finnegan, 1977,
pp. 166-7).
Evidence of a different sort, for cheerful competition between the
oral bard and the story-teller who used a book, is to be found in the
medieval Welsh Mabinogion:
And this story is called the Dream of Rhonabwy. And here is the
reason why no one, neither bard nor story-teller, knows the Dream
without a book - by reason of the number of colours that were on
the horses, and all that variety of rare colours both on the arms and
their trappings, and on the precious mantles, and the magic stones.
(Jones and Jones, 1974, p. 152) 1
B. THE DEMOTIC TRADITION AND WRITING

'It is clear', writes Professor Jack Goody (1968, p. 5), 'that even if
one's attention is centred only upon village life, there are large areas of
the world where the fact of writing and the existence of the book have
to be taken into account, even in discussing "traditional" societies.' How
this comes about had already been hinted at by R. Redfield: 'If we
enter a village within a civilization we see at once that the culture there
has been flowing into it from teachers who never saw that village, who
did their work in intellectual circles perhaps far away in space and
time' (quoted in Goody, 1968, p. 9).
Certainly if we enter a Greek village today, no matter how remote
and 'traditional', the signs of this are everywhere to be seen. Many of
them, such as the jukebox and the motor car, are of obviously recent
importation, but what about the churches (even the tiniest hamlets
often have several), the police station and the tax official? These are
the representatives of a distant and centralised authority, whether that
183
of the Patriarch, the Byzantine Emperor, the Ottoman Sultan or natio-

nal government. For more than two thousand years the rural com-
munities where Greek has been spoken have formed part of a civilisa-
tion (although not always the same one) in which literacy has been an
important instrument of government and medium for culture. When
we say, therefore, that the Greek folk songs of the demotic tradition
are oral what precisely do we mean?
The distinction between 'oral' and 'verbal' will not help us here,
since the greater part of all known oral poetry, including the Yugoslav
epics, must strictly speaking be assigned to the verbal 'word-of-mouth
tradition of a literate culture'. In fact the songs of the Greek demotic
tradition, like those of the Yugoslav guslari, are oral in the sense that
they appear to have been composed, performed and transmitted with-
out being written down and given a fixed form by those who did so.
But it would be naive to imagine that the singers of these songs had
never come into contact with writing, or with ideas, stories and infor-
mation disseminated by means of the written word. Certain key
concepts that are constantly reiterated in the songs have been shown
to be the result of a complex interplay between literary and popular
traditions. Such is the figure of Haros, the personification of death
(Alexiou, 1978), and many traditional themes and formulas in lament-
ing the dead seem to have had a similarly mixed background (Alexiou,
1974, passim).
Nor is there a lack of references in songs of the demotic tradition to
writing, pens and ink, and even schools. In a Karpathian song of
Andronikos (often dubiously identified with the ninth-century general
Andronikos Doukas), the child prodigy not only learns feats of arms at
an unnaturally early age, but goes to school at six and manages to write
by the age of nine (Mihailidis-Nouaros, 1928, pp. 273-4). Ballads of
child-murder often begin with the child safely out of the way at school
learning kondyli, that is, his letters, and arriving home unexpectedly to
find his mother in bed with a lover. And there is surely conscious irony
in the description of Papathymios, at one time 'young at letters, young
at his slates', who in his old age has become a leader of klefts and crafty
enough to deceive a monastery into opening its gates to his raiders
(Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 202-3).
These references are sufficient to remind us that the centuries of
Ottoman rule in Greece were not, as one is frequently given to under-
stand, an unrelieved dark age in which the twin lights of literacy and
literature were extinguished. Indeed one has only to read a reasonably
184
The historical tradition and writing
thorough history of modern Greek literature to realise that, although
often poor in quality, the quantity of literary production was scarcely
abated during these centuries. At no time in its development has the
demotic tradition really been isolated from writing, but it is only in
the last hundred and fifty years that it has begun to disintegrate. Before
attempting to account for this decline we must say something about the
historical tradition and the generalisation (after Mrs Hogg) that the use
of writing to record and disseminate oral songs is necessarily destruc-
tive to oral tradition.
C. THE HISTORICAL TRADITION AND WRITING

The professional rimadori and pyitdrides of Crete and Cyprus were, as
we saw in the last chapter, oral poets: many were and are illiterate or
able to read and write only with difficulty. Yet writing and the written
text are often prominent in the minds of these oral versifiers. If the
poet is unable to write himself, he values - and sometimes envies - the
power and permanence of the written word:
"H#eXa vd '/xat noirjTris, vd %epco vd ovvrdoocj
Kai TO xaMO oaq, rjpcoec, ek rd xapTia vd 7pdi//cj
I wish I were a poet, and able to write a story
and your destruction, heroes, I'd write out on paper.
Td ypdniiciTa 8ev r?£eupa, Kai vd JUT? tr\v %exdoco,
Tpayoi)81 TOV TT\V 'ena/ia, ndkd vd TT\V ^pvXd^cj.
(Fauriel, 1825, p. 356)
I couldn't write, and so as not to forget it,
I made it into a song, to hold on to it well.
Often the poems were published or written out on broadsheets which
would be declaimed by those who could read them, and there is no
doubt that the circulation of these broadsheets has also played a part
in the transmission of the songs (Pantelidis, 1923; Petropoulos, 1954a,
p. 231). Petropoulos cites an example of the modern transmission of
'Daskaloyannis' which shows the interaction between oral composition
and memorisation of a written text:
When in Hora Sfakion last year a descendant of Skordylis [Barba-
Pantzelios' amanuensis] wished to sing the song, he sang several
185
lines which he had memorised from a broadsheet. But he would
often depart from the initial text, he would modify lines and leave
many out in his haste to reach the end, so as to give the dramatic
story in its entirety. (Petropoulos, 1954a, p. 232)
If he was able to write, a rimadoros would often commit his song to
paper, although he might not have the means to publish it. A case in
point is the song by Nikolaos Markakis, in an autograph manuscript
dated 5 May 1895, commemorating the consecration of the Cathedral
of St Minas in Iraklion, which had taken place three weeks before.
The poem is 228 lines long and the poet must have worked fast to have
had it finished and copied out in the time. What's more, on his own
admission he was a villager and his knowledge of writing poor; and
according to the editor of the manuscript this was no false modesty but
the plain truth, borne out by the poet's painstaking but unpractised
calligraphy (Alexiou, L., 1956). It is almost impossible therefore that
Markakis could have composed his poem on the page in only three
weeks. Also, the poem is in the usual couplets, many of which are struc-
turally connected by the repetitive devices we have learned to associate
with improvised mantinades. Clearly Markakis composed his poem
orally and then, once it was complete, began the laborious task of
putting it down on paper. And we need not seek far to discover the
reason for the poet's desire to fix his poem in writing or for the speed
with which he did so: he tells us himself that he was in competition
with the local newspaper (11. 225-6).
In Cyprus the pyitdrides seem to have had, if anything, greater suc-
cess in circulating texts of their songs, and seem to have advertised
them with less diffidence than their Cretan counterparts:
116 vav X^PTIV vd Trap ere, nvpioi, vd x^PVTe,
KL ac Sojori /cdtê &5ep<poc TO 6 n itpoaipeirai.
116 vav fiifiXiov Trdpere, &v #eXere, no fievav,
vd pXenere H y'iverai \ Tr\v Kimpo Ka^rjiiepa.
KXedvdriq 2d/3j3ac ypcuperai r 1 6vojia TO biKbv iiov>
\ TOV 1AT? MdfJLav, nvpioi, ev TO yevvqTtKov JJLOV.
(Politis, N. G. 1915, pp. 504-5)
Take each a [ballad] sheet, gentlemen, if you please,
and let each brother give what he chooses.
Take each a [ballad] sheet, if you will, from me,
and see what's happening in Cyprus every day.
186
The historical tradition and writing
Kleanthis Sawas is my name and it's written there,
Ayios Mamas, gentlemen, is my birthplace.
We do not know how these broadsheets were originally transcribed -
by the poet himself or by an amanuensis; but it is probable that
many Cypriot pyitarides could not themselves read with fluency the
printed copies of their own ballads which they hawked round the
audience after a performance. Printing was not introduced into Cyprus
until 1878 (Papadopoullos, 1967, p. 4), so that large-scale distribution
of song texts would have been impossible before that date. The histori-
cal tradition in Cyprus had, of course, been flourishing long before this,
and, as in Crete, seems deliberately to have imitated vernacular literary
texts. Writing was certainly known to the pyitarides before 1878, and
the same envy and emulation of the fixed, written text as we obser-
ved in Crete can also be detected in Cypriot compositions. But the
introduction of printing and the sudden availability of printed texts in
large numbers, far from sounding the death knell of the oral tradition
or destroying the oral poet's power to compose oral poetry, resulted in
an explosion of printed oral texts. According to the bibliography of
N. G. Kyriazis, published in 1935, the first known song text appeared
in 1889, followed by two the next year and no less than fifteen in
1892. After that the number of publications fluctuates slightly, with a
marked decline during the First World War, rising to an average of
nearly forty-five a year for the last five years covered by the biblio-
graphy (Papadopoullos, 1967, pp. 42-3). The decline of this tradition,
both in Cyprus and Crete, many years later can hardly be because
'those singers who accept the idea of a fixed text are lost to oral tra-
ditional processes' (Lord, 1960, p. 137).
There is another sense, however, in which literacy and the assump-
tion of certain of its consequences are fundamental to the existence of
the historical, oral tradition, and which also serves to distinguish it from
the equally oral demotic tradition. We saw that a primary function of
this tradition was to report and record 'news' for entertainment. Deriv-
ing in all probability from the popular chronicles of the late middle
ages, an essential requirement of a song in this tradition is that the
story, although doubtless embellished after the singer's fancy, should
literally have happened. It is news, not fiction; history, not myth. And
'historical consciousness', as Felix Jacoby has argued, 'is not older than
historical literature' (quoted in Goody and Watt, 1968, p. 48 n).
This essential difference between the historical and demotic traditions
is amply illustrated by the use of dates in the former. The synchronic
187
attitude to time which is found in the Greek demotic tradition, as well
as in wholly non-literate traditions, is incompatible with the historical
perspective implied by recording the day, month and year of a given
event. The man who begins his song,
'2 TCL xtXta dxTCUCooui ews -nevr\vra e£r?

