Talking with Plato?

This is the sort of thing I find utterly fascinating. Greek-speaking Muslims continue to live in the Turkish Pontos speaking a dialect of ρωμαίϊκα, a language with grammatical structures retained from classical Greek. Listen as well to the distinctive Pontic music in the background. Incidentally, ρωμαιϊκά means Roman, which harks back to the time when Orthodox Christians living in the Eastern Roman Empire called themselves Ρωμαίοι, or Romans.

In the phrygian mode

Not too long ago I was puzzled to hear my father tell me that a lot of Greek folk music is in the key of E. How could he know the precise key of a folk song with so many variations in so many parts of the Greek-speaking world? It quickly dawned on me that he meant that it was in what we now call the phrygian mode, which spans the octave between any two E's on the white keys of the piano. Here is an example from one of the Aegean islands:

Cat Stevens, ex-Greek singer

While we're on the subject of Greek music, remember Ruby Love by sixties great Cat Stevens? Some of the lyrics are even in Greek, while the bouzouki adds a distinctive hellenic flavour to what is in effect a kalamatianos. More than three decades ago Stevens, who was born in England to a Greek Cypriot father, converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.

Οι 'Ελληνες της Μικράς Ασίας — The Greeks of Asia Minor

A decade ago I was reading everything I could on the fate of the Greeks of Asia Minor, including Marjorie Housepian Dobkin's Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City. Greeks had inhabited this region for nearly three millennia until the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne mandated the exchange of populations between Greece and the new Turkish Republic, uprooting hundreds of thousands of refugees from their homes and sending them to countries that were not their own. A grand effort to secure ethnic uniformity wreaked havoc on deeply rooted communities, something my own relatives experienced in Cyprus half a century later.

In memory of the Greeks of Asia Minor, I link to the following folk song, Γιαννούλα Τσανακαλιώτισσα (Giannoula Tsanakaliotissa), whose title refers to a girl from what in Turkish is called Çanakkale (Τσανάκκαλε) and in Greek Δαρδανέλλια (Dardanellia). This town is located on the northwest coast of Asia Minor immediately across from the Gallipoli Peninsula. I had been looking for this song for ten years and finally found it a few days ago.

The Byzantine musical scale

For those still attempting to master the intricacies of Byzantine chant and musical notation, I have now come up with a surefire method of learning the scale. Most westerners are acquainted with the western (solfège) scale:

Do re mi fa so la ti do

Fewer of us are as familiar with the Byzantine musical scale, which my father was taught as a child:

Πα βου γα δι κε ζω νη πα
(Pa vou gha thee ke zo ni pa)

Now there is a song to help us learn this:

The Byzantine Musical Scale Song

(To the tune of Do Re Mi, by Richard Rodgers,
lyrics by David T. Koyzis,
with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein II)

Πα, a name I call my dad,
βου, a Gallic word for “you,”
γα, the sound a baby makes,
δι is you and only you,
κε, conjoining words in Greek,
ζω, where animals are caged,
νη, arthritis makes it weak.
That will bring us back to
Πα - κε - γα - βου
Πα . . .

Ravel's hellenic foray

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is one of my favourite composers. Thus when I came into contact with his Cinq mélodies populaires grecques more than two decades ago, I was intrigued.



The texts are apparently authentic Greek folk songs, though I am not persuaded, contrary to the person who posted this clip on Youtube, that this is true of the melodies as well. I have the sheet music somewhere, and I do recall seeing Greek and French texts between the staves. The tunes, however, were almost certainly composed by Ravel himself in what he believed to be the style of δημοτικά τραγούδια (folk songs). To my ears, however, they sound much more typically Ravel than Greek. Contrary to the writer of this review, the first song is not in G minor; this is modal music and it's in the G phrygian scale.

A day to remember

Today marks the 555th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.

Theodorakis' paper kites

This piece has to be my all-time favourite of the large corpus of works by composer Mikis Theodorakis. It's called Χαρταετοί, or Paper Kites, and it is here performed ably by the students of the Mousiko Skholeio Alimou in Greece:

St. Basil the Great

Today is the feast day of St. Basil the Great, who lived from approximately 330 to 379 and was bishop of Caesarea. In the Orthodox tradition he is grouped with Gregory the Theologian (Nazianzus) and St. John Chrysostom as the Three Holy Hierarchs, and with Gregory the Theologian and St. Gregory of Nyssa as one of the Cappadocian Fathers.

