Ottoman History Podcast - The Journeys of Ottoman Greek Music

Episode Date: May 3, 2020

Episode 463 with Panayotis League hosted by Chris Gratien What is Greek music? For our guest Panayotis League, it's no one thing. Rather, it is diversity that defines the many regional musical traditions of Greece and the broader Greek diaspora. In this episode, we discuss League's ethnomusicological research on Greek music in diaspora, and we explore the history and transformation of Ottoman Greek music before and after the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece. As League explains, Greek music in the Ottoman Empire was inextricably linked to the musical traditions of neighboring Turkish, Armenian, and Sephardic communities. However, the First World War, the Second Greco-Turkish War, and the exchange of populations that sent the entire Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia to Greece eliminated spaces of intercommunality where Ottoman music thrived. In our conversation, we discuss how the intercommunal music of the Ottoman Empire survived in Greece among exchanged people who pioneered the new rebetiko style that would reshape Greek popular music. We also discuss how the music of Ottoman Greeks fit into a larger diasporic communal dynamic in places like the United States. « Click for More »

I think the only common characteristic that all Greek music has is that there are people who play it who have decided that it's Greek and doesn't necessarily mean the lyrics are even in Greek. The historical Greek territories, places where Greek speaking people who thought of themselves as Greek have lived straddles the entirety of the Eastern Mediterranean. So there's corners of the Greek world whose music has almost literally nothing in common with the music of some of the Greeks from the interior of Anatolia, from Asia Minor. I think it's most helpful actually to think of the universe of Greek music in terms of geographical areas. So for example, the music of northern Greece along the borders with places like Bulgaria.

These countries, in many respects, is almost indistinguishable from the music of Bulgarians who live on their southern border. Really, the only difference is the language they're singing in. The music of the Ionian Islands is very similar to a lot of Italian music. The mandolins, harmony singing, accompaniment with the guitar. The music of northwestern Greece, Epirus, is identical to the music of southern Albania, and so forth. And more to the point of the topic today, the music of the Greek communities of eastern Thrace, let's say, is the same as the music of the Turks of Western Turkish Thrace, and the music of the giant population of Greeks that lived in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire, places like Izmir, Smyrni as we call it in Greek, or of course

Istanbul, Constantinople, was indistinguishable from the music of Turks and Armenians and Sephardic Jews because they all played music together. They celebrated together all of the great orchestras, bands, recording artists of the pre-Turkish Republic period, the late Ottoman period. Almost all of them were explicitly multi-ethnic, pluralistic in both musical tastes and their demographic makeup. So it's a tremendously large universe of music. Music and diaspora have been two of our favorite subjects on the Ottoman History Podcast.

And in our final episode of Season 9, we're exploring the vast universe of Greek music in the diaspora. I'm your host, Chris Graydon. In this interview with Panayotis Leik, an ethnomusicologist, musician, and assistant professor of musicology at Florida State University. In this episode, we're going to be focusing

on the history of Ottoman Greek music, its relationship to the music of non-Greek communities, and its transformation after the First World War with the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece. Hellenic College Holy Cross is one of the largest Greek Orthodox seminaries and institutions of higher learning outside of Greece. It's tucked away on a hill in Brookline, Massachusetts, just a short drive from the center of Boston.

This is what it sounds like on a cloudy day in June. I visited Hellenic College to meet with Panagiotis League on one of his breaks from teaching in the Hellenic College summer sessions. So I grew up around people from the island of Kalimnos, which is in the Dodecanese, just a few miles from Bodrum, the resort town on the southwestern Aegean coast of Turkey. So I grew up with this very particular musical tradition.

I wrote my master's thesis on the music of that community in the town I more or less grew up in, in Florida, which is a sponge-diving community, Tarpon Springs. But I wanted to do something different for my dissertation research. And I've been living here in Boston for a decade or so, almost a decade, and had gotten to know a lot of people and was playing with a lot of musicians who were descended from refugees, Greek refugees from the Aegean coast of Turkey, from places like Alatsata, right across from the island of Chios, and from the island of Mytilene or Lesvos.