In the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty six,
is separated by a whole cultural tradition, of which he himself may

scarcely be aware, from his compatriot who begins,
'0 Aowrfc \pvxoidaxei KI r) yfj rove rpotiaooei

(Laografia 1, 1909, p. 242)
Diyenis is in the throes of death, and the earth trembles in
fear of him.
The demotic singer in the second example is unconcerned with when

Diyenis was in the throes of death. Characters on the scale of Diyenis,
Kostantinos and the other recurring heroes of the demotic songs cannot
be confined within an age and among real, familiar happenings. They
exist as a paradigm in the imagination of singers and audiences, and
their existence there belongs to now and always, untouched by histori-
cal time. The characters and situations of the historical songs, on the
other hand, are always familiar. A conventional Providence is substi-
tuted for the miraculous, the location is clearly indicated and usually
well-known, and the story of murder, uprising or devastation set against
the background of everyday life.
Lord encountered such songs in Yugoslavia and, recognising the
significance of their use of dates, assumed that they must have been
written and not part of the oral tradition (1960, pp. 132-3). He may
be right about the Yugoslav songs, but the singers in Crete, Cyprus and
occasionally elsewhere who betray their historical sense by the use of
dates cannot be described otherwise than as oral poets. They were,
however, oral poets who had once been to school and had had the
experience of learning from books. What is more, they had perceived
the value for themselves, as professional entertainers, of imitating the
texts and the attitudes which had come down to them from a literate -
and better off - section of society.
188
Decline of oral tradition
D. THE DECLINE OF ORAL TRADITION IN GREECE

Mrs Hogg's objections to writing down and publishing oral folk poetry
do not then seem to be fully valid, at least as far as writing is concer-
ned. Most attempts to explain the decline of, particularly, the creative
component in oral poetry during the last hundred years have concen-
trated on the act of writing and its effect on the oral poet. But when
we consider the oral traditions which have flourished in Greece we find
nothing to suggest that confrontation with the technique of writing
and with fixed texts of oral poems has any predictable effect on the
oral poet. For many hundreds of years singers who composed and sang
in the demotic tradition seem to have ignored writing altogether, while
the professionals of the historical tradition quickly learnt to exploit its
possibilities as an accessory to oral composition and performance.
Today, however, many young people learn the texts of songs at school,
and the effects of this are aptly demonstrated in a recording, made
from oral performance, of the ballad 'The Dead Brother' which follows
word-for-word the text published by N. G. Politis.2 Since Politis' ver-
sion is an academic collage made up from many different oral variants,
its existence in oral tradition can only be due to deliberate learning of
this text.
The suggestion I wish to make is that a creative oral tradition is
adversely affected, not by the impact of writing on singers, but by that
of reading on their audiences. The assumption is often made that a
written text presupposes a reading public - for example by Lord:
'Writing as a new medium will mean that the former singer will have a
different audience, one that can read' (1960, p. 131). But neither the
great majority of British broadsides, nor Skordilis' transcription of
'Daskaloyannis', nor the proliferation of Cypriot broadsheets, were ever
intended to be read, silently, alone by the fireside, or still less at a
school desk. They were commercially viable because the singer who
distributed them could count on the desire of members of his audience
to emulate his performance. At no time until very recently would the
public for these printed songs have included enough people able or will-
ing merely to read them for the business to have been profitable. On
the other hand the farm hand in town for the day, who hears a new and
enthralling song performed in the market square, will willingly pay the
price of a copy and spend an hour over beer with his friends in the
effort to construe it, for the pleasure of being able to go home the
first, as he hopes, to sing or even just tell the latest story.
189
Even in western Europe it was not until the nineteenth century that
the practice of reading for pleasure became general. Reading, especially
among people who had had little opportunity to become proficient at
it, was normally a way of learning rather than a means of entertain-
ment. Those who did read for pleasure at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century were still a class apart, sharply divided from the
majority by manners and education. What must have distressed Mrs
Hogg about Scott's publication of her ballads was that they would
inevitably become the property of people who lived in quite a different
world, that they would be read by people of refined taste who would
judge them by alien standards and despise or patronise them, so that less
sophisticated people would be ashamed to sing and take pleasure in them.
In Greece the many volumes of folk songs published in the nine-
teenth century were intended to appeal to the opposite end of the
social spectrum from the peasant audiences for whom they had been
sung, and to people whose tastes and interests were remote from theirs.
Fauriel in his preface set out the reasons why he thought the songs in his
collection should be read (see pp. 6-7 above), thus guaranteeing that
those who did so would approach them and respond to them in ways
incomprehensible to a Greek villager of the time. This process of aliena-
tion went further as the century progressed and the songs were edited
and interpreted by the educated in conformity with their own precon-
ceptions. The child at a village school today is taught his own folk cul-
ture from books. He learns that Diyenis was the medieval champion of
Hellenism and Christianity and that Politis' text of The Dead Brother'
is the 'correct' one. In these circumstances it is no wonder that tradi-
tional singers today have generally lost the ability to re-compose songs
as they sing them, since they have been taught that they never had it.
The wheel has now gone full circle. Education, based in part upon a
falsification of the oral song tradition by a small reading public, has
now enlarged that public to include the villager who had previously
relied on the oral tradition for his entertainment. Together with the
ability to read, the former audiences for oral poetry have discovered the
'correct' versions and interpretations of the songs they used to hear.
Now that they know that 'The Dead Brother' is 'correct' in Politis'
version, why should they stop to listen to Barba-Yannis' rendering,
when it is full of mistakes?
But this is only part of the reason for the gradual decline of oral folk
poetry in Greece. The first sign of decay can be seen in a couplet which
seems to have been composed in 1827:
190
Decline of oral tradition
°OXa r' dpneua apixevftovv lie aepa, jie Kovma,

rob Konpavr} TO Panopi aptievftei fie ^corvd.
(Kyriakidis, 1965, p. 96)
All the sailing ships sail with wind and oars,
but Kokrani's steamship sails with fire.
The occasion for the couplet was evidently the arrival of the first steam-
boat, the Karteria, to be seen in Greek waters, a move for which Lord
Cochrane (Kokrani) was largely responsible. Its main statement, with
its naive tautology, is already quaint. A sophisticated tradition has been
forced into primitivism. The same tendency is more marked in songs
composed to mark the arrival of the Bavarian Otto, the first king of
Greece, in 1833:
Tcop' eydaoev 6 /facriAidc, ra>p' eydaoev 6 "O0co*>,

KT\ 6 oupavbs xa/zoTeAa, K ' ol KCLIMOI XovXovb'fiovv.
Kamrapalot, yeirfere, /cat oeis, naXXrjKapade^'
8ev elvai -nXeov 6 Katpoq TOV SOXLOV inrdpidTra-rta^vrj,
Tcbp' e^pdaoev 6 ]3aatXtdc, rcbp' eydaoev 6 <b pay not.
(Legrand, 1874, p. 166;cf. Passow, 1860, pp. 234-6)
Now the king has come, now Otto is here;
and the sky is smiling and the plains are flowering.
Kapetdnii, flee, and you too, boastful heroes;
the days of poor old Barba-Yannis are over,
now the king has come, now he is here, the Frank.
The traditional form and language of the demotic tradition are here
operating under considerable strain - first, because the whole subject
matter, the arrival of the foreign king, belongs to the new and unfamiliar
world of diplomacy, of a Greek ruling class and its pompous official
language. The word pleon (1. 4) belongs to katharevousa, the 'purifying'
form of the language which had just been adopted by the new Greek
state, and there may also be a slight uneasiness implicit in the form of
the king's name Othon, which helpfully fits the metre but lacks the
familiarity of the vernacular Othonas. The tenor of the song is also new
in the tradition, as the singer was obliged to veil his contempt for the
'Frank' (a pejorative term for a westerner) under the form of a
panegyric.
An unusually successful example of a song which attempts to reflect
a serious reponse to changed conditions is this one from western Greece
191
which laments the fixing by international treaty of the Greek frontier
at the town of Arta in Epiros, in 1881:
2 ' ovXou rbv KOO/JLO i-aarepid, a' ov\ov rbv KOO[XOV fpuoc,
KOX ora due a /iac ra xcopid vov\o nanvbq KL avrapa.
*H yi avrdpa V arc' TCL KXavixara KL T) KaTayyva. am* TO vrepri.
- Amê/id ae, nLrponr) /cat ov, j3pe paoikea,
nob Pap are TCL ovvopa orris 'Aprac TO yuxpvpi,
OTT)V "ApTa KCLL OTX\V npe]3efa, \jjr]\d orb Ueptorepi.
Kal TX\V KaX)[xkvr\ Wpd[iavTa TT)V nbfiovve OTT) fieor].
(Spandonidi, 1939, p. 24, No. 39)
In all the world the sky is clear, in all the world the sun shines,
[but] in our own villages all is smoke and storm.
The storm is made by our tears, the mist by our sadness.
'A curse on you, committee, and on you, old king,
who made the frontier at the bridge of Arta,
at Arta and at Preveza and up at Peristeri.
And wretched Pramanta is cut in half.'
Only one line defeated the traditional formula systems at the singer's
disposal - that which includes the word 'committee' and the katha-
revousa ('correct') form of the word 'king'. The structure of the song
is substantially that of other laments on a variety of subjects, as even
is the structure of the offending line: curses are often formulated
according to the same pattern.
But a world governed by committees and international treaties can-
not convincingly be described or evoked by a conservative system of
formulaic patterns and recurring themes. Too many things changed
and too quickly in the life of the rural villager, as his village came to
be incorporated into the Greek state, for his traditional modes of
expression in song to keep pace. With the growth of education the first
thing he learns is that he is illiterate, rustic and backward. And the
more he learns that is unfamiliar to him, the less adequate is his stock
of traditional formulas and themes to express his reponse to it. The
result is a gradual fossilisation of the song tradition. Versions of songs
which have the approval of the educated come to be accepted as
'authentic' and then, since there is nothing more to be said or done
with them, remembered as imperfectly as the rest of what one learns in
primary school, and finally perhaps forgotten altogether.
192
The twentieth century
E. THE DEMOTIC TRADITION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

