The Piraeus Blues
Music of the Athens underworld kept alive in old Nicosia
It’s one-thirty on a Thursday morning. The room is smoke-filled and dim. Bottles of wine and small bowls of olives and nuts litter a handful of tables where regulars sit, talking through the smoke. There is a sour cloud of zivania in the air. A woman’s voice cuts through the smoke and the hum, and it is the kind of voice that can tear a man’s heart out with a single note. Carried away by the voice, and the zivania perhaps, a heavy, old man has stood. At his feet is an empty pint bottle, which he is circling gracefully as if the bottle were his bride and he still a young man. The lyrics of Markos Vamvakaris bring us back to a Piraeus dive circa 1930. We are listening to rembetika.
An amalgam of east and west, of oriental rhythms and Byzantine modes, rembetika was the music of the poor and dispossessed who flooded Greece from Istanbul and Smyrna in the early 1920s. It was a music of diaspora, but eventually took root in Athens, around its port, Piraeus, and flowered there in the 1930s. The men who played it sang of hash dens and prostitutes, marijuana and prison time, to forget themselves and their poverty. They lived by the code of the mangas, or man of truth and honour, spoke an argot, koutsavakika, and played tiny bouzoukis, baglamades, so small they could hide them in their pockets from their enemies, the police. Rembetika was, above all else, a music of outlaws.
None of these men are alive today, but there are musicians, like Giorgos and Eleni Fountos, who carry on the tradition. Giorgos and Eleni play every Wednesday night at Epea Pteroenta, a tiny club in Nicosia’s old quarter next to Simis’ caf?, Kala Kathoumena. I spoke to them earlier that Wednesday.
Giorgos first heard rembetika as a child in Greece. When he was 18 he set out for Athens with his bouzouki to learn from the masters. This was 1978. Sousouras stin Plaka was the caf? where the old musicians gathered. It was owned by a man named Tasos Schorelis, who, like most of his clientele, has since passed away.
“It was a coffee shop with a loft like this, but a bit bigger,” Giorgos said, indicating the space above our heads. “It had benches like in a church, but no tables. That’s where the rembetes sat, bottles in hand, listening and playing. Sotiria Bellou, Ioanna Georgakopoula… Roukounas. Roukounas sang beautifully in both the Smyrna and Piraeus styles.”
Eleni met Giorgos in 1986. A Greek Cypriot, she was studying music and theatre in Athens at the time, but after an introduction to Giorgos from her sister, decided to try her hand at rembetika. Although Eleni does not call herself a rembetissa, she seems to fit the part. Olive-skinned and sad-eyed with dark hair and a voice that could make an old man dance with a bottle, she at least comes close.
“They were looking for a female singer,” she said. “Our group had 10 musicians.”
“A big group,” Giorgos added, rolling a cigarette.
“Yes. We played at a club called Glaros. Giorgos Mouflouzelis, an old man then, was playing with us. He was one of the greats. He’s dead now. We played every winter in Athens, and in the summer we played the islands. George and I have been together since then.”
As much a myth today as the cowboy of the American West, but real enough because urban, the mangas was the heart of rembetika. My understanding of the mangas was limited to the early films of Kakogiannis, and to my father-in-law, a self-admitted mangas, whose principles of honour, however, seemed mostly to involve shouting at those who did not share them. I was curious to know what kind of men they had been.
“They were men of truth, men who wouldn’t lie,” Giorgos said. “How can I say… generous men. Mouflouzelis brought his own wine to the caf?, and his own bread. He wouldn’t accept hand-outs.”
Eleni said, “He was very proud.”
“He once asked Eleni not to sing a song called Kalogria. It is a very sad song about a woman who is disappointed with life and enters a nunnery.”
“Too sad?” I asked.
“I was singing it in a way that made people sad,” Eleni said. “There’s a way to sing a sad song. I was making it, because I was very young, too sad.”
Giorgos said, “Mouflouzelis was trying to teach us the roads of music.”
A difficult phrase to translate, but evocative.
“They call them roads. We were young and we took whatever we could from them.”
Trying to picture Mouflouzelis, the noble refuser of bread and wine, I recalled the words of Elias Petropoulos. “The womb of rembetika,” he wrote, “is the jail cell and the hash den.” Eleni didn’t see a contradiction.
“Society made them the way they were,” she said. “They were very poor and oppressed. They were forced to drink and smoke to forget their problems.”
“They didn’t pretend,” Giorgos added.