Both people who were the descendants of refugees who made that same crossing that, of course, we've been hearing so much about in the news over the last couple of years, the Strait of Mytilene to Lesvos, but also people of lesbian extraction who, for various reasons, economic or political, their grandparents or great-grandparents came here in the teens and 20s. So Boston has a, there's a very high percentage of Boston's Greek community

who are of Anatolian or Ottoman origin. Also a lot of people from the Black Sea coast, the Pontians, Pontic Greeks, right? So I'd been spending a lot of time with this community. I was fascinated by their music, which to me was very exotic. My ideas of what it meant to be Greek and Greek music were very different from theirs.

And this is really the key. And you mentioned this idea of intercommunality or like aesthetic pluralism. When I would ask my friends from Lesbos or whose grandparents were from Lesbos, oh, play me something that you used to listen to as a kid, that is a great memory of your idea of Greekness. They were as likely, if not more likely, to put on an old 78 RPM recording

of someone singing an improvisation in Turkish, or Arabic, or playing a dance form that was explicitly Turko-Arabo-Persian than they were like the Greek island dances that I would have expected based on having grown up with islanders

from an island not too far away. So it quickly became clear to me that their idea, their practice, lived idea of what it meant to be Greek was referencing this world

that in the, let's be honest, the relatively ethno-nationalist influenced idea of modern Greek America was very foreign. Aşağı, elinde dağ var, elinde üstümden aşağı. Beni talimci kuşlara koyamadık ya. Altyazı M.K. So that fascinated me. So that led me to spend a lot of time with those communities, listening to their music, looking at their archives. They have a tremendous tradition of musical literacy,

so a lot of notations, a lot of written accounts of things, as well as spending a few summers doing fieldwork in villages, the villages on the island of Lesvos where my friends' families had come from. So I spent a lot of time playing with musicians, doing interviews, attending festivals, and what came out of it was my dissertation. Generations after the first migrations to the U.S., Greek music from the former Ottoman Empire doesn't just survive, it's alive and well. The focus of the music of the

Dodic and East Islands, or at least the island of Kalymnos, like in a lot of music from Crete, is on improvised poetry. So people are paying very close attention because they want to hear the song that you're making up and they repeat it back to you. And, you know, it's running jokes and gags and playing around with the social context. A very informal, let's say, village style. Very sophisticated, but a very village style of musical performance. And another thing that struck me about the Anatolian or Ottoman Greek musicians who I was working with and playing with both in Greece and in the diaspora community here. And this holds true for also the large Armenian community and whether they came here from Arab countries or Turkey. The degree of sophistication

and attention to performative detail, whether or not they're on a stage, even if they're in the living room, there's just this real reverence for crafting an artistic performance. And I think that's a very clear sign of that heritage, that urban, professional, musical class of the late Ottoman Empire that these people are artistic descendants of. So that made a great impression on me. That married to that kind of rowdy, interactive, jocular context of, you know, musicians in this culture, jukeboxes, you know, that people come up and pay them and tell them what they want to dance and they do it.

culture jukeboxes, you know, that people come up and pay them and tell them what they want to dance and they do it. But a lot of really clever musical jokes and references, like sly asides to the other musicians or knowledgeable dancers or singers in the audience who would get them because they, so many of them have this encyclopedic knowledge of historical recordings or the way, you know, some great Turkish violinist used to play this piece, or that kind of thing. Ottoman Greek music from what is now the Republic of Turkey is only one subset of the Greek musical tradition, but it's one of the subsets of Greek music that has traveled most widely over the past century. Although parts of modern Greece became independent as early as the 1830s, more than a million

Greek Orthodox people lived in what is now Turkey right up until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Greeks were vital to the Ottoman music scene, and a key feature of Ottoman Greek music was its intercommunal character. It was inseparable from the musical traditions of the other ethno-religious communities residing in the empire. Perhaps we can start in opposition to communalism, like defining ethnic or regional or personal identity in opposition to other groups that have distinct bounded identities. So intercommunality, in the way that I use it and a lot of scholars of the Ottoman world talk about it

is the guiding ethos of the, not just the urban, but the primarily urban pluralistic Ottoman world where there was a recognition, both a tacit and a vocal practiced recognition by all the different ethnic and

religious groups of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, however you want to call them, and other groups, of course, that in order for the society to function in a way that was mutually beneficial to everyone, boundaries had to be porous, necessarily. Social boundaries, artistic boundaries. Of course, some boundaries are less porous than others,

especially ones relating to joining a family, marriage, this kind of thing. But those were often porous as well. So the idea is that it was in everyone's best interest in terms of the continued prosperity and flourishing not only of their own ethno-religious group, but the larger town or city that they, or on the global scale, the empire that they belong to,