This trend has been observable in Greece throughout the present cen-
tury, although it would not be true to suggest that as a result oral folk
poetry there is now dead. The expropriation of folk song by the educa-
ted class in the nineteenth century has also had the positive result that
most Greek literary poets of stature owe an enormous debt to folk
poetry and many of the themes of the demotic tradition have become
staple themes in the works of such different writers as Solomos,
Sikelianos, Kazantzakis, Seferis and Elytis. Nor is the survival of the oral
tradition confined to its influence on modern literature and culture,
which is diverse in the extreme. Parts, at least, of the oral demotic tra-
dition have continued to flourish after the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury and have adapted successfully to changed circumstances.
(i) Rebetika
If the growth of education and the rise of new values tended to make
traditional ways of composing and singing obsolete in the eyes of the
villager who saw a new prosperous future dawning in the towns, there
was one class of society on which they had quite the opposite effect.
This, very broadly, consisted of the urban population who, having
moved into the towns and cities, had failed to reap such benefits as
were to be had. These were people of limited, but varying, degrees of
education and literacy, but who saw no prospect of advancement in
adopting the values of the growing middle class. The movement to the
towns in Greece had begun in the eighteenth century, and the Greek
population of the great commercial centres of the Ottoman Empire,
Istanbul and Izmir (Smyrna), had. been settled there for much longer.
The song tradition of the urban lower classes had had adequate time
to develop, although almost nothing is known of it before the begin-
ning of this century. But whatever its beginnings, this urban song tradi-
tion was by its nature likely to be immune to the effects of the values
and attitudes propagated by the nation state. And for a time it seems
that it was.
It is often said that the rebetika are songs of the criminal underworld
(Petropoulos, I., 1968; Butterworth and Schneider, 1975); and there is
no lack of references in the songs to prisons and violence. But hashish-
smoking, the one activity most widely extolled in songs of this type,
193
did not really count as a criminal activity before the introduction of
new drug laws in 1936, and for all the violence we encounter in the
songs, their singers have surprisingly little to say on the subject of
organised crime. Many songs recorded from the twenties and thirties
appear to have been composed and performed by professional artistes
who made a living out of appearances in the tekedes (hashish houses)
and cafe-aman (oriental coffee houses), where audiences would have
included a wide range of people from local shopkeepers and labourers
to petty criminals of various sorts. It was not until the 1930s that the
police began to gain the upper hand in certain areas of Athens and
Piraeus, and when the law was enforced at best on a random basis the
dividing line between criminal and non-criminal cannot have been very
clear-cut.
The term rebetika by which these songs have come to be known has
yet to be satisfactorily explained, and occurs relatively rarely in the
songs themselves. Opinions differ considerably on the precise nature
and delimitations of rebetika songs; but many of their structures and
themes are taken from the demotic tradition, and the variants of songs
found in different recordings strengthen the belief that this was an oral
tradition, a natural development of the materials and techniques of the
rural demotic songs in response to new circumstances; although at least
for the period most fully documented, from about 1920 onwards, it
was an oral tradition with a marked emphasis on personal, professional
composition.
An event which had an important impact on the urban tradition of
rebetika was the defeat of the Greek armies in western Turkey in
1922, and the ensuing exchange of populations between the two coun-
tries. Constantinople was exempted from the exchange, but a high pro-
portion of the million or so Christians deported from Turkey to Greece
came from Smyrna, which had been almost totally destroyed by the
advancing army of Kemal Atatiirk. Most settled in Piraeus and Salonica,
and it is often said that the rise of rebetika in Greece dates from the
time of this influx of refugees from Smyrna. In the songs commemorat-
ing these events it is characteristic that the grief of the refugee is
centred upon a purely personal bitterness, the loss of a homeland for
which 'Mother Greece' can never be an adequate substitute. Often these
refugees were more fluent in Turkish than in Greek; if they came from
Smyrna they were used to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan environment
compared to which Athens or Salonica at that time must have seemed
puritanical and provincial:
194
Ti oe fxeXei eoevave tvnb nov elytai £ycb,

arr' TO KapaT&oi, <pd>? yov, fj an*' TO Kop6e\to;
Tt oe fieXet koevave KI 6X0 /ie pcordq
bird noub xcopto eljiat eycb, (5upoy 5e yC ayanas;
'ATT' ro*> TOTTO nov et/zat eyCo, %evpovv v aya-novv,
%ebpouv TOP KarjiJid vd Kpvôvv, %ei)povv vd yXevTWv.
Tt oe fieXei kokvave KI bXo \ie pcordc,
d^pov be fxe Xvnaoai, ycbq fjtov, /cat /xe wpayvd<;\
'Ayr' rr? îivpvr) 'epxoixai vd j3poo naprjyopid,

vd ]3pco iieo* OTX\V %Adr\va lias dydnrj /a dyKaXid.
(Schorelis, 1977, p. 126)
What is it to you where I come from,
from Karatasi, light of my life, or from Kordelio?
What is it to you, that you keep asking me
what village I'm from, since you don't love me?
Where I come from they know how to love,
they know how to hide their sorrow, and how to enjoy themselves.
What is it to you, that you keep asking me,

since you've no pity for me, light of my life, and torment me?
I've come from Smyrna to find some comfort,

to find in this Athens of ours a loving embrace.
Here was a development of the oral demotic tradition capable of
expressing the attitudes, values and aspirations of a class of people
caught up in situations very far removed from those depicted in the
rural songs. Up until the end of the thirties these songs retained their
inventiveness and subtlety, even though the advent of sound recording
had added an element of commercial competition and a sense of per-
sonal ownership of songs. (Composition remained largely an oral pro-
cess, involving recombining the themes, formulas and lines of other
songs - often 'claimed' by other composers.) Then this tradition, too,
began to decline. Part of the reason was the gradual removal of the
social conditions in which the rebetika had flourished, and in particu-
lar the drive begun by the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936 to stamp out
the use of narcotics and the censorship of all reference to them on
gramophone records. 3 (This law was enforced as recently as 1978, to
prohibit the reissue of historic rebetika recordings.) But undoubtedly
195
another cause had to do with commercial recording. When songs began
to be distributed by means of gramophone records the immediate effect
on the oral tradition seems to have been comparable to that of the
introduction of printing on the historical tradition in Cyprus: the fixity
of the recorded text did not in the least inhibit the inventiveness of oral
composers. What it did, however, was to introduce the songs to
audiences for which they had never been intended. Rebetika towards
the end of the thirties began to be fashionable.
When in the mid-thirties Markos Vamvakaris, the foremost of a
generation of professional bouzouki players in Athens, began playing
at Votanikos, a slum district in the suburbs of the city, the scene as he
later described it was exaggerated, certainly, but not fictitious:
It was pandemonium each evening. That meant work, lots of work.

All sorts of people would come down there. High society aristocrats
as well as manges and bums and they raved it up till morning. All
the froth of Athenian society came along. The whole of Kolonaki.
They wouldn't dance, though, they just sat there. (Vamvakaris,
1973, p. 175)
And at the same period the bouzouki, from being despised as a symbol
of depravity and crime, began to acquire social cachet. Probably with-
out intentional irony, Vamvakaris charted its rise in a song composed
about the same time:
MTTOVÔVKL yXevri TOV PTOVPLOL

nob y\evrayes TOUS pay net
KL Ol nXoUOLOL OOV KOPCLPe, jJinOVÔVKL flOV
yteyakes vaToapdynes.
Tcbpa ae 0dXcu> ae
/cat ae odkopva kn
dKOfxa KL and TO |3toXt,
Svo onakes napd navco.
Me aoavoep av£ftr\K.es
ae noXvuaTOLKies
KL b a i l e e KaL youorapave, idnov£ovKL fiov
Ta?pa 6' ave&eLS nu> \jjrj\a

da ipraoeLS Kai OTOP 'Apr?
Kai 6 'AnoWcop 6 0e6s, jinovôvKL yov
KL afrros da ok youorapeL.
(Vamvakaris, 1973, pp. 130-1)
196
Bouzouki, life's delight,
you used to delight the manges
and the rich, my bouzouki,
did you down.
Now they've spread out carpets for you
and in their salons placed you higher
even than the violin, my bouzouki,
by two whole rungs.
You've risen in the lift
to apartment blocks
and played, and enfant gate ladies, my bouzouki,
found you to their taste.
Now you're going to rise still higher,
you'll get as far as Mars
and even Apollo the god, my bouzouki,
will find he likes you really.
After the Second World War singers in the rebetika tradition (which
after all was firmly commercial by this time and possibly had always
been) directed their compositions more and more towards a middle-
class audience. As the prosperity of audiences and singer-composers
alike increased, the references to low life, the underworld and dubiously
legal activities became distant and conventionalised and, what is more,
conventionally shocking. This song of 1949, composed by Vasilis
Tsitsanis to words perhaps by a hack writer, seems intended to supply
a frisson of horror and disapproval by its portrayal from a safe distance
of (conventionally) unconventional behaviour:
Tpe£e, idayna, vd pcorTjaeic vd oov novv nova einai ycj'

einai yco yvvauca iplva, VTepnevTeptooa,
nod TOVS ttvTpeq odv rd fdpia TOW fxneyXeptoa.
Ae fie ovyiavovv aydnes gravel vd KaXonepvcj-

KaBe j3pd5t vd rpaj3dcj TO HOTX\PL \ioo
/cat vd OipdôvTat Xefevres yui \ajipi (iov.
Ilcix Sd y'wio yio 5UCT? OOV, ndtye vd TO

5e yovoTdpco rte 7rap6Xec, oov iriyridriKa,
Ta(tepve<; KOX ard Kafxnape yevvrfir^Ka.
(Petropoulos, I., 1968, p. 239)
197
Run, mangos, get them to tell you who I am;
I'm a woman of quality, a derbenderissa,
and I've played with men as I do with dice.
Love affairs don't move me, it's enough to enjoy myself;
every evening to pick up my glass
and have young men kill each other for my sake.
I'll never be yours - give up talking about it;

