The song that got away

As I stood on the side of the road to Plomari, I thought about a lot of things. I had a lot of things to think about but, more crucially, I had lots of time to think. I was hitch-hiking and nobody was stopping. The inhabitants of the island of Mytilene (aka Lesvos, but called Mytilene by natives) are considered by some Greeks to be the least friendly community in all of the islands, which obviously doesn’t make it a very good place to catch a lift from a stranger – on a quiet back-road, going to a remote village, late at night.

A piece of dried faeces on the road to Plomari in the shape of Mytilene island

Mytilene is one of the most easterly of the Greek islands, separated from Turkey by only a narrow strait. Though the political differences either side of that body of water have been very great at certain times in the past. I was well awareof this as I waited, thumb in the air on the road to Plomari as I had the privilege of meeting a very unique individual on the ferry that had taken me from Ayvalik on the Turkish west coast to Mytilene that afternoon. After the population exchange between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s, only a small minority of the 800,000 Greeks remained in Turkey. In a complex technicality of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 following the Great War, the two islands of Imvros and Tenedos were ceded to Turkey but their Greek inhabitants remained with the right to self-administration of their communities. What followed however, was a period of terrible discrimination including the prohibition of education in the Greek language on the islands and a violation of many other terms of the Treaty between Greece and Ataturk's new Turkish Republic. Today, there are only a few hundred of these ethnic Greeks with Turkish citizenship and one of them was sitting opposite me, recounting his stories of hardship through another passenger who translated his Greek to my English. Like many others, both of them were travelling to Lesvos to be with their families for Orthodox Easter that weekend.

Easter decorations in Mytilene harbour

As many more cars passed by, I decided to take off my heavy backpack and leave it by the roadside. This was going to take some time. Despite it being Easter Week in the Orthodox calendar, or 'Big Week' as the Greeks call it, generosity was not forthcoming from the locals. Local taxis were asking for an exorbitant 35 euro for the short journey and I couldn’t bear for my return to the EU to be met with such flagrant robbery. I kept thumbing Lesbians and wondered if this was really going to be worth the trip.

Many of the Greek islands have a distinct local music and Mytilene/Lesvos is reknowned for its traditional music, which has been heavily influenced by the music of Asia Minor and the many ethnic Greeks who moved from there in the early part of the 20^th century. Mytilene also has a strong pre-existing connection with the nearest city on the Turkish mainland, Smyrna (now Izmir). I had made the deliberate visit to the island in the hope of tracking down an apparently unique singing tradition within the music of Mytilene. It is a song in the form of a melancholy dialogue, often on nostalgic themes and sung in two-line couplets by one singer in the company after another. The lyrics are often improvised and the social themes raised in the songs are reinforced in meaning by the social context of their dialogical performance. They are called Plomaritikos, meaning 'songs of Plomari', the village I was trying in vain to get to that night.

After about an hour of waiting for a lift, I conceded and accepted the offer of a taxi driver to take me to Plomari for 25 euro, despite the fact that he already had two passengers who were going there. Upon reaching the village, I quickly found a place to stay and then began scouring the tavernas until I found one that looked like the kind of place where folk singing might happen. My enquiries brought me gradually through a series of men with increasing abilities in speaking English until my request was eventually fully understood and I was introduced to Yanis. It turns out I was in the right place and talking to the right man. Yanis is a singer of the Plomaritikos and told me a lot about them, most notably that during the week leading up to Orthodox Easter, people are fasting and it is not appropriate to sing songs in public. As I looked upon the restaurant table in front of Ianis and his friends, its plates of shrimp and other luxurious foods, I pondered the many cultural interpretations of 'fasting' and realised that I was not going to hear the Plomaritikos in Plomari.