that everyone, to a great degree, leave each other be in ways that were convenient according to laws and societal norms. So there's a lot of give and take. Looking back, one might be tempted to see this culture as in some way hybrid. But that's a lot of give and take. Looking back, one might be tempted to see this culture as in some way hybrid. But that's a reading that only makes sense in a post-Ottoman context. We can all think of some musical experience that we've had or we have daily

that in one way or another originates in some group that we don't necessarily identify with in terms of our ideas about where we come from genetically or culturally, but still a big part of our lives. And in the realm of music, there are spectacular examples. My personal favorite, because it also touches on the religious, the supposedly bounded ritual world of religion, one of the most, and this is appropriate to mention since we're here at Hellenic College and Holy Cross, which is one of the largest Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox theological schools outside of Greece. One of the most beloved composers of Byzantine liturgical music, Petros Peloponnesios, Petros Labavarios,

he was one of the head chanters of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul. He was also one of the most renowned and respected composers of Mevlevi music, liturgical music, and he was one of Mevlevi music, liturgical music, and he was one of the, in his time, one of the Ottoman Sultan's court composers and court performers. So he very comfortably straddled that line and probably also sang and composed secular music as well. Greek Orthodox chants influence the Sufi music of so-called whirling dervishes that have become a symbol of Turkey's musical heritage to the world. And the Turkish popular music of Ottoman cities quickly found its way to nightclubs in New York thanks to Greek immigrants and other people from the Ottoman Empire.

Generations later, those melodies survive wherever the Ottoman diaspora is to be found. And at the beginning of the 20th century, the intercommunal music scene of the Ottoman Empire wasn't just intact, it had never been more vibrant. In many ways, it was just coming into its own with the rapid growth of Mediterranean port cities. However, Ottoman Greek music would follow a radically different trajectory due to the political conflicts of the First World War and its aftermath, which culminated in a diplomatically negotiated exchange of populations

between Turkey and Greece. So when we say the population exchange, which I personally, I hate this term, I think it's an absolutely perverse and cruel mockery of the real kind of exchanges between populations that were happening for centuries before the tragic event. But that's, it's what we call it. So after the, when the Ottoman Empire was, the writing was on the wall and the Western powers were intervening in various ways to play their cards and get the biggest pieces they could

of the pie that was about to be cut up after the First World War. One of the things that happened was the Greek army and the Greek armed forces invaded the western coast of Turkey, occupied a lot of the large urban areas, particularly Izmir, with plans of annexing all these lost former Byzantine territories, what we call the great idea of anarchy, sort of unification of all the former Greek lands. The Turkish forces withdrew into the heart of Anatolia. The Greek army was encouraged

unwisely to follow and try to stamp them out once and for all. One of the many instances in history of this kind of thing going very badly. They were soundly defeated by Kemal Ataturk's forces and fled from Anatolia. Various things happened. A lot of atrocities were committed by both sides, by all sides. One of the most painful events, the emblematic event from the Greek point of view of this series of events was the burning of the city of Izmir or Smyrna, which was a majority

non-Muslim city. Huge Greek-Armenian-Jewish population. And a very large number of people died on all sides, but particularly the Christian inhabitants of the city. And that event has come to stand for this,

what we call the great catastrophe in Greek, the loss of quote-unquote Hellenism, Asia Minor Hellenism, the millennia-old Greek presence. So at the peace talks at Lausanne in Switzerland, in my opinion, and I think the opinion of a lot of historians of the region and of this time, a very misguided, there was a misguided attempt to solve these kind of

problems that were supposedly based on religion. And so the idea was all of the Ottoman, all of the Christians, Orthodox Christians residing in Turkey would be quote-unquote repatriated Orthodox Christians residing in Turkey would be, quote-unquote, repatriated to Greece, and the Muslims in Greece would be repatriated to Turkey, with some exceptions of certain populations. This was a tremendous disaster. It was a humanitarian disaster. It made worse the already existing humanitarian disaster,

which was a consequence of the Second Greco-Turkish War. And it was a deeply traumatic experience for everyone who were, like anyone who's a refugee, who's uprooted from where they're from. It had an effect, of course, in Turkey. Every human life has equal value, and many people's lives were irrevocably changed. But in a giant country with such a large population, the percentage of people whose lives were affected was much smaller. However, in Greece, the population of Greece increased overnight, almost literally overnight by, I can't off the top of my head say the percentage, but there were something like a million and a half refugees who flooded into Greece. It completely changed the face of the nation,