I don't like idle talk, I've told you,
I was born in the tavernas and the cabarets.4
(ii) Rural songs
Outside the urban centres where the singers of rebetika had scant
respect for education and authority, the art of recombining traditional
themes and formulas in response to new situations seems to have
declined rapidly during the twentieth century. Only in those cases
where history has continued to repeat itself, have events provoked a
response in the traditional manner. This song of the German parachute
landings in Crete in 1941 escapes incongruity because its language, form
and attitude to the events described are consistent with those of other
songs of different periods which evoke similar experiences:
- Yla&ui, K* eivra Vat ol jtnraXXcorec, orbv Kaymo ol Kaintaves,

aYf efina ydjio Kapovve f? ncwrjyvpi 'exovv;
- Ofire KOX ydjio Kavovve, ovre Kal ircwqyvpL,
ixbvo kneoav Yepiiavoi tvno r' bepoirXapa
Kid,pxi>oave TOV iroXeiio OTOV K&HTTO ol Ka/XTrtrec.
(Academy of Athens, 1963, p. 179)
*Lads, what's that shooting, and bells ringing in the plain,

perhaps they're having a wedding or a festival?'
'It's not that they're having a wedding, or a festival either,
but Germans have been landing from the aeroplanes
and the plainsmen have started fighting in the plain.'
And in a similar way the formulaic patterns once regularly applied to

the loss of a kleft or his band are effective and moving in this lament
for the reprisal killings of the villagers of Distomo in Roumeli in 1944:
(T2p') era -novkoK e\akr\oev npbs rf?c Aet/3a6tdc TO petia
Kal Koiraye (na&ux /i') TO AtOTOfxo.
198
T
( fipe) iiotpoXor/ovoe (na&ia fx) KL eXeyev, (cop') notpokoyei /cat
Xeet-
- XTO AioTOfio (7rai5d ju) oKorcovovve.. .
(McNeish, 1965, side 1, track 4)
(Ore) a bird gave voice towards the stream of Levadia
and was looking (my lads) at Distomo..
(Ore) it lamented (my lads) and said, (ore) it laments and says,
'At Distomo (my lads) they are killing people. . .'
These examples, by their relative rarity, make the exception that
proves the rule. Invasions and wholesale killings by an occupying power
are events that recur throughout Greek history. In these cases the tra-
dition may still have the power to transform history into myth and thus
to relegate such terrible and irreversible events to a place in a timeless
pattern. But most of the events and situations with which the Greek
villager has been faced in this century have been the consequences of
new economic and social conditions: neither drastic enough, usually,
to call forth this kind of response, nor, without irrelevance .or quaint-
ness, assimilable into an existing pattern of song.
(Hi) Andartika
The same period of the Second World War and the civil war which fol-
lowed in the Greek mainland, gave rise to a great many songs among
the various partisan groups in the mountains. Known generally as
andartika (partisan songs) these songs were banned from public perfor-
mance in Greece after the civil war and did not surface again until
191 A, when legal recognition was again granted to the Communist
Party. The same censorship which can be used to block any mention of
narcotics on gramophone records also continues to impede the issue of
andartika on record, presumably because of the political content of
very many of them, and at least until 1977 the only record of these
songs to have appeared was in a French translation. The songs that have
recently reemerged have mostly been those of the E.A.M.-E.L.A.S.
groups which from the beginning had been dominated by the Greek
Communist Party,5 and the purpose of the revival has been overtly
political. The content of these songs is all too often militaristic, jingling
propaganda, and their tunes tend to be military or popular tunes bor-
rowed from elsewhere. The majority of these must be counted as 'popu-
lar song' rather than folk song (cf. I.F.M.C., 1955, p. 23), but it is
interesting to discover that some songs of E.A.M.-E.L.A.S., as well as
199
of the more right-wing E.D.E.S group, appear to have been composed
by guerrilla fighters in the field, in circumstances probably very similar
to those of the klefts more than a hundred years before. The forms,
attitudes and themes of kleftic songs are sometimes revived among the
anddrtika, and it is probable that this was not an artificial revival but a
natural expression of partisans who had grown up hearing and singing
traditional kleftic songs, subsequently finding themselves in closely
parallel circumstances.
The song of Nikos Pakos is composed entirely of traditional formu-
las. The interjections addressed to the hero of the song, breaking the
continuity of the lines, are also traditional in kleftic songs as they are
sung.
T' e\ovv rq 'Hneipov TCL (3ovva,

nariiieve NIKO UCLKO JJL
KCLL OTeKovv PovpKootJieva,
N'LKO UCLKO JJL avrpeu^yieve.
Wiva xaXdf i TCL (lapel,
Kariiieve N'LKO UCLKO fx
\xr\va flpoxv ret Sepvei
N'LKO UCLKO {JL avrpeiojixeve.
Owe xaXdf t TCL Papei
Kariiieve Nuco UCLKO JJL
0VT6 fipOXV TCL 8epV€L
N'LKO UCLKO fi dvTpeiojixeve.
KXatê TOP KaireTavio TOVS
Kar^jJieve N'LKO UCLKO JJL
onov elvcLL OKOTioiievos
NIKO UCLKO JJL avTpeLGiiieve.
(Anon., 1975, p. 59)
What is the matter with the mountains of Epiros,

my poor Nikos Pakos
that they are shrouded so,
Nikos Pakos my brave man.
Perhaps they're lashed with hail, perhaps they're whipped with
rain.
It's not that they're lashed with hail, nor that they're whipped
with rain.
They're weeping for their kapetdnios who has been killed.
200
Other songs of the partisans show varying degrees of a hybrid style,
evidently based on traditional forms but often with a refrain which
seems to belong to popular song (cf. Anon, 1975, pp. 12, 56, 69).
(iv) Distichs
The most lasting type of folk song has proved to be the rhyming dis-
tich. The many lyrical songs which are still composed using traditional
material (love songs, wedding songs and funeral laments) are very often
now cast in this form, and the use of the rhyming couplet, which in
Fauriel's day was confined to the islands and towns, has now spread
throughout the mainland of Greece as well. The art is still most deve-
loped, however, in Crete, the islands of the Dodecanese and Cyprus. In
the villages in all three places a substantial part of a wedding feast or
paniyiri consists of impromptu mantinades or tshiattismata sung
usually by the men, either in dialogue form or in rotation. In Karpathos
it is the custom on the second day of a wedding feast for each of the
male guests (often the whole male population of the village) to toast
the bride and sing a mantinada in her honour. Most of the men are able
to provide a suitable mantinada of their own, either put together on
the spot or perhaps, if they are less inspired on the occasion, or less
inventive, one that they have used before; while a man who is unable to
express himself with the required tact and humour in couplet form will
use a traditional, well-known couplet of praise to accompany his toast.
(He may not, however, use a couplet which is known to have been
composed by someone else in the village.)
One of the reasons for the survival of the distich as a medium for
traditional composition is its extreme versatility. To make a song of
any length, using largely given formulas and themes, is difficult if not
impossible outside a relatively restricted range of subject matter. But
to compose a two-line epigram using the same structural techniques is
hardly more difficult whatever the theme chosen. Most of the distichs
published in folk song collections are innocent enough compliments
addressed by young men to young girls. But there is a possibility of
humour and amusing word-play in these couplets which a skilled singer
will use to the full, as in this mantinada told me by a singer and lyra-
player from Crete, which makes tongue-twisting use of the very similar
words in the Cretan dialect for a boy and a girl:
0eXet KapvSt Kapvdud KCU neXiooa TO fieXt,
OeXei KoireXt noireXui KOX KOireXid KoneXt.
201
A walnut needs a walnut tree and the honey-bee the honey,
a boy needs a girl and a girl a boy.
Or a mantindda may sum up, slightly ruefully, an infinite wisdom which
is refreshingly untraditional in its lack of reverence for a traditional
past:
TOVTOV TOV Kooiio, vovpi jiov, tiWot TOV eixav npcbTa,
edd TOV exofie KL e/xetc, jJ.d Se /idc TOV £5co/ca.
(Lioudaki, 1936, p. 251, No. 32)
This world, young man, belonged to others before us,
now it's ours, but they didn't give it to us.
An equal diversity is found in the Dodecanese and in Cyprus, where
the competition between opposing tshiattistes is still held as part of the
Kataklysmos (Ascension) celebrations in Larnaca on 1 July. The sub-
jects most favoured in Cypriot tshiatttsmata today are as various as in
the mantinddes of Crete and the Dodecanese. Organised competitions
have encouraged a fluency of direct personal insult, and alongside the
ubiquitous theme of love there flourish many fine tshiattismata dedica-
ted to the elaboration of sexual fantasy. There is nothing that cannot
be expressed in this form, no matter how serious or banal. In 1975 I
was present at a festival in the Cypriot village of Ormidia, where there
was a large encampment of refugees from the Turkish invasion of the
year before. The occasion was no means a melancholy one, for all that,
and the tshiattismata were declaimed vigorously, with characteristically
loud amplification. In this 'couplet' (in fact it spills over into three
rhyming lines) the word foussdto (army) is a Byzantine military term
going back to the ninth century, and now obsolete except in popular
tradition, while 'NATO' with which it rhymes requires no explanation.
Fid vd p0ei 7? f cot? naked ev ev rcopd dwdrov,
yt e£i xt^Kie? noikpaev TO Tovpicuco ÔVOOCLTO,
0eXere KL eoeiq, 7? XOWTCL KCLL TO NATO.
To bring back the old life is now not possible,

