28. THE MAKING OF THE MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS

iii) APPENDIX

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28. THE MAKING OF THE MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ 28. ΠΩΣ ΓΕΝΝΗΘΗΚΕ Ο ΜΕΣΟΓΕΙΟΥ ΠΑΡΑΠΛΟΥΣ

Michales Loukovikas

“… STARTING FROM INDIA with Ravi Shankar, he passes to the Arabs with their ouds, then to Andalusia and flamenco – and, why not?, to some Jimi Henrdix stuff, if he feels like it!”…

Pandit Ravi Shankar

That’s how a 9.58 fm executive responded, to the question of a new ERT3 radio manager, on what I played in the Mediterranean periplus, as he was impressed by the program’s ratings, having in hand the results of a related research: if this executive had included the… Persians, Bach and Beethoven, plus Latin America and jazz, he would have been closer to a succinct summary!

The Mediterranean periplus was born in 1998, when I was told that from then on my program would be daily (the previous years I had weekly shows: In Search of Orpheus, and Flamenco – Andalusia’s Rebetiko, when I translated Donn Pohren’s book, The Art of Flamenco, comparing the two genres). I was puzzled over what I would do in my new daily program, and decided to do something… extravagant, continuing in a way my Thessaloniki newspaper column, Mediterranean periplus, while playing music exclusively from my personal archive.

In short, I decided to present to the public the material I had been collecting for several years, not just buying discs (my resources were limited then: I would eat less to get “musical food”), but also copying from friends (in any house I visited, I would check the record collection, and then borrow some of them). I’m talking, nota bene, about the era B.I. (before Internet), when not only free downloading was non-existent, but also information about “world music” was, in fact, hard to find. In this way, I managed to gather a rather admirable archive.

I divided my archive into two categories (Orient / Occident), and numbered my discs and cassettes (Hellenic numbers for the Orient, Arabic for the Occident). I then figured out ways to get random numbers so as to eliminate the subjective element in music selection: these… lucky numbers corresponded to music from both categories (so that there was a balance between them); finally, I checked everything I played so as not to play it again – unless it was a listener’s request. (I don’t think there is any other “extravagant” person in the world who prepares shows in this way! Nor, of course, that if someone followed this recipe, he/she would be able to create a new Mediterranean periplus)…⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ There was a girl who would come to the studio every evening to watch me while I was “on air” in an effort to “decipher” my way of making radio. I don’t know if she was an earnest fan of mine or a spy of the management – or if her intentions were more “down-to-earth”! In any case, after a month or so, she disappeared giving up her quest: I guess that she had probably decided I was undecipherable – or just… undesirable!

Nina Simone and Soteria Bellou

Anyone can understand that the pieces of music selected through this “lottery” were anything but corresponding to each other. That’s why a “rationalization” process followed to map out itineraries, build bridges, and find the information for each track, so that the journey would be unpredictable, and also meaningful, captivating and entertaining; you see, I loathed that “trendy style” to play a Nina Simone blues after a Soteria Bellou’s rebetiko! Add to this the digitization of all tracks that were not in CD format. As contributing in this field, I have to publicly thank Giorgos Andreou (who, after listening to some of my shows, turned to me and said, “You’re way ahead…” – with me looking dumbfounded, as I couldn’t understand then what he meant).⁽²⁾

• ⁽²⁾ It is impressive that my work as a radio producer has improved my work as a music producer! The experience I gained creating bridges between different cultures and genres of music in the radio program was used during the final revision of my work setting Ares Alexandrou’s poetry to music (The Gold in the Sky): this work, lasting 78 minutes, is essentially one piece, where each part leads to the next one – despite being a West-to-East voyage with many styles involved. In short, the radio made me a better musician! I am again indebted to Giorgos Andreou during this final revision phase of my work, as he helped me use the Finale program… When the time came later for my adventure in Portugal, in a partnership with Amélia Muge, I was equipped to employ all this knowledge in our own projects (Periplus and Archipelagos), sailing freely through modes, genres and cultures.

