free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
animation. The mountain songs still uphold the traditional heroic ideal
of levendia, the gallant attitude to life. But the successive oppressors of
the Cretans have gone and the songs now exist in a vacuum. For the
first time in hundreds of years there is no enemy. The Cretan mountaineer
is living in the past, but the twentieth century is beginning to
catch up with him.
Brian Saperia and I were in the White Mountains recording folk
music, the traditional dances played on the lute and the three-stringed
Cretan lyre, and the rizitika, songs from the roots of the mountains
which express in heroic terms the Cretans’ independence and longing
for liberty under Venetians, Turks and Germans. We arrived one evening
in Asi Gonia, a tiny village which emerges from a sea of olives, surrounded
by precipitous mountains on every side. Here we were greeted
by George Psychoundakis, who was runner to Professor Dunbabin in
the resistance after the German invasion of 1941. And within half an
hour we were recording.
I shall not forget that night. In the village café a large tin of Californian
squid was turned out on to a communal plate, and glasses were
filled with the sharp, red Cretan wine which is so much more pleasant
than the resinated variety drunk on the mainland. The Californian
squid was incongruous: native Greek squid is delicious as I discovered
in Piraeus. We had arrived in the middle of the fast which precedes the
Feast of the Assumption. How squid was excepted from the list of forbidden
foods I do not know. Perhaps the villagers shared vicariously in
our status as bona fide travellers.
We ate and drank. And then, quite suddenly, the singing began.
Immediately, the room was filled with people, children intent on us
and our equipment, old men in traditional costume who had come to
see this strange phenomenon. We were tired and we had not had time
to check our recording apparatus. But this was an audience which
could admit of no exceptions. We were caught up in the atmosphere.
Two men were sitting at the table with us, Pavlos Gyparakis and
the shepherd Andreas Petrakis, both veterans of the last war. Pavlos
threw his great head back and began to sing, while Andreas put an arm
round his shoulders as if to bind the two of them together in one performance.
Their absorption was complete. The lamplight flickered on
their faces as they sang:
The Lord made the earth, the Lord built the heavens,
But three things in this world the Lord did not provide;
A bridge over the sea, a return from Hades
And a ladder up to heaven.
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