with six thousand victims of the Turkish army -
not even should you wish it, [Greek] junta and NATO.
202
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1 It cannot be established exactly when Fauriel began seriously to plan his col-
lection. Ibrovac believes that the project was 'very probably' not conceived
before the 1821 uprising. But Fauriel's acquaintance with the prominent expa-
triates Korais and Basilis goes back to 1793 (Ibrovac, 1966, p. 114).
2 Traditionally regarded as above reproach, Passow seems to have been guilty
in a small way of the practice of conflating two or more variants to arrive at an
'established text' of a song, for which N. G. Politis has been justly criticised
(Politis, A., 1973, p. vii). But it is worth remembering that very- few texts
published in the nineteenth century are likely to be exact reproductions of
oral performances.
CHAPTER 2
1 The attempt is frequently made, all the same. Professor Linos Politis, other-
wise eminently sane in his judgements, has even written of their 'guileless
demotic charm' (1973, p. 39).
2 The grounds for these accusations are slight. The question of idolatry is pre-
sumably open to theological debate, although the profound Christian faith of
the Anastenarides is not in doubt. The charge of orgiastic behaviour is quite
unfounded and seems to be based on the (non-proven) theory of the ritual's
Dionysian origin.
3 It is interesting to note that, although names of characters in Greek songs are
by no means stable and substitution of one name for another is commonly
found, the name Kostantinos rarely varies in versions of this song. In the brief
Sarakatsan version (Tziatzios, 1928, p. 31) the hero is called Yannis, and in
the Pontic version (Lampsidis, 1960, pp. 40-3) Marandon (probably meaning
the 'unwithered one'), but St Constantine is still his patron saint.
4 While in most of the versions so far discussed the sheep, dogs, etc. come by
their fine accoutrements, if they have any, miraculously, in examples 1 and 5
they are given them by the shepherd-wife as here; and in example 3 there is
an interesting verbal parallel with this song, in the word asimogiourtanou
(silver ribbon). The word giortdnia, or giourtanou, interestingly enough echoes
the Yorddni potamo (River Jordan) which is only found in the Anastenaria
version.
203
Notes to pages 34-44
5 The relation between song texts and ritual in a Greek example and its implica-
tions for the existing scholarly taxonomy of folk songs has been discussed
from the anthropologist's point of view by Michael Herzfeld (1974; 1977).
See also Chapter 8, on ritual songs, whose content and structure are specifi-
cally determined by their ritual function, and whose performance is wholly
restricted to the ritual context.
CHAPTER 3
1 Sources for the numbered examples in this chapter are as follows. (1)
Petropoulos, 1959, p. 227, No. 27A, 1. 7; (2) Laografia 3, 1911, p. 266, No.
8, 1. 2; (3) Ioannou, 1966, p. 424, 1. 4; (4) Passow, 1860, p. 257, No. 353,
1. 3; (5) Laografia 5, 1915, p. 107, No. 96B, 1. 3; (6) Laografia 5, 1915, p. 71,
No. 37B, 1. 4; (7) von Haxthausen, 1935, p. 48, 1. 3; (8) Jeannaraki, 1876, p.
94, No. 72, 1. 12; (9) Laografia 19, 1961, p. 373, No. 24, 1. 8; (10) Passow,
1860, p. 388, 11. 1-11; (11) Petropoulos, 1959, p. 65, No. 47, 1. 1; (12)
Spandonidi, 1939, p. 3, No. 1, 1. 4; (13) Tziatzios, 1928, p. 52, No. 126, 1. 5;
(14) Petropoulos, 1959, p. 45, No. 16A, 1. 6; (15) Tziatzios, 1928, p. 65, No.
159, 1. 1; (16) Laografia 1, 1909, pp. 224-5, 1. 12; (17) = ex. 13, 1. 8; (18)
Hasiotis, 1866, p. 155,1. 1; (19) Jeannaraki, 1876, p. 149, No. 155, 1. 1; (20)
Laografia 8, 1921, pp. 533-4, 1. 2; (21) = ex. 16, 1. 8; (22) Passow, 1860, p.
379, No. 497, 1. 1 (cf. 1. 10); (23) Laografia 5, 1915, pp. 180-2, 1. 47; (24)
Passow, 1860, p. 338, No. 458, 1. 32; (25) Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 19-20,
1. 24; (26) Petropoulos, 1959, p. 67, No. 55, 1. 1; (27) = ex. 24, 1. 34; (28)
Fauriel, 1825, p. 4; (29) Petropoulos, 1958, p. 169, No. 29; (30) Pasayanis,
1928, p. 13; (31) Manousos, 1850, I, p. 79; (32) Passow, 1860, p. 5, No. 1;
(33) Fauriel, 1824, p. 98; (34) Passow, 1860, p. 97, No. 122; (35) Laografia
6, 1917, p. 363, No. 3; (36) Passow, 1860, p. 66, No. 80; (37) Manousos,
1850, I, p. 110; (38) Passow, 1860, p. 30, No. 35, 1. 2; (39) Passow, 1860,
p. 41, No. 46, 1. 1; (40) Hasiotis, 1866, p. 105, 1. 6; (41) Petropoulos, 1959,
pp. 80-1, No. 88, 1. 2; (42) Fauriel, 1824, p. 288, 1. 5; (43) Fauriel, 1824, p.
296, 1. 8; (44) Passow, 1860, p. 158, No. 216; (45) Fauriel, 1824, p. 194, 1. 4;
(46) Academy of Athens, 1963, p. 237, No. 5, 1. 6; (47) Academy of Athens,
1963, p. 202, No. IVa, 1. 1; (48) Academy of Athens, 1963, pp. 200-1, 1. 11;
(49) Laografia 5, 1915, p. 71, No. 37, 1. 2; (50) Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 107-8,
1. 16; (51) Kyriakidis, 1926, pp. 140-9, 1. 17; (52) Passow, 1860, p. 83, No.
102, 1. 2; (53) Laografia 1, 1909, pp. 600-2, 1. 7; (54) Jeannaraki, 1876, pp.
203-4, 1. 3; (55) Zogrdfios Agon 1, 1891, p. 73, 1. 3; (56) Destouny, 1877, 1.
103; (57) Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 124-5, 11. 11-12; (58) Jeannaraki, 1876, p.
154, No. 170, 11. 2-3; (59) = ex. 31, 11. 2-3; (60) Petropoulos, 1958, pp.
134-5, 1. 24; (61) Passow, 1860, pp. 394-6, 1. 39; (62) Dawkins, 1934, pp.
113-14, 1. 11; (63) Lampsidis, 1960, pp. 60-1, No. 17, 1. 1; (64) Passow,
1860, p. 28, No. 32, 1. 5.
2 The early history of this metre and some of the controversial problems of its
development will be mentioned in Chapter 5. A useful critical guide to the litera-
ture on the subject is to be found in Alexiou and Holton, 1976.
204
CHAPTER 4
1 Legrand, 1880, p. 17;Passow, 1860, p. 262, No. 367 (translationsby Alexiou).
The first passage, said by Alexiou to be of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries,
is by the Cypriot monk Neophytos Enkleistos who flourished at the end of the
twelfth century (Tsiknopoulos, 1952, pp. 45-6). Interestingly enough it was
the same Cypriot monk who recorded, and then re-worked in a poem of his
own, the earliest known fragment of a modern folk song (see p. 78).
2 Sources for numbered examples in this chapter are as follows. (1) Petropoulos,
1959, p. 105; (2) Petropoulos, 1958, p. 35, No. 18,1. 6; (3) Petropoulos, 1959,
p. 250, No. 82B, 1. 6; (4) Politis, N. G., 1885, pp. 229-31, 11. 44-9; (5) ibid.
pp. 235-6, 11. 29-30; (6) ibid. pp. 239-41, 11. 29-30; (7) ibid. pp. 241-2; 11.
28-33; (8) ibid. pp. 243-5, 11. 50-2, 58-60; (9) ibid. pp. 255-6, 11. 29-34;
(10) ibid. pp. 256-7, 11. 24-6; (11)-(13) see note 3; (14) Petropoulos, 1958,
pp. 3-4, 11. 20-3; (15) Petropoulos, 1958, p. 4, 11. 9-14; (16)-(22) see note 3;
(23) and (24) Jeannaraki, 1876, pp. 122-4; 11. 2, 46; (25) Jeannaraki, 1876,
pp. 237-8, 1. 49.
3 Unpublished material from the University of Ioannina Archive is included
here by kind permission of the Director, Folk Museum and Archive, Univer-
sity of Ioannina.
4 For a detailed analysis of such thematic patterns in the ballads of north-east
Scotland see Buchan, 1972, pp. 87-144.
5 cf. the interesting comments on what he calls ars combinatoria in this song by
Dronke (1976, pp. 29-32).
CHAPTER 5
1 Professor Linos Politis, whose views on the Escorial manuscript are generally
in agreement with my own, suggests that the folk songs of the death of
Diyenis, in which Diyenis is actually named, may derive from the epic, since
the name must have been invented by the author of the epic (1970, p. 578). I
agree with him on the literary origin of the name, but apart from this the
songs in question have very little to do with the epic. There is no reason why
the name alone should not have gone into the folk tradition, and become
central to a song otherwise composed of entirely traditional elements.
2 The only manuscript of 'Armouris' to be published in full is that of St Peters-
burg (Destouny, 1877; reprinted in Athinaion 8, 1879, pp. 385-94). This has
been republished subsequently in considerably amended versions by Kyriakidis
(1926, pp. 119 ff.), Kalonaros (1941, II, pp. 213-17), and Gregoire (1942,
pp. 204-12), all apparently without recourse to the original manuscript. Of
the dated manuscript, Codex 35 (Topkapi Palace, Istanbul) only a critical
apparatus, listing divergences from the St Petersburg manuscript, has been
published (Bouboulidis, 1964, pp. 138-44). Some doubt has been cast on the
accuracy of Bouboulidis' readings (Papathomopoulos, 1974, pp. 466-7), and
a brief reply to this challenge (Bouboulidis, 1975) is no substitute for a full
publication of the text.
205
The second text is interesting because it mentions the date of copying,
1461, implying that the song was then current in this form. The divergences
between the texts and the significance of their having been written down at
all are questions for further study. All references to 'Armouris' here are to the
original reading of the St Petersburg manuscript by Destouny.
CHAPTER 6
1 The version published by N. G. Politis (1914, p. 11 = Petropoulos, 1958, p.
151, No. 2) is a conflation of this song with the opening lines of Manousos,
1850, II, p. 119, on which see p. 98.
2 This last song (Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 155-6 = Ioannidis, 1870, p. 287, No.
20) was thought by its first editor to refer to the sack of Trebizond in 1461.
It is clear from the text, however, which refers to i P6H and Romania, unam-
biguously Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire respectively, that its
subject is the sack of the latter city.
3 See, respectively, Kriaris, 1920, p. 44 and Herzfeld, 1973, passim; Passow,
1860, p. 365; Spandonidi, 1939, p. 3; Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 161-2; Fauriel,
1825, p. 4;Passow, 1860, p. 364, No. 485a.
4 See, respectively, Kyriakidis, 1965, p. 92; Petropoulos, 1958, p. 169;
Petropoulos, 1958, pp. 169-70.
CHAPTER 7
1 On the 'Dead Brother' see, for example, Wollner, 1882;Psichari, 1884; Politis,
N. G., 1885; Impellizzeri, 1944; Lavagnini, 1953; Dronke, 1976, pp. 23-9;
and the critical bibliography by Katerina Krikos (1975). See also Brewster
and Tarsouli (1961) which typifies the dangers and limitations of applying
the 'historical-geographical' approach to comparative material. The authors
discuss similarities between the Greek 'Handjeris' (Harzanis) ballad and two
Child ballads 'without', in their own words, 'however, attempting to establish
any influence or relationship' (p. 3). The result, perhaps inevitably, is desul-
tory and inconsequential.
2 The instinct to claim national ownership of ballads is not confined to scholars
whose work is otherwise of a high standard, such as Vargyas and Megas. An
apparently 'official' claim to Albanian ownership of the 'Bridge of Arta'
ballads attacks simultaneously on two fronts - first showing the alleged pri-
macy of the Shkoder (Skutari) versions and then, to reinforce the point,
claiming that even if this were not so and Arta were the 'original' location of
the ballad, the region round Arta has belonged culturally to the Albanians (or
Illyrians) since prehistoric times (Sako, 1966).
3 In Cypriot versions which begin thus or with a vaguer indication ('Down at the
five rivers, down at the five roads') the bridge is often called the Bridge of Hair
at the end of the song (Papadopoullos, 1975, pp. 28, 176; Megas, 1971, p. 81,
summary of a text from Athens Academy Archive). These instances have not
been included in Megas' statistical summary.
4 I have been unable to find any reliable information about the building of the
present bridge outside the town of Arta. According to the Megdli Elliniki
206
Enkyklopaidia it was built either in 1602 or 1606, but the source of the
author's information (Karamanos, 1928) seems to be a folk tradition (Politis,
1904, II, pp. 774-5 ;Megas, 1971, p. 91).
5 Baud-Bovy thought that the 'Bridge of Hair' was the most frequent but dis-
regarded its importance on the grounds that 'ce nom, lui non plus, ne doit pas
etre primitif (1936, p. 169). The suggestion was taken up again by K.
Romaios, who correctly saw the song as essentially mythical in nature but
made the mistake of assigning its origin to a specific local ritual, the Rousalia
(Romaios, 1952). In fact, as Megas has shown, 'Arta' occurs considerably more
frequently in the recorded variants of the song, although this need not
diminish the importance of the 'Bridge of Hair'.
As to the distribution of the 'Bridge of Hair', this is found in Epiros, the
Peloponnese, the Cyclades, Thrace, Asia Minor and offshore islands, the
Dodecanese, Pontos, Cappadocia (Megas, 1971, p. 93) and Cyprus (see note
3). It is not found in Crete, although the opening of this Cretan version
conveys a similar sense:
Kdra? \ rd iiavpov rroraiib nanapa -deneXibvovv,
Kanapa devd. xrioovve nty -nviyovvT' ol 6ta/3drat<:.
Down at the black (unhappy) river they are digging the foundations for
an arch,
they're going to build an arch so that travellers won't drown.
To save travellers from drowning is an improbable reason for building a
bridge, unless it is in fact the 'Bridge of Hair', which serves precisely that
purpose.
6 The hybrid form Tptxoyibipvpo (hairbridge) is also found in one version of the
song from the Peloponnese (Megas, 1971, p. 92).
7 That the popular belief about the hair bridge had a Turkish origin was first
suggested by B. Schmidt (1871, p. 240) and rejected out of hand by N. G.
Politis as 'most improbable' (1901, p. 623).
8 Even the most objectively constructed models, where the constituent elements
of a myth are represented by + and — signs, involve the choice of a criterion
for awarding these values, and this may often be more arbitrary, or external
to the myth, than we would like to think. See, for example, Maranda and
Maranda, 1971, and the comments by Herzfeld on a specific case (1974a). It
would be as well, perhaps, to think of such complex mathematical models for
mythical structures more as a modern extension of the mythical process than
as an ultimate solution to the problems of myths.
9 Fauriel, 1824, 1825;Passow, 1860;Kind, 1861; Jeannaraki, 1876; Kanellakis,
1890; Anagnostou, 1903; Louloudopoulos, 1903; Pahtikos, 1905; Mihailidis-
Nouaros, 1928; Pasayanis, 1928; Tziatzios, 1928; Odeon, 1930; Baud-Bovy,
1935, 1938; Perdika, 1940; Tarsouli, 1944; Argenti and Rose, 1949;
Petropoulos, 1958, 1959; Yangas, 1959; Ioannou, 1966; Laografia, 1909-74;
Arheton Pontou, 1938-46.
207
CHAPTER 8
1 Athenaeus, VIII 360b-d. This whole passage in Athenaeus is, or purports to
be, a quotation from Theognis' Rhodian festivals. Almost nothing is known of
this writer or when he wrote. Athenaeus himself wrote in the second or third
centuries AD, and his source may well be a few hundred years older.
2 The word helidonisma, now the accepted term for these songs, is not found in
ancient sources or in modern songs, but is a scholarly invention (Herzfeld,
1977, p. 29). The helidonisma was first discussed by Fauriel (1824, p. cix),
and recently a detailed study of these songs was made by Herzfeld in an un-
published thesis (1972). Some of his conclusions have now been published
(1974; 1977).
3 On the relation between the literary and oral laments in Byzantine and
modern tradition, see Alexiou, 1975, passim.
4 The pattern of question and answer, and even part of the wording in the reply
are also echoed in the apocryphal prose Ada Pilati which as Alexiou has
shown 'constitutes a remarkable link between some of the earlier Byzantine
material and modern folk tradition' (1974, p. 68; cf. Bouvier, 1976, pp.
229-30).
5 The Cretan poet Sahlikis was the first to use the couplet form consistently,
and Morgan dates his career to roughly 1470-95 (1960, p. 86). But it has
recently been argued that Sahlikis lived a full century earlier, in the fourteenth
century (Manoussakas and van Gemert, forthcoming).
CHAPTER 9
1 I use the word 'professional' in this sense throughout the chapter. The status
of many of these poets is usually only vaguely defined - most are unlikely to
be full-time professionals, or necessarily to subsist on their professional earn-
ings. Such poets are often described elsewhere as 'professional or semi-profes-
sional'.
2 Not all of these devices will be used by every professional singer. The impor-
tance of topical, historical narrative, however, is constant in British minstrel
and broadside ballads (Wells, 1950, p. 210; Shepard, 1962, passim; 1973, p.
39) and in Greek professional songs or rimes from several areas (Politis, N. G.,
1915, p. 505), so that it is not surprising to find certain of the accompanying
devices recurring throughout these distinct traditions.
3 cf. W. B. Yeats: 'In primitive times the blind man became a poet, as he became
a fiddler in our villages, because he had to be driven out of activities all his
nature cried for, before he could be contented with the praise of life' (1924,
p. 344).
4 For a cross-section of this material, mostly composed and recorded in the
nineteenth century, see Jeannaraki, 1876, pp. 1-89, and Kriaris, 1920, pp.
7-184. These sections include briefer songs which belong to the demotic
tradition and a small number of songs which appear to be hybrid, but all the
longer songs appear to be the work of rimadori.
208
5 Petropoulos, 1954; Notopoulos, 1954. With the collaboration of Professor D.
Petropoulos, Notopoulos collected a large amount of 'epic' material from
Crete and Cyprus during 1953. The recordings, of which almost all remain
unpublished, were deposited in the Folklore Archive of the Academy of
Athens and in the J. A. Notopoulos collection in the Milman Parry Archive,
Widener Library, Harvard.
6 For texts of these long Cypriot narrative songs both professional and tradi-
tional, see Sakellarios, 1891; Farmakidis, 1926; and Papadopoullos, 1975.
Songs of pyitdrides with their music have been transcribed by Kallinikos,
1951, pp. 130-5; 154-97.
7 This situation has begun to be remedied with the publication of YangouUis,
1976.
8 Marshall, following Fauriel (1824, pp. 169-71), gives the date of Andonis'
death as 1807, but A. Politis, basing his account on a variety of sources, puts
it later, in 1808 or 1809 (Politis, A., 1973, p. 61).
9 The text, which was transcribed with chaotic orthography, was reprinted
twice by Legrand (1870; 1874, pp. 108-14). The portions here reproduced
follow the Stephanopolis' line divisions, according to which each political line
of fifteen syllables is printed as two lines.
10 Of the sixty-two formulas noted by Jeffreys (1973) with more than eight
occurrences in the poem, all but a few are of the type,
6 ixpiynvna YvMaiioq Prince William
J)V fniepav that day,
that is, inexpert 'padding' of a proper name or commonly recurring noun to
fill one half of the political line. Formulas of this type are also found in
abundance in the historical tradition although they tend to be scrupulously
avoided in the 'traditional' demotic songs. The following examples from
Jeffreys' list can also be paralleled in the historical tradition:
jut/cpot re nai jieyaXoi great and small,
ne£oi /cat /ca/3a\\dpot footmen and horsemen (also in the
demotic tradition),
/ r6 cupriyoviiai just as I'm telling you,
/a 6 prfya? CJS T6 rj/couae and when the king heard (also in the
demotic tradition),
rfjq yf\q /cat rfjq 6a\door}q by land and sea,
re /cai Pcj/uatot Franks and Greeks.
CHAPTER 10
1 I am grateful to Dr C. J. Wickham for bringing this passage to my attention.
2 I am grateful to Dr M. Alexiou, who made the recording on a field trip, for
this information.
3 Greece had been a signatory to a series of international agreements restricting
the use of narcotics, in particular of opium, since 1912. Of these by far the
most radical was that of the 'Convention pour la Repression du traflc illicite
209
des droghes luisibles', drawn up in Geneva on 26 June 1936, less than two
months before the Metaxas regime came to power. Although the agreement
was not ratified by Greece for another two years, there is no doubt of
Metaxas' zeal in implementing its terms, which included the imposition of
severe penalties for the use of hashish.
4 The most useful and the only really scholarly work on the rebetika is a doc-
toral thesis by E. Gauntlett (1978), as yet unpublished. I am grateful to Dr
Gauntlett and to Mr R. Conway Morris for a great deal of information, and
many useful discussions, on this subject.
5 For an account of the different partisan groups and the events in which they
were involved, see Woodhouse, 1976.
210
Glossary of Greek words Transliterated in the Text
akritikd - term used by scholars to describe narrative ballads, said to be connec-