This spadework was necessary before any Mediterranean periplus. If you wonder what my anticipations were at the time, I expected – to tell you the truth – that the program would stop in two or three months, due to… lack of listeners! After all, the same thing had happened twice (102 fm radio, ERT3)… You can imagine my surprise when I learned that the program was a “smash hit”! I have to thank all the listeners for their longtime support and the great joy they have given me. As I realized from their phone calls, the Mediterranean periplus appealed to all ages (from high school students to retirees), to all social or educational backgrounds (from ordinary workers with basic education to intellectuals).⁽³⁾

• ⁽³⁾ Mediterranean periplus, nota bene, is dedicated to Homer, Herodotus, and the program’s listeners.

Ludwig van Beethoven

I have a lot to remember: university professors applauding my ability to simplify matters around music, or musicology students asking for my opinion on various musicological topics; Western classical music aficionados thanking me because I had opened the door for them to enter another immense musical universe, that of the Orient, or of the earthy, unsophisticated folk art; people who visited some Oriental countries telling those who met there: “You know, back at home we can listen to music from your country on the radio”; other people with psychological problems who found some solution listening to the Mediterranean periplus! But what I will never forget is the phone call of a simple, ordinary working man, who trusted me so much by then that he told me:

“Hey, buddy, I really go for you! For your sake, I even dig Beethoven!”…

• >> 29. BIBLIO – DISCO – GRAPHY
• << Chronicle 27. AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’S WATERLOO

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Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 24. ΘΡΙΑΜΒΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΚΡΕΤΙΝΙΣΜΟΥ

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We don’t need no education…

We don’t need no thought control!

Roger Waters (Pink Floyd, The Wall)

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Michales Loukovikas

● The Genocide of the Hellenes (Β) ● Hypatia’s Assassination ● Christianism
and Slavery ● Colonialism and Racism

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“THIS WAS NO TIME FOR A PHILOSOPHER to be philosophical. ‘The tyrant’, as the philosophers put it, was in charge… Houses were entered and searched for books and objects deemed unacceptable. If any were found they would be… burned in triumphant bonfires in town squares… Anyone who made sacrifices to the old gods could, the law said, be executed. Across the empire, ancient… temples had been attacked, their roofs stripped, their treasures melted down, their statues smashed. To ensure that their rules were kept, the government started to employ spies… and informers to report back on what went on in the streets… and behind closed doors in private homes.

“The consequences of deviation from the rules could be severe and philosophy had become a dangerous pursuit. [A scholar] had been arrested and tortured to make him reveal the names of other philosophers… A fellow… had been flayed alive. Another had been beaten before a judge until the blood flowed down his back. The savage ‘tyrant’ was Christianity… the Christians were ‘the vultures’.”

Revealing, overwhelming evidence in Catherine Nixey’s breathtaking book, The Darkening Age / The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. It’s high time we “tear down the wall” of this Christian Iron Curtain:

“When modern histories describe this period… they tend to call it the ‘triumph of Christianity’.⁽¹⁾ It is worth remembering, however, the original Roman meaning of the word ‘triumph’. A true Roman triumph wasn’t merely about the victory of the winner. It was about the total and utter subjugation of the loser. In a true Roman triumph the losing side was paraded through the capital while the winning side looked on at an enemy whose soldiers had been slain, whose possessions had been despoiled and whose leaders had been humiliated. A triumph was not merely a ‘victory’. It was an annihilation.” And it wasn’t very far from a pillory, I should add.

• ⁽¹⁾ Χρίειν (ancient Hellenic: to anoint) > Χριστός–Christ (anointed) > Christianus (Latin) > crétin (French) > cretin. You see, Christianism and cretinism are (etymologically) identical!

A Roman Triumph, by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1630)

That was exactly what the Christian leaders were after: “that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims”, declared “Saint” Augustine to his congregation in Carthage – obviously, after he had a meeting with the… “Most Merciful” God himself!

“Christian observers would look on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbours with astonishment. Augustine marveled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions… Despite that, he was not willing to extend such tolerance himself. It was, he concluded, the duty of a Christian to convert heretics – by force, if necessary… For those who wish to be intolerant, monotheism provides very powerful weapons. There was ample biblical justification for the persecution of non-believers. The Bible… is very clear on the matter of idolatry… And what precisely did God advise as a punishment for idolatry? Deuteronomy was clear: a person indulging in this should be stoned to death. And if an entire city fell into such sin? Again, the answer was clear: ‘destruction is decreed’.”(!)

