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 20th 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.
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