ted with the hero of the medieval epic, Diyenis Akritis.
amanes (pi. amanedes) - rhyming couplet, often resigned or lugubrious in charac-
ter (Asia Minor).
anddrtika - songs of the partisans of the Second World War and Greek civil war
of 1944-9.
armatoliki (pi. armatolikia) - locally recruited armed bands, used by the Ottoman
authorities to contain brigandage in parts of Greece in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
armatolos (pi. armatoli) - one who serves in an armatoliki. By the end of the eigh-
teenth century often indistinguishable from a kleft.
bouzouki - plucked instrument of the pandore family, popular with singers of
rebetika from about 1930 onwards.
derbenderissa - a woman of irrepressible individuality, selfishness, energy and
perhaps glamour (rebetika).
devletli (Turkish) - an honorary title.
helidonisma (pi. helidonismata) - term used by scholars to describe the 'swallow
song' traditionally sung on 1 March.
kdlanda - carols; folk songs for various religious festivals.
kapetdnios (pi. kapetdnii) - leader of a band of klefts or insurgents.
katharevousa - the 'purifying' form of the Greek language, in contrast to dimotikt,
the vernacular.
kleftika - songs of the klefts.
kleftis - kleft; a 'social bandit' of the Greek highlands.
kondyli - a slate-pencil used by children in primary school.
kontdkion - a type of hymn of the early Byzantine church.
leventid - manliness, including youth, courage and vigour.
lyra - a three-stringed bowed instrument of the rebec family, especially popular
in Crete.
lyrdris - a player of the lyra. Sometimes, but not necessarily, equivalent to a
rimadoros (Crete).
manges - characters of the urban underworld in the early twentieth century:
proud, flamboyant, frequently antisocial in behaviour (rebetika).
mantindda (pi. mantinddes) - rhyming couplet (Crete, Dodecanese).
pallikdri (pi. pallikdria) - a brave, handsome young man.
211
Glossary of Greek words
paniyiri - (village) festival.
paraloyes - term used by scholars to describe narrative ballads on a range of
subjects.
poustika - appropriate to perverts.
pyitdris (pi. pyitdrides) - a professional singer-composer (Cyprus).
rebetika - songs of the urban lower classes, mostly known from the period
between 1920 and the mid-fifties.
rimadoros (pi. rimadori) - a professional singer-composer (Crete).
rimes - long narrative songs on topical or historical subjects.
rizitiko (pi. rizitika) - traditional song of west Crete.
tambourds - a plucked instrument of the pandore family, common in the nine-
teenth century, similar to the modern bouzouki and Turkish tanbur saz.
tshidttisma (pi. tshiattismata) - rhyming couplet (Cyprus).
tshiattistes - contestants improvising rhyming couplets (Cyprus).
212
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221
Index
acclamations, 75-6, 140 Balkan folk songs, see songs (3)