ROMAN EMPERORS RULED ALEXANDRIA through a Roman Governor, or Prefect, with civil personnel which consisted mainly of Hellenes. This had worked well, until the moment that Constantine inaugurated a “Christian Monarchy”. Then a second hierarchy of officials appeared, in conflict with the old one. The “unorthodox” thought became a crime, and this second (continuously burgeoning) Church hierarchy, headed by a bishop, policed popular sentiments. This duopoly was an explosive mixture: the prefect derived his power from the emperor, of course; but the bishop considered he derived it from God – thus he was out of control. The conflict was sure to come if the bishop was an ambitious and fanatical person, such as Cyril, having opposite him an educated and urbane prefect, called Orestes. It was a clash between the tolerance of classic antiquity and the vulgar intolerance of the “New World Order” of Christianism. Moreover, it was unavoidable, as the atmosphere, mainly in Alexandria, had been explosive for some time.

The Lighthouse on Pharos islet (one of the 7 Wonders of Antiquity) and Alexandria in the background

● “The parabalani in Alexandria”, explains Nixey, “have been described as a ‘terrorist charity’ – a strange oxymoron… These men did, at times, good deeds but they also sowed fear. ‘Terror’ is the word used in Roman legal documents about them… The city had a new bishop, Cyril… the zealot Theophilus’s nephew. And, true to family form, he was a thug. Even Christians had reservations about this ambitious and brutal man: he was, as one council of bishops put it, ‘a monster’” – but “a monster” that could at any time deploy the parabalani, or his reserve army, several bands of fanatic, black-shirt monks. Soon, violence reigned.

The circumcellions were another extreme North African terrorist gang, based mainly in Carthage. Initially concerned with remedying social wrongs, they became linked with the Donatists, condemned property and slavery, advocated free love, canceling debt, and freeing slaves. But gradually, says Nixey, they “became notorious not only for their suicides but for their vicious attacks on those who didn’t share their particular Christian beliefs. [Their] ‘holy’ violence alarmed even the Church”, for they targeted not only the festivals of the old gods (a favourite target), but also priests, who were tortured and horribly killed as “traitors”. “Augustine called [their methods] ‘a new and unspeakable kind of violence’… and others might have been shocked by such acts – but the Church was reaping what had been sown. A few decades earlier, as… Brent D. Shaw has pointed out, Christian preachers had been glad of the circumcellions’ violence and cultivated it: in the attacks against the temples such freelance destroyers had been eminently useful and were drafted in to do the strong-arm work of pulling these buildings down… ‘Where there is terror, there is salvation… Oh, merciful savagery!’, said Augustine” – in tempore non suspecto. It was inconceivable that such gloating oxymora could turn into boomerangs! Such was the era’s “atmosphere”…

Hypatia, by Raphael (detail
from The School of Athens)

Great Terror: Hypatia’s Assassination

● 415. The Great Terror in Alexandria culminated with the brutal murder of the astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher, Hypatia, “a most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d Lady; who was torn to pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the pride, emulation, and cruelty of their Archbishop, commonly, but undeservedly, stiled St. Cyril”, as the philosopher John Toland said. The astronomer Carl Sagan linked Hypatia’s death with the demise of the Alexandrian Library. The assassination, symbolizing the end of Alexandria as a centre of wisdom and scholarship, was instigated by Theophilus’ nephew and successor, Cyril, the so-called “Pillar of Faith”, proclaimed as a “Doctor of the Church”, and canonized as… “Saint” – of all Christian denominations! Who are, indeed, the ones that err deplorably? All the Christian Churches in the world, or those who described him as a “thug”, “monster”, or as a “proud Pharaoh”, as the emperor Theodosius II called him?

