Epiros. Surely the age-old war between passion and reason which so often consumes the Greek world began there, stoked by its fierce beauty.

Home of the Vikos gorge, the world’s deepest, and the oracle of Dodona, Hellenism’s most ancient, the greatest poets can only take snapshots of Epiros’ soul – Lord Byron sang of the Souliotes in Child Harold.

Words fail. They cannot capture Epiros’ essence or express its wisdom – only music can reveal its magic.

Amanda Petrusich, an American music journalist and author was hypnotized by the music and was powerfully drawn to that continent – the literal meaning of Epiros.

The music of Epirus , in Epirus, northwestern Greece, present to varying degree in the rest of Greece and the islands, contains folk songs that are mostly pentatonic and polyphonic, characterized as relaxed, gentle and exceptionally beautiful, and sung by both male and female singers.

Alismono ke cheromai - Pleiades

The lamentation song ‘When I forget, I’m glad’ (Alismono ke cheromai), recounts a story of forced migration and relates to the present economic situation in Greece.

The female polyphonic group “Pleiades” was founded in May of 2006 in Thessaloniki, in order to contribute to the diffusion of the Greek-speaking folk polyphonic singing. The members of “Pleiades” have already had a considerable experience in studying and performing folk music, in Greece and abroad.

Distinctive songs include lament songs (mirolóyia), shepherd's songs (skáros) and drinking songs (tis távlas).The clarinet is the most prominent folk instrument in Epirus, used to accompany dances, mostly slow and heavy, like the menousis, fisouni, podhia, sta dio, sta tria, zagorisios, kentimeni, koftos, yiatros and tsamikos. The polyphonic song of Epirus constitutes one of the most interesting musical forms, not only for the east Mediterranean and the Balkans, but also for the worldwide repertoire of the folk polyphony like the yodeling of Switzerland. Except from its scale, what pleads for the very old origin of the kind is its vocal, collective, rhetorical and modal character.

The Polyphonic Song of Epirus, one of the most significant examples in the repertoire of world polyphonic music, is a living tradition and an element of the cultural identity of the populations of the borderland region of Epirus and the Greek minority of Albania (Northern Epirus).

Petroloukas Chalkias - Epirotiko Mirologi

The song, “Epirotiko Mirologi,” is a pentatonic lament — mirologi — that, for millenniums, has been sung beside fresh graves in Epirus. The performance is a little over four minutes long, instrumental and largely improvised against the low anchoring drone of some unnamed accompanist dragging a bow across a double bass.

Epirotiko Mirologi sung at the funeral of the Greek hero Konstantinos Katsifas

Pagonisio

A gentleman from the southern United States discovers folk music in rural Greece that is full of purpose--the music here is meant to heal those who hear it, participate in it. What results is a book and a lifelong odyssey into the function of music.

Christopher C. King is a Grammy-winning producer, musicologist as well as a prominent 78 rpm collector. He has been profiled in the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post, and has written for the Paris Review and the Oxford American. Christopher was born and raised in southwest Virginia and studied philosophy at Radford University.

Over the course of the last ten years, he has researched the tradition of Greek demotika songs, especially in Epirus. In 2018, W.W. Norton published his book, Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Old Surviving Folk Music, to wide critical acclaim. His book was named one of the top ten books of 2018 by the Wall Street Journal and Christopher has presented his work at the New York Public Library, the Gennadius Library of Athens as well as the Odeon Conservatoire in Athens, among other venues. He currently splits his time between the United States and Greece. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.