Adonis, 144 Barba-Pantzelios, see 'Daskaloyannis'
Adrianople, 2, 91, 95-8 Basil, St, see songs (1)
adynaton, 67, 68, 99, 101 Baud-Bovy, S., 114-15, 122, 138, 207
Aegina, Lidinos ritual in, 145-6; see Beowulf, 37
also songs (3) Berati (Epiros), 101
Akritas, see Diyenis Akritis, songs (1) bird messengers, 48-50, 51, 54-5,
akritikd, 2, 78, 81, S3; see also Diyenis 61,95-6,99,198-9
Akritis, songs (1) bouzouki, 196-7
Albanians, 5, 169, 170-2, 206 'Bridesmaid who Became the Bride,
Ali Pasha of Ioannina, 5, 105, 106-7, The', see songs (2)
108-9,170,172 'Bridge of Arta, The', see songs (2)
amanedes, 148; see also distichs broadside ballads, 151-2, 180, 181,
Anakdlima tis Konstantinopolis, 99 189,208
Anastenaria, 17, 19-21, 128-9, 145, Buchan, D., 181-2, 205
203 Budinger, M., 10
anddrtika, 199-201 Bulgaria, 1, 19\see also songs (3)
Andronikos, see songs (1), (2) Byzantine folk songs, 75-8, 205
anonymity of folk songs, 152-3
Anoyia (Crete), 162 carols, see kdlanda
Apostolakis, Y., 9, 11-12, 105 'Castle of Beauty, The', see songs (2)
archaisms, 87, 93-5 Chanson de Roland, 37
archetypes of folk songs, 2, 11, 30-1, Charos, see Haros
70,74,113-15, 125 Child, F. J., 151
architectonic patterns, 42, 44-51, 53, Chronicle of the Morea, 175-6,178, 209
55,56,58,68, 70, 181 Church, see Orthodox Church
Arethas (Bishop of Caesarea), 77, 154 classification of folk songs, 1-3, 10,
armatolt, 103, 104, 108 33-4,80-1, 136,204
Armouris, song of, see songs (1) Cochrane, Thomas Lord, 191
Arodafnousa, see songs (1) composition
Asia Minor disaster (1922), 1, 10, 194- anonymous, 152-3
5 in the demotic tradition, 35-6,
Athenaeus, 137, 208 69-73
Athos, Mt, see Iviron folk songs oral, 93-5
223
Index
composition - cont. distichs - cont.
professional, 152-5, 208 201-2, 208; see also manti-
of urban songs, 195-7 nddes, tshiatttsmata
see also singers Dfstomo, lament of, 198-9
Constantinople, 1, 76, 77, 193, 194 Diyenis, see songs (1), also akritikd,
laments for, 2, 98-102, 111, 112, Diyenis Akritis
174-5, 206 Diyenis Akritis, 1, 10, 78-82, 84-6,
Corfu, 5; see also songs (3) 205
Corsica, 1, 88 Dodecanese, 148, 201; see also songs
Crete (3)
The Disaster of, 176-7 Dodwell, E., 5, 89
distichs popular in, 148-50, 201-2 Dronke,P., 183,205
historical tradition in, 3, 155-62,
174, 176-8, 185-6, 188, 209 education
modern songs of, 162, 198 Church schools, 140-1
renaissance literature of, 87, 149- effect on oral tradition, 36, 189,
50, 160, 163, 175, 176-7, 178 190,192
see also rizttika, songs (3) and literacy, 183-5
Cyprus, 1 of professional singers, 155, 189
Byzantine folk song in, 77-8, 205 see also writing
distichs popular in, 148, 177-8, Eliot, T. S., 72-3
201-2 Elytis, O., 193
historical tradition in, 3, 153, enjambement, 44
154-5, 162-8, 174-5, 185-8, epic, xi
189,209 in Yugoslavia, 2, 35, 36, 37-8, 56,
laments for, 174-5 65, 93, 114, 152-3, 179-80,
oral recitation in, 85 184,188
renaissance literature of, 178 see also Diyenis Akritis, historical
Turkish invasion of (1974), 202 tradition
in sixteenth century, 87-8 epic style
see also songs (3) in 'Armouris', 83
in Crete, 155, 163, 209
Dante Alighieri, 150 in Cyprus, 163, 166, 209
Dapontes, K., 177 in the historical tradition, 3, 148
'Daskaloyannis', see songs (1), also Epiros, see AH Pasha, songs (3)
Crete, historical tradition Erotokritos, 87, 160, 178
'Dead Brother, The', see songs (2) Erotopaignia, 149-50
decapentasyllable, see metre: 'political exile, laments for, see laments
verse'
Dervenakia, Battle of (1822), 101 Fauriel, C, 5, 6-7, 8, 9, 36, 94, 104,
dialects (Greek), 93-5 149, 154, 169, 190, 203, 208
diffusion, see historical-geographical folk songs, see songs
diffusion folk tales, 113-14, 116-18, 125
Digenes, see Diyenis formula systems, 38-55, 60, 192
Dionysos, 20, 203 formulas, 3, 36-57, 69, 70
dirges, see laments, miroloyia in anddrtika, 200
distichs, 3, 148-50, 157-60, 176-8, and archaisms, 93
224
Index
formulas - cont. Ionian Islands, 5, 8-9; see also songs
in 'Armouris', 86 (3)
in the Chronicle of the Morea, Islamic legend, 123
175,209 Iviron folk songs, 78, 86-7, 98
in 'The Complaint of Roumeli',
172 Jeffreys, M., 75-8, 175, 179-80, 209
in 'Daskaloyannis', 161
in Diyenis Akritis, 81,82 kdlanda, 137, 140-1
in the historical tradition, 165, 170 Karpathos
in modern songs, 192 distichs popular in, 201
in rebetika, 195 table songs in, 34
in Scottish ballads, 181-2 work songs in, 147
in 'The Virgin's Lament', 141-2 see also songs (3)
function Kasos, lament for, 101
of the demotic tradition, 3, 34, katharevousa, 191, 192
90-112 Katsoudas (kleft), see songs (1)
of song in ritual, 19-21, 136-7, Kavakli (Topolovgrad), see songs (3)
144_5, 147 Kazantzakis, N., 80, 193
functional songs, 3,33, 136-47 Kind, Th., 8
'Kitsos' Mother', see songs (2)
George, St, see songs (1) Kitzio Andonis (Katsandonis, kleft),
Georgillas, E., 149, 150, 176 see songs (1)
Goethe, J. W. von, 4, 6 klefts, 2, 7, 8, 91, 95, 96, 102-11, 112,
Goody, J., 92, 182, 183 168-71, 184,200
Gregoire,H., 81,90,91 Kodaly,Z., 70-1,72
guslari, 37, 56, 184 Kostantinos, see songs (1)
Kosti (Thrace), 19
Haros, 60, 69, 79, 115, 133, 184; Kyra Frosyni,see songs (1)
see also miroloyia Kyriakidis, S., 81, 90, 147, 151, 164
'Harzanis and Lioyenniti', see songs (2) Kythira,see songs (3)
hashish, 193, 195, 209-10
Haxthausen, W. von, 6, 8 laments
helidonisma, see 'Swallow Song' for cities and towns, 95-102, 112:
heroic poetry, 37; see also, epic, Homer Adrianople, 2, 91, 95-8; Con-
Hios, see songs (3) stantinople, 2, 98-102, 111,
historical-geographical diffusion, 112- 112, 174-5, 206; Distomo, 198-
20,121-2, 125 9; Malta, 101, 112, 174-5;
historical tradition, 3, 104, 148, 151- Paros, 86, 112; Rhodes, 83-4,
78,181, 185-8,209 101,112;Tripolitsa, 100
Hobsbawm, E., 104, 110 for exile, 2, 26, 31, 78, 86, 118-19
Homer, xi, 36-7, 38, 42, 56, 87, 93-5 for death, see miroloyia
'The Virgin's', 141-4, 145
imagery, 3, 16-18, 58-64, 69, 70, 119- at weddings, 97-8, 208
20 Larnaca, 202
India, 35-6, 40 Leake, W. M., see Martin-Leake, W.
International Folk Music Council, 71, Lefkas, see songs (3)
199 Legrand, E., 10, 78, 79, 174
225
Index
leventid, 109-10 music, xi, 12
Levi-Strauss, C, 74-5,113-14, 125-7 of acclamations, 76
Lidinos, ritual and song of, see songs in Anastenaria, 17, 19
(1) 'art' and folk, 70-2
linguistics, 39-40, 114, 125, 127-8 in Cyprus, 201, 209
literacy, see writing described, c. 1800, 88-9
Lord, A. B., 2, 37-8, 39, 40, 41, 56, of Dodecanese, 114
65, 81, 114, 179-81, 187, 188, in Iviron MS, 86
189 primitive, 146
love songs, 2, 59, 98, 111, 140;see also Mykonos, 88
distichs myth, 92, 112-35,199
lullabies, 2, 34, 140
Lusignan, F. E. de, 87-8, 175 Nafplion, 101
Nagler,M. N.,39,41
Mabinogion, The, 183 nationalism (of folk song collectors),
Macedonia, armatoli in, 103; see also 3-4, 10-12, 101-2, 116-20, 206
songs (3) Neophytos Enkleistos, 77-8, 205
Malta, laments for, 101, 112, 174-5
manges, 196-8 oral epic, see epic
Mani 'oral-formulaic theory', 36-40, 180-2;
described by Stephanopoli (1800), see also epic, formulas, Lord
172 'oral literature', xi
historical tradition in, 171-4 oral tradition, xi, 35-6, 118, and
origin of Corsican Greeks, 88 passim
work songs in, 147 and history, 91-3
Manousos, A., 9 and literacy, 179-92
mantinddes, 148, 158-9, 160, 162, urban, 195
186, 201-2; see also Crete, originality, 63-4, 69-73, 121, 153
distichs Orthodox Church, 20, 76, 134, 140-1,
Markakis, N., 186;see also rimadori 144,203
Martin-Leake, W., 5, 104, 170-1 Otto, King of Greece, 191
Mavrogordato, J., 80 Ottomans, see Turks
Mavromichalis, P. (bey of Mani), 171
meaning in song and myth, 112, 125- Palamas, K., 80
35 Panayis, Y., 170
Megdli Idea, see Asia Minor disaster Papathymios (kleft), see songs (1)
Megas, G., 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, parahyes, 2
206, 207 Paros, lament for, 86, 112
memorisation, 36, 43, 54, 56, 71, 85- Parry, M., 2, 37-9, 41, 42, 53, 93, 114
6,185-6 partisan songs, see anddrtika
Mesolonghi, 101 Passow, A., 10, 203
Methoni (Modon), 101 Percy, Bishop T., 4, 90
metre, 140, 145 Piraeus, 194
hexameter, 93, 95 poets (oral), see singers
'political verse', 44, 51, 75-7, 87, 'political verse', see metre
94-5, 140, 204 Politis, N. G., 1, 2, 10-12, 81, 90, 94,
Mikrokostantinos, see songs (1) 97, 101, 116, 164, 171, 189,
miroloyia, 60, 96, 97, 101, 148, 184 190,203,206,207
226
Index
Pontos, 1 \see also songs (3) singers - cont.
Porfyris, see songs (1) attitude of, 36
Pouqueville, F. C, 5, 89 of distichs, 201-2
pyitdrides, 153, 154, 162-8, 169, 174, professional, 77, 152-74, 185-8,
175,185-8, 209; see also Cyprus, 208
historical tradition of urban songs, 193-8
Sklavos,M., 176-7, 178
quite songs, 137-41 Smyrna, 193-5
snakes, imagery of, 41-2, 124, 128
rebetika, 148, 193-8 sociology of literature, 114
religious songs, 2, 137-46 Solomos, D., 8-9, 12, 94, 193
rhapsodes, 154, 169; see also singers songs (1), by principal character
Rhodes Akritas, 78, 80, 82
laments for, 83-4, 101,112 Andronikos, 10, 60, 184
'Plague of, 176 Armouris, 30, 54, 82-6, 205-6
'Swallow Song' in, 137 Arodafnousa, 168
rhyme, 145, 148-50, 157-60, 167-8, St Basil, 219
201-2, 208;seealso distichs Daskaloyannis, 155-61, 177, 185-
rimadori, 155-62, 168, 176-7, 178, 6, 189
185-6, 188, 208; see also Crete, Diyenis, 1, 10, 20, 78-82, 83, 86,
historical tradition 151,163,164,167,188,205
rimes, see historical tradition St George, 65-8, 130
Ritsos, Y., 80 Katsoudas, 108-9
ritual, 18-21, 137-46, 203, 204 Kitzio Andonis, 170-1, 209
rizi'tika, 85, 160-1 Kostantinos, 60-4, 163, 167, 203
Romaios, K., 20-1, 45, 90, 207 Kyra Frosyni, 172
Romantic movement, 3-4, 13 Lidinos, 145-6
'Roumeli, The Complaint of, see Mikrokostantinos, 13-34, 36, 84,
songs(2) 128-35,145,166
rule of three, 17,45, 133, 142 Papathymios, 108, 184
Russo, J. A., 39 Porfyris, 132, 163
Stournaris, 108
sacrifice (animal), 19 Yiftakis, 106-7, 110
Sahlikis, S., 149, 150,208 Zafiris, 145-6
Salonica, 194 Zaharias, 108, 110
Saracens, 30, 65, 82-3 songs (2), by conventional title
Sarakatsani, 26, 111, 203 'The Bridesmaid who Became the
Sathas,C.,10, 78, 79 Bride', 32, 86
Saunier, G., 115 'The Bridge of Arta', 34, 44-51,
schools, see education 117-18, 120-4, 127-8, 206-7
Scott, Sir Walter, 179, 181, 190 'The Castle of Beauty', 101, 133
Scottish ballads, 119-20, 151, 179, 'The Complaint of Roumeli', 172-4
181-2,205 'The Dead Brother', 41, 60-4, 68-9,
Seferis, G., 193 116, 189,206
Sheridan, C. B., 7 'Harzanis and Lioyenniti', 131, 132,
Sikelianos, A., 80, 193 133,206
singers 'Kitsos' Mother', 34
anonymity of, 152-3 'The Sons of Andronikos', 10
227
Index
songs (2) - cont. table songs, 34; see also rizitika
'Swallow Song' (helidonisma) 137- taxonomy, see classification of folk
40, 144, 145, 208 songs
'The Virgin's Lament', 141-4,145 Tenedos, 99
'The Wife who Came to Grief, 134 themes, 3, 65-9, 70
songs (3), by place of origin in Scottish ballads, 181
Aegina, 23-4, 145-6 in urban songs, 193-8
Anoyia, 162 Thrace, 19;see also songs (3)
Mt Athos, 78, 86-7,98 Tommaseo, N., 9
Balkans, 116, 117, 118, 120-1, Tournefort, M., 88
122,128 transmission
Bulgaria, 32, 120,121 of broadside ballads, 180
Corfu, 22-3,97-8 of the demotic tradition, 35-6,
Corsica, 138-9 69-71, 74
Crete, 24, 29-30, 97-8, 207 of folk tales, 125
Cyprus, 20-1,24-6,29 of the historical tradition, 159-
Dodecanese, 114 61, 174-5, 185-8
Epiros, 26-7, 192 of ritual songs, 145
Hios, 28 see also memorisation, oral tradi-
Karpathos, 31,83, 184 tion
Kavakli, 32 Trebizond
Kythira, 174 Diyenis Akritis discovered at, 78,
Larnaca, 202 79
Lefkas, 67 sack of (1461), 206
Macedonia, 23, 33 Tripolitsa (Tripolis), 100
Pontos, 26, 31-2, 78, 99, 203 tshiattismata, 148, 177, 201-2; see
Thrace, 24, 29, 34 also Cyprus, distichs
Zagori, 145-6 Tsitsanis, V., 197
Sperber, D., 125-7, 135 Tsopanakos (Panayiotis Kalas), 168-9
Stefanopoulos family, 88 Turkey, 1, 194-5
Stephanopoli, D. and N., 5-6, 172 Turks
Stournaris {armatolos), see songs (1) influence of, 102, 207
structuralism, 39, 113-14, 125-6, 129, and Islamic legend, 123
207 and klefts, 2, 102-11 passim
structure lament for, 100
of the demotic tradition, 3, 35-73, rule of, in Greece, 5-6, 86-9, 95,
and passim 140-1, 184
ofdistichs, 148-9 and St George, 65-8
of the historical tradition, 157-
62 urban folk songs, see rebetika
of myth, 129-30
of ritual songs, 136, 139-40, 145 Vamvakaris, M., 196-7
of urban songs, 194 variants of folk songs, 2, 11, 21-34,
'Swallow Song' {helidonisma), see 69-71,112-15, 118, 120
songs(2) 'verbal tradition', 181-2, 184
symbolism, 126-8, 131-5 'Virgin's Lament, The', see laments,
syntactical patterns, 44, 51-3, 54, 55, songs(2)
56 Vyzantios, D., 94
228
Index
War of Independence (1821-30), 2, 5, Yeats, W. B., 208
7-8, 102-3, 105, 168, 169 Yiftakis (kleft), see songs (1)
wedding songs, 2, 34, 97-8, 201 Yugoslavia, oral epic in, see epic
Wife who Came to Grief, The', see
songs(2)
Wordsworth, W., 4 Zafiris, ritual and song of, see songs (1)
work songs, 146-7 Zagori (Epiros), see songs (3)
writing, 36, 38, 51, 72-3, 85-6, 140-1, Zaharias (kleft), see songs (1)
149-50, 174-5, 179-92 Zambelios, S., 9
229