Cyril began his reign the way he meant to go on: by persecuting his opponents. He eyed enviously the wealth of the Novatians, an established Christian sect of puritans. Edward Gibbon described them as “the most innocent and harmless of sectaries.” But they weren’t going to support him, and they had already joined his opponents. So, one of Cyril’s first acts was to close their churches and seize their sacred vessels and ornaments. He next, says Nixey, targeted the Jews:⁽²⁾

• ⁽²⁾ John “Chrysostom”: “’the synagogue is not only a brothel… it is also a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts… a dwelling of demons… a place of idolatry’. St Chrysostom’s writings would later be reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.” (C. Nixey)

“A Christian attempt to regulate the dancing and theatrical displays – apparently much enjoyed by the city’s Jewish population – started a complicated chain of reprisals that climaxed in a Jewish attack on some Christians. Some were killed – and Cyril was provided with the pretext he needed. Mustering together a mob of the parabalani, as well as some of the merely brutal and enthusiastic, he ‘marched… to the synagogues, took possession of them, purified them and converted them into churches’. ‘Purified’ in such texts is often a euphemism for stole, self-righteously. The Christians then completed their work by purifying the Jewish ‘assassins’ of their possessions: stripping them of all they owned… they turned them out of the city into the desert.”

“Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed, unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were levelled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving nation,” noted Gibbon.

Alexandria: the Canopic Way (now Ṭarīq al-Ḥurriyyah), the principal thoroughfare, intersected by the Sōma, where Alexander’s tomb was located – the two main arteries with the Agora in the centre.

“Orestes,” recounts Nixey, “looked on in horror… Ostensibly the most powerful man in the city, he was nonetheless unable to stop the uprising: a mere governor’s retinue was no match for 800 marauding, muscular parabalani. And the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around 500 monks descended from their sacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates [of Constantinople, or Scholasticus] admits, men of ‘a very fiery disposition’. One day, they surrounded Orestes and began to insult him, accusing him of being a ‘pagan idolater’… One of the monks threw a rock and struck Orestes on his head. The wound started pouring with blood. Most of his guards… scattered… Orestes was left almost entirely alone.”

Orestes escaped. The order was probably “Terrify him!”, not “Kill him!” Some passers-by also intervened. The governor appealed to Theodosius II, the child emperor, and his guardian sister, Pulcheria – a pietistic “Christian virgin”, who was waging her own campaign for Christ, by turning the imperial palace into a monastery. Later on she was also “sanctified”! The appeal was in vain. The monk, named Ammonius, was executed for the attack, Cyril immediately hailed him as a “martyr”, but the Alexandrian Christians were in turn appalled: the execution took place for the attempted murder of the prefect, not for the culprit’s faith. Several people intervened, and Cyril, a master in manoeuvres and behind-the- scenes schemes, was obliged to bring the matter to a close – for the time being. But now a blood sacrifice was required to appease the henchman of Christ…

Hypatia, by Charles William Mitchell, brutally murdered by “Saint” Cyril’s thugs inside the Caesareum, his headquarters

Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the astronomer, rose to become the supreme figure of the Alexandrian School of Philosophy, which was second only to the Athenian School. Her fame attracted students (including Christian theologians) from across the Mediterranean. She was also very much respected by Orestes, who quite often consulted her. Cyril was incensed that Hypatia’s reputation and talents were giving the cause of Hellenism a “dangerous prestige”, and thereby preventing the “progress of the Faith”. The bishop had no scruples to liken the relationship of Hypatia and Orestes to that of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. “If she could,” he ventured, “she would set up an Egyptian Empire”! As he inveighed against the “harlot” from his pulpit, more fanatics swarmed in from the desert in response to his call.

● One day in March 415, Cyril agitated a “Sturmabteilung” of Black-shirts, a mob of 500 fanatical monks, possessed

“by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader [a minor cleric] named Peter”, testified Socrates Scholasticus. They “waylaid [Hypatia] returning home and, dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with ostraca [potsherds]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them”…⁽³⁾ “No one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover up”, adds Catherine Nixey.

• ⁽³⁾ It seems that the burning of dead bodies (or of any opponents, while they were still alive) was “typically” the final stage of the “etiquette” of bigoted brutalities. Traditionally, Alexandrians, and others in those years, carried the remains of “the most abominable criminals” usually outside the urban (and also… urbane) limits to incinerate them, cleansing symbolically the city. They burned the body, as well, to prevent the cult of a martyr or a hero. As we have seen, this was the fate of George, Marcellus, Mark – and now of Hypatia. So, there’s a chance that “Mark” the… “Venetian” (whom we met at the end of the previous Chronicle) is in fact Alexander the Great!

