Arts & Events

I have recently read two fascinating books about the remote mountainous region of Epirus in northwestern Greece. The first book I read was Lament from Epirus by Christopher C. King, (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018(), an account of the author’s lifelong involvement in discovering, initially by means of old 78 rpm vinyl records, traditional music from Epirus in northwestern Greece. The second book, which I decided to reread right after my reading of Lament from Epirus, was Eleni, by Nicholas Gage (Random House, 1983), a harrowing account of how Gage’s mother, a peasant woman from a remote village in the Pindos Mountains of Epirus in Greece near the Albanian border, struggled to save her children. This task, undertaken during the Greek Civil War, ultimately cost this courageous woman her life, while it successfully saved the lives of her children. 

Although I have been many times to Greece, a country and people I cherish, I have never visited the Epirus region depicted in these two books. Thus, it was an eye-opening experience for me to encounter an aspect of the post World War II Greece that I had thus far rarely confronted. These two books opened up to me, in different ways, a Greece that called into questioned, or even countered, my experience of Greece as a land of enormous hospitality and openness to the outside world. 

On this issue, I must say, at the outset, that Christopher C. King’s Lament from Epirus does not in any way challenge this notion of an eminently hospitable Greece. Quite the contrary. King’s account of his visits to Epirus in search of traditional music are full of anecdotes relating the hospitality and openness of the people of Epirus. King was given a front-row seat at many panagyria festivities in Epirus, drank enormous quantities of his hosts’ tsipouro, (distilled moonshine like grappa), and was feted as a great supporter of the local traditional music. 

However, King’s account, focused as it is on traditional folk music and the social circumstances in which it now survives, never mentions the horrendous ravages of Greek society, especially in Epirus, caused by the civil war that erupted in Greece after World War II and pitted villagers against villagers, pro-communists against pro-capitalists, pro-Soviets against pro-western elements, in a struggle for power that cleft Greek society in two. It is precisely those ground-level divisions that re the subtext of Nicholas Gage’s Eleni. Growing up in a remote village high in the Pindos mountains during the post World War II years, Gage, in his first nine years of age, saw how some villagers swung ardently to communism while others either vacillated or swung towards a non-communist nationalism. He also saw how these opposing swings began to tear at the fabric of village life in the Epirus. Of, course, as a nine year-old child, Gage could not comprehend at the time the gravity of this division in village society. However, when his devoted mother Eleni was executed as a traitor by the communist-led ELAS partisans, Nicholas Gage, as a nine-year-old child, found himself having to deal with life bereft of the loving mothuer who had nurtured him since birth. Scarcely comprehending why his mother was killed, he vowed to find out why. Later in life, after he and his sisters successfully emigrated to America, Nicholas Gage set about investigating what happened to his mother and how she died. 

In terms of the age-old Epirot tradition of mourning dirges, or Mirologoi, which dominates the music discovered by Christopher C King in his book Lament from Epirus, it is curious that King fails to even mention the Greek Civill War that tore apart Greece, and especially tore apart the high mountain villages of Epirus, as Nichols Gage’s book Eleni documents. King’s book, a welcome contribution to understanding folk music traditions, ultimately betrays its emphasis on the ongoing presence of folk music by obfuscating the recent past in which that music served extremely counter-progressive authoritarian movements on both sides of the political division. When villagers killed villagers over their respective political sentiments, mourning dirges proliferated in the remote mountain villages of Epirus. Christopher C. King’s emphasis on folk music’s sense of community, a phenomenon King celebrates in Epirus, is strangely oblivious to the extreme political divisions and antagonisms that ravaged the village communities of Epirus during the Greek Civil War.