“Because they were smoking hashish they were marginalised and had problems with the police. That brought them together. Their songs came from these experiences. They were not bad people.”
“It’s what the people wanted to say,” Giorgos said, “but men like Vamvakaris and Batis said it for them.”
Eleni remembered a lyric and half sang, half spoke the words. “‘These cops who just got here, what are they up to at this hour?’ The rembetes sang against the police and the government,” she said. “That’s why they had problems.”
But how does one living in Nicosia in 2006 relate to the music of the urban underworld of Athens circa 1930?
“Look,” Giorgos said, “oppression will always exist. Through the music I can express myself, what I felt and what I feel. For me this music is very important. Today’s songs aren’t as deep. Rembetika is deep.”
“Is the spirit of the music the same?” I asked.
“No,” Eleni said, “we don’t feel it in the same way.”
Giorgos agreed. “But when we sing,” he said, “it makes us feel like we had been alive back then. Everything has changed.”
“But those songs,” Eleni said, “we still have.”
Like all nostalgia, there was a paradox at the heart of it. We are transmuted by the misery of others, pining for the hash den and jail cell. For Giorgos it went deeper.
“Even in their love songs,” he said of the rembetes, “they talked about beautiful eyes, hair… eyelashes. There is no romantismos today. People don’t write songs about green eyes. We laugh at this kind of thing, we are ashamed. Why? We don’t like beautiful women today? The erotic? The rembetes wrote and sang about it. They couldn’t have women, so they loved them through their songs.”
There was a note of regret in his voice.
“Nowadays, if you want to talk to a woman, you just call her on the phone. Why write a song in that case? Things have changed.”
This at least explained why the regulars, who, according to Eleni and George, haven’t changed for the past six years, come back every Wednesday night. To be transported to the past, to escape the world and forget their problems.
“They are searching themselves,” Eleni said of her audience. “That’s why they listen to rembetika.”
“Will rembetika ever die?” I asked, thinking of my own pain relief, the blues.
Eleni shook her head.
“No,” she said, “never. In 1991, when we came to Cyprus, we were the first to play rembetika here. We are keeping the tradition alive. A new generation is learning.”
“We don’t like playing new things,” Giorgos added.
And I was glad they didn’t. Even if it wasn’t my past or my culture, I was glad. If the cobblers and fabric merchants of Aischylou Street fall to Vandome and Starbucks, Mouflouzelis will at least still be there, playing his baglamas upon a balcony, re
fusing bread.
Rembetika every Wednesday night
Epea Pteroenta, 19 Nikocleous St, Old Nicosia. Tel: 99 454896
How it all started
By Eleni Antoniou
Rembetika have been around in some form since the turn of the century. In the 1920s, Greece was facing the resettlement of over 1.5 million Greek refugees from Asia Minor. As a result, shanty towns grew up around Athens, Piraeus and other cities with refugees bringing their music with them; this had the most pronounced effect on the urban music of Greece.
The Piraeus rembetika was the music of the urban underworld, the outcasts, the hash addicts, the people living on the wrong side of the law, struggling on the fringes of society. During the early years, rembetika lyrics were often about drug use, smuggling, gambling, hard life, sometimes even prison, which always came down to social isolation and repression. Sometimes the lyrics also talked about personal experiences and hardships or particular incidents such as crime, murder or brawl.
Rembetika was seen as an expression of his ostracism from mainstream society and was sung and danced amongst friends. As a result of the nature of these songs, many were banned in Greece, mainly due to their anti-authoritarian and non-conformist stand. Police would raid hash dens, smashing instruments, arresting, harassing and assaulting the followers of this kind of music. The people who formed this sub-culture were, what Greeks called ‘Manges’, which is loosely translated as wide-boys. They used an elaborate form of slang and dressed extravagantly much like the Jazz/Blues subculture in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s.
Three great figures were associated with very early rembetika: Batis, Artemis and Stratos. Batis was the clown of the group, Stratos was the group’s singer and Artemis was the only member of the group with music education. As a hard drug user, he wrote this song, which illustrates what rembetika was originally all about.
From the time I started to smoke the dose,
The world rejected me.
I do not know what to do,
Wherever I stand, whatever I’ll be
People will bother me.
My soul can’t stand it,
Junkie they are calling me.
Sniffing certainly led me to the needle,
Until my body slowly melted and became weak,
Nothing was left in this world for me to do,
Because the drugs have led me,
To die in the streets.
In 1943 at the age of 29 Artemis was found dead in a street outside a hash den with a bouzouki in his hands.