● Hypatia’s brutal murder sent shockwaves throughout the empire. Cyril, whom everyone saw as the culprit, had done something unprecedented, even with the standards of the era, targeting a prominent intellectual woman, and was now in great danger. Alarmed at Cyril’s conduct, the council of bishops of Alexandria sent an embassy to Constantinople, and an investigation was soon launched to determine his role in the murder. In the autumn of 416, emperors Theodosius and Honorius issued an edict, removing the parabalani from the bishop’s power and placing them instead under Orestes’ authority. Cyril probably only managed to escape some heavy punishment by bribing imperial advisers. The restrictions on the parabalani (limiting their numbers, and forbidding them to attend “public spectacles”, or enter “the municipal council or a courtroom”) show that they were found equally guilty. However, Cyril proved he was a master of intrigues: in two years, the parabalani were again placed under his control, and after a while, he had come to dominate the Alexandrian council. There was nothing to block his way anymore while heading for… “sainthood”!⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ That’s what one version of the story says. Because, though it’s been 1,600 years since then, we still don’t know exactly what has happened. According to another version, Orestes ordered the execution of the monk Hierax (the provocateur in the expulsion of the Jews) for complicity in the murder of Hypatia. In a few days, says this version, Orestes was also murdered. Cyril, absolutely triumphant, declared that “Hypatia has gone to Athens”, while Orestes resigned and left. There had been no mob rule (ochlocracy), nor any tragedy. And then, Cyril himself nominated the new governor, the duopoly ceased, and religious tyranny enthroned itself in the erstwhile capital of wisdom. It’s amazing that, if you search for Orestes’ fate in the Internet, you read Cyril’s version: the prefect resigned and left… How then the parabalani were placed under his authority 1.5 years later?

Cleopatra at the entrance of
the Egyptian Museum in Cairo

Sometimes history is not written by the winners. Cyril’s propaganda may have worked for centuries. The rumours for Hypatia’s defamation (“she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles”) echo in the writings of the 7th-century Coptic bishop, John of Nikiû. In the Middle Ages, Hypatia was co-opted as a symbol of Christian virtue, or her death was equated with that of Christian martyrs. The last advocate to speak out “in Defence of Saint Cyril and the Alexandrian Clergy” was perhaps Thomas Lewis in 1721. Since then, more and more books and works of art turn against Cyril and extol Hypatia. In 1853, Charles Kingsley romanticized her in his novel, Hypatia, as “the last of the Hellenes”. She was honoured as an astronomer, as well, in 1884, when a main belt asteroid and a lunar crater were named after her. “Unfortunately for Cyril et al”, said Abby Norman, “by killing Hypatia, they immortalized her. Indeed, had they left Hypatia alone, her work and name would likely have been lost to history. In death, she is as she was in life: unwilling to be silenced, ever-tenacious in her curiosity and wonder.”

● Regarding the Caesareum, where the hideous assassination took place, it was not an ordinary church, but “Saint” Cyril’s headquarters! And, needless to say, it was not a church, but an ancient temple that was “sanctified” at the turn of the 4th century, when Christians set about appropriating the property of all other religions to wipe out all their traces throughout the world. The Caesareum was conceived by Cleopatra as a dedication to Marc Antony. It was finished by the man that “finished” them, Octavian-Augustus, who, after wiping out all traces of Marc Antony in the temple and Alexandria, dedicated it to… himself!

● 420s. There was soon more trouble in Carthage, says Nixey, taking us to the other North African “hot spot”. “The one-mile-long temple of the Roman goddess Caelestis and all nearby sanctuaries were leveled… Fights could ensue during destruction and, in the process, Christians were sometimes killed [as well] – not necessarily a bad thing to some Christian minds”…

Parthenon in ruins and an Ottoman mosque (built after 1715), by Pierre Peytier (early 1830s)

● 429. A widespread persecution of Hellenes, who were considered as demon followers, was accompanied by the plunder of the Parthenon. Athena’s temple survived for nearly one thousand years, until Theodosius II decreed in 435 that all ancient temples throughout the empire be closed. In the last decade of the 6th century, it was converted into a church of Virgin Mary. Thus the Parthenon, disguised as “Parthenos” (“Virgin”), became the fourth most important Christian pilgrimage destination in the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople, Ephesus, and Thessalonica.