particularly urban areas like Athens and Thessaloniki. Now, in terms of what this did to music, it was absolutely, it was tremendously destructive. It destroyed this vibrant, not completely destroyed, but it in many ways crippled this remarkably vibrant intercommunal, as I said, pluralistic world of free cultural exchange, musical ideas, and this great economy of artistic production, and transferred it to many places around the Eastern Mediterranean. But it did have a lot of creative consequences, as tragedies often do. So the example that springs most readily to mind, as you mentioned,

was this genre that we've come to call rebetika, which in a simplistic way we can say the continuation the urban kind of uh you know continuation of these the the continuation of this ottoman urban music in urban centers in greece by people who all of a sudden found themselves living in refugee camps or in slums, a lot of people who used to play at the courts of local dignitaries and this kind of thing. The emblematic instrument of this genre, the bouzouki, of course, it's such a beautiful, as many people have pointed out, it's such a beautiful emblem of this world

of modern Greek artistic culture because it's a hybrid instrument. It's based on long-necked, bowl-backed Eastern Mediterranean lutes with a Western-style and Italian-style mandola neck stuck on it, and it bears a Turkish name, bozuk, broken.

It refers to different tuning systems. So it was an absolutely catalytic event for modern Greek popular music, for sure, the urban popular music of Greece. I mean, you can barely hear any, even pop, like Western-style or Euro-style pop songs made by Greek artists that don't have at least implicit tonal or metrical in the lyrics or timbral, the sound of instruments or the references to that genre and that world of Asia Minor. Argyledes ke tsigaro, marugana brousas mavro.

Argyledes ke tsigaro, marugana brousas mavro. Ottoman Greeks arrived in Greece with an entirely new culture that would forever change the country's music. But the initial reception of this culture in Greece was ambivalent at best. To the best of my knowledge, the initial reception by Greek or Athenian society at large was not a very warm one. I mean, these were people whose physical presence, and by extension their sounds and their smells and their language, were a painful, a stark painful reminder of the utter humiliation that the Greek nation had just gone through, being defeated. The perspective of someone who had grown up with this idea of the dream of reuniting all of Greekdom. And to taste it, to read in the newspaper that we've taken back. Smyrni, the Greek army is in Constantinople, right?

The second Rome. And then all of a sudden, just a few months later, this terrible tragedy, human and political tragedy from that point of view, had happened. They were absolutely, they were treated very terribly they were discriminated against in horrendous ways some didn't speak greek as their first language right because they came from parts of anatolia where people were speaking turkish absolutely in fact there are there's a the community of greek americans in new haven connecticut um a big percentage of them uh were monolingual turkish speakers from the interior of Anatolia. I mean, imagine what it must have been like for those people to get off the boat in Athens, supposedly to be reunited with their cultural kin and to be treated like trash and

then finally make their way here. So their music at first also was not very well received. make their way here. So their music at first also was not very well received. We tend to view, we, when I say we, I mean the musicians and artists and scholars who are interested in this, in the Greek music for that time, we tend to view the artistic product of those refugees in through this, you know, sepia toned, you know, romantic haze because they produced amazing music. The balance of the recordings that we have and the photographs that we look at of artists like Panagiotis Toudas, Roseski Nasi,

one of the great voices of the Greek Ottoman tradition, even though she was a Turkish-speaking Sephardic Jew, people like that, those were made in Athens and in other places in Greece after the population exchange. So we tend to imagine it as this lively continuation. On the one hand, this continuation of that world, the sophisticated artistic world that they had been kicked out of. And on the other hand, this romanticized kind of like tough guy, underworld, hash den,

running from the police, playing, this kind of thing which both of those things were real but i think the reality of people moved rather fluidly i think between those and we must not forget the people like rosa eskinazi and all of her contemporaries they were singing these songs about being a refugee about being destitute about drugs about knife. They're also doing these amazing improvisations on classical Ottoman poetry, but they're also singing tangos and waltzes, and they were doing all those things in Turkey. Let's take a minute to enjoy a few selections of music from that first generation of singers