Pavlos Kavouras, a lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Athens has described the Plomaritikos as follows:

‘A head singer starts singing a whole fifteen-syllable line. One by one, the singers of the singing group join the head singer singing along with him the same line. This dialogical process produces a heterophonous effect. It is most important for the community of the singers to converge on the melodic changes, on the rhythmic stresses and on the ending, which is sung in unison. The performance of the plomaritikos makes manifest a feeling of “unity in multiplicity”. (1)

The road from Plomari

Unfortunately, Kavouras’ description will have to suffice, as I still haven’t heard the Plomaritikos. His description reminds me of the songs we used to make up late at night during a summer I spent working in the Irish speaking area, An Rinn, in the south of Ireland. To the tune of the well-known song 'An poc ar buille' (The mad goat), we each would invent a rhyming couplet in Irish, usually vulgar, topical and about somebody present and then all sing the chorus together (2). There are recordings of the Plomaritkos I could have purchased but I still haven’t gotten over the dissapointment I felt that evening leaving that taverna. As I walked around Plomari’s streets full of the sounds of screeching mopeds, rebetika music spilling out from the bar stereos, I felt defeated. Defeated, but proud that I had made a considerable effort. Unfortunate timing and a significant gap in my research had resulted in an empty handed expedition.

And so, I include here no excerpts, no personal impressions or descriptions. The Plomaritiko will always be the song that got away.

(1) More information on Plomaritikos can be found on Pavlos Kavouras webpage here: http://www.umbc.edu/eol/MA/index/number10/kavour/kav_8.htm

(2) Other similar competitions include shairoba and kapiaoba in north eaastern Georgia.

Down from the mountains

The landscape thawed as we descended into the valley from the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus mountain range that has separated Georgia from Russia for centuries. I listened to the incomprehensible Georgian dialogue of my hosts as I looked out of the car window at the astounding scenery that passed by: ancient churches, an enormous hydro-electric dam right by the roadside and then a brief stop off in a cottage cum restaurant for a traditional Georgian meal of Khinkali. These delicious meat dumplings originate in this mountainous area in the North East of Georgia and proved much trickier for me to eat that the young Georgian children in our party, leaving my plate covered in the tasty juices that had spilled out from each one while everybody else’s plates remained spotless.


It had been my first day in Georgia and despite having only had a handful of hours sleep since my late-night flight, I had spent the day skiing in the prestigious resort of Gudauri in the north of Georgia. Gudauri remained a popular destination for Georgian skiers but since the August War with Russia only seven months earlier (this was March 2009), Russian tourism had dwindled. The air space here on the northern border of Georgia remained closed, thereby prohibiting Gudauri’s famous heli-skiing, which had attracted many tourists. The rest of the country remained noticeably affected: the signs outside foreign exchange shops in the city showed the rates for USD and Euros but the space beside the Russian Rouble remained empty. There was no trade, no cross-border flights, no diplomatic dialogue.


We drove back towards Tbilisi as the sky grew darker. Then on the radio came a song, which caused the four women in the car to sing along, while the two seven-year old boys in the back remained disinterested. The song was from a Russian children’s cartoon from the Soviet era called Cheburashka. When I asked what the song was about, the attempt at a serious explanation resulted in an eruption of laughter from everyone else due to the silliness of the song. To a chirpy melody and accordion accompaniment, the chorus is:

А я играю на гармошке у прохожих на виду
К сожаленью день рожденья
Только раз в году

And I'm playing the accordion
All the people gaze at me.
It's a pity that birthday’s
Are just once a year.

The song reminded the women of their childhood, but meanwhile in the back of the car, the two boys were listening to American pop music on their mobile phones. The cultural empire had shifted from East to West in a generation. The irony was not lost on Nadia sitting next to me: “Poor Georgians. Once it was Russian music popular, now American music is popular. In twenty years I don’t know which music will be popular.”
I took the opportunity to try to provoke some Georgian songs.
“Do people still sing Georgian songs?”, I asked.
Initially, I was told how there was Georgian pop and even rap, illustrated by the young boys playing a Georgian rap on their phone, but before long, the women quite naturally began singing Georgian folk songs they had learned in school.
Over a dissonant ostinato of lo-fi Georgian rap, they sang a medley of traditional verses in turn, with some casually attempting the distinctive bass drone of Georgian polyphony.