● “Even the Acropolis had not escaped”, remarks Nixey: “The colossal statue of Athena, one of the most famous works of art in the empire, was torn down from where she had stood guard for almost a thousand years, and shipped off to Constantinople… Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked. Faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated.”

East Pediment: Parthenon’s Marbles, or Elgin’s (for the British), or Mutilated (by the Christians)

“Go to Room 18 in the British Museum”, she challenges. “You will find yourself in front of the Parthenon Marbles,⁽⁵⁾ taken from Greece by Lord Elgin in the 19th century. The astonishingly lifelike statues are, today, in a sorry state: many are mutilated or missing limbs. This, it is often assumed, was the fault of Elgin’s clumsy workmen or fighting during the Ottoman occupation… But much was the work of zealous Christians who set about the temple with blunt instruments, attacking ‘demonic’ gods, mutilating some of the finest statuary Greece had ever produced… The East Pediment fared particularly badly. The vast majority of the gods have been decapitated… They were pushed off… and smashed on the ground below, their fragmented remains ground down and used for mortar for a Christian church.”

• ⁽⁵⁾ If you search for the “Parthenon Marbles” in Wikipedia, you’re redirected to the “Elgin Marbles”! Not only for the British authorities, but for Wikipedia, as well, the marbles (still) belong to the looter…

“Today, histories of this period, if they mention such destruction at all, hesitate to condemn it outright. The 1965 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Saints records with little more than amused indulgence that Martin of Tours ‘was not averse to the forcible destruction of heathen shrines’. In modern histories those carrying out and encouraging the attacks are rarely described as violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely ‘zealous’, or ‘pious’, or ‘enthusiastic’ or, at worst, ‘over-zealous’. As… John Pollini puts it: ‘modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias’, has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times ‘sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light’.”

The Rape of the Parthenon begins on July 31, 1801: Elgin removing the Marbles (reconstruction)

● In 457, politics bowed to religion, when Leo I became the first emperor to be crowned by the patriarch of Constantinople. In 491, the empire’s submission to Christianism became complete, when Anastasius I was obliged to sign a written declaration of orthodoxy before his coronation.

● Etrusca Disciplina, the Etruscan books of cult and divination, untouched by all ancient cultures, were collected and burned by the Christians in the 5th century, almost a millennium after the Etruscans had ceased to exist as a people…

Justinian: Genocide Act IΙI – Codex Justinianus

Goddess (Leto) carries a child (Apollo); roof ridge of the Etruscan Portonaccio Temple at Veii (510–500 BCE)

● 529. This year, which is often cited as the end of Antiquity, Justinian decided to shut down the Platonic Academy that had been revived in 410 as a centre for Neoplatonism and mysticism. The old Academy was probably destroyed by the Roman dictator, Sulla, in 86 BCE. The faculty members, wrote the Hellene poet and historian Agathias, looked for protection under the Sassanid king Khosrow (Khosrau) I (531-579), known to Hellenes and Romans as Chosroes, in his capital at Ctesiphon, carrying with them precious scrolls of literature, philosophy, and science. While exiled, Simplicius of Cilicia (perhaps others, too) might have gone to Harran (Carrhae or Hellenopolis), near Edessa, in Upper Mesopotamia, founding an Academy-in-exile. This school should have survived until the 9th century, facilitating a revival of the Neoplatonic tradition in Baghdad, with the foundation of the House of Wisdom in 832. Two of the major centres of learning in the intervening period (from 5th to 8th centuries) were the School of Nisibis (Nusaybin, close to Harran) in Asia Minor, under Persian rule at the time, and the Academy of Gundishapur, founded by Khosrau. The Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner commented that the culture of Gondishapur (also home of a Library and a Medical school-hospital) was a premature efflorescence which was undermined and destroyed by the Islamic troops in the 7th century (Parallel Lives of monotheistic religions).