Among other things he is known for his battles against the Arian heresy and his defence of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, in use during Great Lent in the Orthodox Church, is named for him, in recognition of his activities "in formularizing liturgical prayers and promoting church-song."

Amongst the Greeks, St. Basil brings gifts to children on 1 January, in a tradition mirroring that of St. Nicholas in the west. In fact, a Google image search of Άγιος Βασίλης brings up surprisingly familiar images.

Off-putting auto

KIA Motors obviously did not have any Greeks working in its marketing department when it came up with the following:



I suspect I'm not the only person to read this as "kill", which could prevent its cars selling in Greece, Cyprus, Toronto's Danforth neighbourhood and Melbourne's Russell and Lonsdale district.

More Greek dancing

Riverdance has nothing on these young men performing the Cretan pentozali and thereby demonstrating that, if sport builds camaraderie in North America, dancing does so amongst the Greeks:



Bravo, λεβέντες μου! And here is that famous scene from the 1964 film, Alexis Zorbas, or Zorba the Greek, in which Anthony Quinn teaches Alan Bates to dance the hasaposerviko to Mikis Theodorakis' electrifying music. As a child, I must have heard this, including the dialogue at the beginning, countless times on our family's LP soundtrack of the film.



This afternoon Theresa and I were dancing and, after watching the above footage a few times, she did a pretty good approximation of Zorba's dance. Opaaa!

Pontic music

Three years ago I wrote of The fate of the Pontic Greeks, that is, those Greek Orthodox Christians who inhabited the southern shores of the Black Sea for nearly 2 thousand years prior to their treaty-mandated expulsion after 1923. Although I grew up hearing and singing Greek music, especially δημοτικά τραγούδια (folk songs) familiar to generations, it was less than a decade ago that I encountered the distinctive Pontic Greek music via this page maintained by Leigh Cline of Toronto.

As a child I learned to dance the καλαματιανό (kalamatiano), with its distinctive 7/8 time signature. Typical examples follow immediately below:


These are familiar to anyone attending one of the numerous Greek Orthodox church festivals held throughout North America during the summer months. However, one is less likely to see something like this at one of those festivals:


The music of the Pontic region boasts such distinctive instruments as the 3-stringed kemenche, played much like a western viol. It has a close relationship to the music of the surrounding cultures, especially that of the Caucasus, Iran and central Asia, and it may even have ancient Celtic roots. The Pontic Greeks are one of any number of displaced communities around the world who have brought their culture, including their music, with them in an attempt to maintain their distinctiveness in exile.

Fall of Constantinople: a grim anniversary

Today is the 550th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Although most westerners think of this as the end of the "Byzantine" Empire, it was really the end of the last vestige of the Roman Empire, which had been contracting in fits and starts for nearly a millennium. The Empire's people called themselves Romans, and so did their conquerors, even after the empire had been extinguished. The emperors were officially titled "Emperor of the Romans" and saw themselves as the genuine heirs of the Caesars, albeit christian and not pagan.

Constantinople was built by and named for the Emperor Constantine, who transferred his capital here from Rome in AD 330. It was ideally situated for defensive purposes, and indeed the city was successfully conquered only twice: in 1204 by the Crusaders and in 1453 by the Ottomans.

Throughout much of what we call the middle ages, Constantinople was the largest city in the known world. It was the centre of Christendom at a time when western Europe was still sparsely populated. The City was dominated by the magnificent dome of the Church of the Holy Wisdom, or Aghia Sophia, an architectural wonder built between 532 and 537 by Justinian I. This was the mother church (metropolis) of Orthodox Christianity and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch.



Aghia Sophia

The fall of the City came after a lengthy siege on tuesday, 29 May 1453. It was renamed Istanbul by Mustafa Kemal, founder of the modern Turkish republic. But Istanbul is not actually a Turkish name; it comes from the Greek "eis ten polin," meaning "to the City." For all Greeks, well into the 20th century, Constantinople was quite simply "The City."



The siege of Constantinople,
Moldovita Monastery, Roumania

A sizeable Greek Orthodox community remained in Constantinople up until September 1955, when a series of pogroms prompted most to leave. At present the Greek-speaking community numbers a few thousand elderly people at most. Aghia Sophia is now a museum.



Alexios I Comnenos, Emperor 1081-1118