who came with the exchange of populations. This is one of my favorite, absolute all-time favorite recordings from the post-catastrophe era. This is what we would call in Greek a manes or a gazelli, so like a vocal improvisation on a poetic form, on a couplet, a rhyming couplet in the Greek language. It was recorded by the legendary Rita Abadzi, who was born in Asia Minor around 1914

and came to Greece as a refugee as a child. And it's one of the most heart-rending performances that we have from that era. The lyrics say, So one must always bear in mind the hour of death, that he will enter into the black earth and his name will be erased. So I've always thought of it as such a fitting reminder

of what those people went through and that they were able to produce such extraordinarily beautiful and virtuosic art, even literally in the shadow of the catastrophe. So this is Rita Abadzi, 1934, Gazali Nevasabah. πρέπει να σκέφτεται κανείς αμάν αμάν Μα να μαν κάνεις την ώρα του θάνατο άμαν αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, Αμάν Γεια σου λάμπρο με το κανονάκι σου Μουσική Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE Oh, myμάν, ό,τι θα μπει στη μαύρη γη Αμάν, αμάν, αμάν, αμάν στη μαύρη γης και σβήνει το όνομα του αμάν.

Αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ, αχ. All right, so this is one of the all-time great Asia Minor Greek dance songs recorded by Rosa Eskenazi, who is a Turkish-speaking Sephardic Jew who came to Greece with her family as a child. This is a song that was written by her longtime partner, artistic partner Panagiotis Toudas, who himself was born in Izmir,

a great songwriter and producer. It is a karsilamas or karslama dance, so a face-to-face couple dance called Dimitroulamou. When Rosa Eskenazi was, quote-unquote, rediscovered in her old age, this was one of the emblematic songs that she performed on Greek media. Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE Θα σου φέρω λατέρνα, κάνε και πήγε και αρνά Τα ναζάκια σου άσα, με τη γάμπα σου σπάστα Και όλα εγώ τα σπασμένα, τα πληρώνω για σένα Μουσική Δημητρούλα μου, τραβανά κράσα κι ακόμα βάλ' το κούκλα μου

Το ποτήρι σου στο στόμα, ρούχα ακόμα, μια ρεζίνα να μεθύσω με Και το βράδυ βρήκα χθινά, θα γλεντήσω με Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE Με τη γάμπα σου σπάσα κι όλα εγώ τα σπασμένα θα πληρώνω για σένα Τα δερνιάρι μου Φέρε μας και κοκκινέλη Και για αγάπη μου Το καρσίλα μου αχορεύει Κούνησε μου το λιγάκι Το κορμάκι σου

Τίπα μου το τίκη τίκη Τα χτώτα κουνάκι σου Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE The way that we think about it now, and the way we practice these things now is very different because there was a large period of time where that music was very socially unacceptable, especially to young Greek musicians working in Greece. I think it would have been politically an extraordinarily radical act for a young Greek person from Athens

or Thessaloniki in the 70s to decide, hey, I want to study Turkish classical music. Some people did, and they met with a lot of resistance. Now, there are literally hundreds of talented young musicians throughout Greece who, their primary musical activity

is playing the classical music of the Ottoman world or things that are offshoots from it. They spend time in Istanbul and other places. They go to seminars to learn. And there's a lot of people in the U.S. too who are of Greek descent or who aren't, who really consciously identify with the artistic ethos of that time in that way. I would also say that the communities of people who actually are descended from refugees from that time, like Armenians, like I said, people of Black Sea heritage or people from the Aegean coast of Turkey, they also, in my experience, are interested in that art music world, but they've by and large grown up in this community that for the most part, even in instances where the language has disappeared, where people don't really speak

Greek comfortably or don't speak Turkish, they still from earliest childhood have entertained themselves with the same kind of dance and music forms that people did a hundred years ago. So it's a very, very intense, very important part of who they are. Ottoman Greek music was already diasporic in a sense when it came to Greece, but it made itself at home there. However, as Ottoman Greeks increasingly left for other places beyond Greece, like the United States, their music entered into communal contexts where Greeks from many different places occupied the same space in cities such as Boston. There is a, or maybe a couple different common