Folk Poetry of Modern Greece

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FOLK POETRY OF MODERN

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Cambridge University Press 1980

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 1980

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0 521 22853 0 hardback

2. THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: THE SONGS 13

3. STRUCTURE OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: THE 35

4. STRUCTURE OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: 58

6. FUNCTION OF THE DEMOTIC TRADITION: THE 90

7. THE SONGS AS MYTH 112

8. ONE TRADITION OR SEVERAL? 136

9. THE HISTORICAL TRADITION 151

10. GREEK FOLK POETRY AND WRITING 179

Birmingham 1979 R.M.B.

0 evaq TO Xeet era' 6 dXXoq TO Xeet dXXtcZ?c.

/"x* ^•"•vi 1 CCA

,.s\. . . <&( SEA

Map 1. Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean.

A.MODERN GREECE AND FOLK POETRY

B. PERSPECTIVES ON GREEK FOLK POETRY

We have already noted the characteristics of folk poetry emphasised by

A. 'MIKROKOSTANTINOS': STYLE AND ARTISTRY

Kostantinos the Little, Little Kostantinos

but to the River Jordan do not go to water them,

Regarding this song, for the moment, purely in stylistic terms, a

interpolation of a prose summary of a short part of the story, indicate

B. LOCAL FUNCTION: THE ANASTENARIA

C. 'MIKROKOSTANTINOS' IN THE CONTEXT OF

of a Variant* as a song which tells substantially the same story in sub-

Despite considerable variation in detail and emphasis, all of these ver-

These last examples, unless one is prepared to dismiss them, on arbi-

Who owns the sheep, with their collars of gold,

Perhaps the most important fact to emerge from this examination

A. COMPOSITION AND TRANSMISSION

instance the use of a formulaic style coexists with deliberate memori-

O erac TO Xeet era* 6 dXkoq TO Xeet OXXCCJC. Mdaropr? TO Tpayovd'

B. THE ORAL FORMULA

C. FORMULA SYSTEMS AND THE LANGUAGE OF SONGS

D. FORMULAS AND FORMULA SYSTEMS IN GREEK SONGS

(1) Et5a TCL <p£S UL orajopoyra K ai ric bx&s K ovpapia

Examples 1-4 can easily be seen to belong to a formula system such

(i) Metrical and architectonic patterns

(10) ZapavTcnrevTe naoropoi K I e%r\vra jJiaBrjTdd ec

It is much more common to find these two formula systems together

(15) XapapranevTe Xefiovieq OTOV dfifio

(16) Tpanooi dpKo65ta OKbrcoaa K L e^rjmaJSvb Xeovrdpui

(18) Tpefc xpwovs kirep'n&r'qoa ytd V biiop^po Kopiroi

(19) Tpefc xpwO(> Kwe orinepo, reooepK: nopnaTOVve

This analysis is not intended to be quantitative and these examples

succeeding line, in which the antithesis between building the bridge by

(20) orov dpaxoda rr\v nbpra at the dragon's door

(23) orov mroaxror) r% atibvi on the knife-grinder's whetstone

The sheep belong to the thunder, the goats to the lightning 1

and to indicate who a person is,

(25) rob Mavpoet&fi rr\v Kakqv Mavroidis' beloved

There is scarcely any restriction on the content of the first half-line