Interspersed with laughter and chatter, they sang songs old and new, the titles and lyrics of which remain unknown to me, but in the end it was the children’s mobile phones that had more stamina; the repertoire of megabytes defeating that of rusty school songs. The negative influence of media technology on indigenous traditions has been well documented around the world. In Ireland in the 1970s, the prodigious song-collector Tommy Munnelly noted:

‘The pleasure garden, the broadside, the industrial revolution, the music hall and many other influences have all altered or eroded the oral tradition, but the death blow was not struck until the advent of radio and television. What need is there to learn a tune or song when the magic box (Pandora's?) will dispense entertainment automatically?’(1)

and similarly it was reported in Java in the 1980s:

‘Whereas dancers used to require the presence of musicians to provide accompaniment for their rehearsals, the standard practice now is to use commercially produced cassettes of dance music, or to make recordings for that purpose. It is not unusual for a dancer to use a cassette recorder for performances, thereby eliminating the musician completely.’ (2)

No doubt, similar oppression on live musical performance has been increasingly occurring all over the world, including in the back seat of our car driving through the Caucasus mountains. As Tom Munnelly points out, it is by no means a new trend. Fashions change, old song-forms are replaced by new, and modes of performance are ushered into extinction by the latest fads. Whether it’s the Lindy Hop being replaced by the Jitterbug in 1950s Harlem dance halls or Georgian rap fighting for survival against Georgian folk polyphony, technology has often been a decisive factor in speeding up the process of change.

However, recording and broadcasting technology can also be the saviour of diverse musics. When, in 2001, Georgian Traditional Polyphony was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, a programme of ‘re-education’ was implemented by the Georgian government to teach traditional songs to singers in Georgia using recordings from the 1930s as examples of ‘authenticity’.(3) Indeed, since 1901 the early recordings made by the prodigious Graphaphone Company of Georgian ensembles have proved an invaluable resource in preserving the unique style of polyphonic singing before the onset of the Soviet era.

My experience of hearing the women singing their old songs was more special than any recording of Georgian music I had heard up to that point and since, but if it hadn’t been for the recordings I had heard up to that point, I would not have enquired about their songs and perhaps I would not have been inclined to even travel to Georgia. I enquired with Nadia about the songs: Are they love songs? Some are, she explained, some warriors songs and some are from the supra, the traditional Georgian feast. Nata would show me where to get some CDs before I left, she assured me, and she recommended some good recording artists.

The conversation lulled. The night became dark. Then as we neared the environs of Tbilisi, modernity revealed itself gradually as street lights, billboards and neon, and the women tiredly hummed together –

თბილისო, მზის და ვარდების მხარეო
უშენოდ სიცოცხლეც არ მინდა
სად არის სხვაგან ახალი ვარაზი
სად არის ჭაღარა მთაწმინდა

Tbiliso, mzis da vardebis mkhareo
Ushenod sicockhlec ar minda
Sad aris skhvagan akhali varazi
Sad aris chagara mtatsminda

My Tbilisi, flourish in the sun
My fate is regained
Your splendour is nowhere else to be found
Without you life is without beauty

(1) The Singing Tradition of Irish Travellers, Tom Munnelly, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Music of the Travelling People (1975), pp. 3-30 Published by: English Folk Dance & Song Society URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4521962 Accessed: 21/07/2009 19:16

(2) Sutton, R. A. (1985) ‘Commercial cassette recordings of traditional music in Java: Implications for performers and scholars’, World of Music, 27/3, pp. 23–45.

(3) Ninoshvili, Lauren, 'Singing Between the Words - The poetics of Georgian polyphony', PhD thesis 2010, Columbia University, p3, referencing discussion with Nino Tsitsishvili