Greek-American cultural identities that have to do with performing arts, music, and songs in particular. So people who think of themselves as Greek-American, particularly if they're involved at all in the life, the social life of the Orthodox Church, but even if they're not, most people have a common understanding of particular sounds that are Greek. And it's not just bouzouki music, and it's not just, you know, urban like rebetika and post-war, rebetika and pop music, things that, you know, pop stars have sung. I mean, there's a lot of elements of music, of island music,

you know, traditional island music like the stuff I grew up with that are mainstream, part of the Greek-American identity through dances that you learn at a church festival or whatever. There's a lot of explicitly Asian minor music that is part of that too. But on the other hand, Greeks, because Greek is such a large and varied culturally diverse place, people tend to have very distinct regional identities. Linguistically, that's certainly the case. Okay, in the American context, by the time you get to the third generation or so, that maybe is not such a big deal, aside from certain words. But in terms of music and dance, it's a very big deal. Like at the very beginning, I was talking

about, you know, these tremendous differences. And even in America today, especially in big urban areas with a lot of Greeks, like in Boston, in New York, in Chicago, each regional group, like in Boston, in New York, in Chicago. Each regional group, cultural group, has its own, at least one, sometimes many, own social clubs that do their own events that bring musicians from their part of Greece and try to cook that kind of food. They try to encourage the use of that dialect of the language.

So there's a lot of give and take between the two. In the specifically Anatolian Greek context, my impression is that that's a little less because there is no homeland left to go to to renew connections with family members who are still there to bring music. You can't bring a musician from your community from a Lazata because a Lazata isn't a Lazata anymore.

It's a town in Turkey. With places like Lesbos, it's a little different. Of course, Lesbos is still there, but those kind of communities, I've noticed that the Anatolian Greek communities are less focused on that kind of thing, with the exception of the Black Sea people, the Pontians, but that's another case

because they speak a radically different dialect of Greek and have extremely different musical and cultural traditions that most other Greeks have trouble relating to or participating in. I think the only common characteristic that all Greek music has is that there are people who play it who have decided that it's Greek. And it doesn't necessarily mean the lyrics are even in Greek. We've listened to so much great music on this season of Ottoman History Podcast, and we're finishing off our ninth year of recording with one more song featuring none other than our guest, Paneotis League. It's from a recording CD that I did with the great Kalimnian violinist Michalis Kapas,

as well as a wonderful singer, Irini Karavukiru. This is an instrumental dance that was typical of the repertoire that was being played on islands like Kalimnos off the coast of Turkey in the early 20th century. And this is called, and I love the name because it's an explicit reference to the urban musical environment of Asia Minor and how it's continued in folk traditions in the Greek islands.

It's called sarki sirtos. Sarka, the Turkish word sarka, means like an urban, like an art song. So this is a sirtos dance, a village-style dance that bears the name sarki. So this is the greatirtos dance, a village-style dance, that bears the name Sarki. So this is the great Michalis Kapas playing violin, and myself playing lauto, the steel string Greek lute, from a record that we released a few years ago

called Traditional Music and Songs from Kalimnos. Thank you. For more on this subject, visit our website, autumnhistorypodcast.com. You'll find links to all the music used in this episode. You heard multiple selections from an old record called Greek Island and Mountain Songs, released by the Royal Greek Festival Company. You also heard a number of recordings of old 78 RPM records, including releases on Canary Records provided by our friend Ian Nagoski. There were also a few more contemporary recordings, a live

performance of traditional Greek smyrnaika music from Massachusetts by Sophia Bilides and her ensemble from the Library of Congress, as well as the music of Petros Peloponnesios recorded by the En Chordes Ensemble and the Nihavend Semai of Petros Peloponnesios performed by George Ale Cordes Ensemble and the Nihavend Semai of Petros Peloponnesios performed by George Alevizios on the Cretan lute and Gina Kalli on the bendir. Of course, that last clip you heard was from the album Traditional Music and Songs from Kalimnos. I'm Chris Grayton. Thank you for staying with us throughout the past year of podcasts. Special thanks to our editors-in-chief over the course of Season 9,

Susanna Ferguson and Sam Dolby, as well as the rest of the Ottoman History Podcast team and our many guest contributors. We'll be taking a short break, so you'll have plenty of time to catch up on anything you missed over the course of Season 9. But we'll be back this summer, and we hope you'll join us for what will be our 10th year of Ottoman History Podcast, beginning under the very unusual conditions of a global pandemic. We hope that all of you and yours are well in these difficult times, and we want you to know that we'll be here for you,

whether you're just bored out of your mind under lockdown, or when you finally do get to take that long flight or road trip that has been delayed by the current crisis. That's it for now. Take care, everyone, and stay tuned.