The “barbarians” were being Hellenized,
while the Hellenes were being barbarized

All this eastward “brain drain” started in 489, when emperor Zeno decreed the closure of the Nestorian Christian theological and scientific centre in Edessa. Its scholars were then transferred and absorbed into the School of Nisibis. There, in collaboration with those Hellenistic philosophers, who were banished from the Academy of Athens, carried out important research in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and other sciences. The Academy of Gondeshapur became known for medicine and learning. Khosrau gave refuge to various Grecian philosophers and Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christians fleeing religious persecution by the Byzantines, and commissioned them to translate Hellenic and Syriac texts (on medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and other useful crafts) into Pahlavi (Middle Persian). Gloomy conclusion: the “barbarians” were being Hellenized, while the Hellenes were being barbarized!

The School of Athens (1510-1511), by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino)

● The Codex Justinianus was completed in 529, i.e. the year the emperor closed down the Neoplatonic Academy as anti-Christian. It may have been Theodosius who initiated the adoption of laws and the signing of decrees against Hellenism, but the one who sparked persecutions of gentiles on a massive scale was none but Justinian with the codification and reform of the law. As he was convinced that the unity of the empire presupposed the unity of faith, it appeared to him obvious that this faith could only be the “orthodox”. Those of a different creed were subjected to persecution, which imperial legislation had effected from the time of Constantius and would now vigorously continue. The Corpus Juris Civilis contained two statutes that decreed the total eradication of Hellenism even in civic, private life, which were zealously enforced. Contemporary sources (John Malalas, Theophanes of Byzantium, John of Ephesus) tell of severe persecutions, even against many high officials, experiencing strict Inquisition, exile and threat of capital punishment, with executions carried out even in the emperor’s very presence: some by burning, others by drowning. The alternative, the only way out for anyone to escape, was Christianization. Thus these Byzantine Crusades had no end. In Asia Minor alone, John of Ephesus reported to have converted 70,000 gentiles. Other peoples under Byzantine rule were also Christianized. The worship of Amun in Libya was abolished; so were the remnants of the worship of Isis in Egypt.⁽⁶⁾ The state suppression of Hellenism made all non-Christians a public threat. The word Hellene was no longer an insult, but a deadly accusation. With this legal arsenal on hand, which was supplemented by new provisions, the emperors, in complete accord with the Church, continued the Genocide of the Hellenes…

• ⁽⁶⁾ “Justinian decided to destroy the frieze in the beautiful temple of Isis at Philae in Egypt.” (C.N.)

Artemis, Roman copy of a Greek original
(1st century CE)

● When legal loopholes were detected, or if something escaped the attention of the ever-vigilant bishops, Christian “commoners” took action: in the mid-530s they started burning or cutting forests in Hellas because they were… dwellings of demons! Blind fanaticism destroyed the oak forests of Zeus, the fir forests of Artemis and Pan, the olive groves of Athena. The results were devastating since all this deforestation caused the drying up of rivers and springs and the total disruption of the country’s ecosystem…

● “A series of legal hammer blows fell”, says Nixey of the Codex: “anyone who offered sacrifice would be executed. Anyone who worshipped statues would be executed. The laws went further. This was no longer mere prohibition of other religious practices. It was the active enforcement of Christianity on every single pagan in the empire… Everyone now had to become Christian… Those who refused would be stripped of all their property… lose their civil rights, be left in penury and ‘in addition’… they would be ‘subject to the proper punishment’… and then would be exiled. The ‘insane error’ of paganism was to be wiped out from the face of the earth… It was this law that led… Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was… It was from this moment, said later historians, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.”

“Centuries later, Al Mas’udi, an Arab traveller, would visit a town on the edge of Europe and reflect on what had happened in the Roman Empire. ‘During the early days of the empire of the Rum’, he wrote… ‘the sciences were honoured and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the Rum: this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced’.”

● The first millennium of Christianism went on and concluded this way – there is no need to repeat ourselves. You can see how shattered is in fact the “unbroken continuity” of ancient Hellenic and Byzantine civilizations, having as a “malignant appendix” that inarticulate fascist bark: “Hellas of Greek Christians”!⁽⁷⁾

• ⁽⁷⁾ The main slogan of the military junta (1967-1974) in Hellas (when it was turned into… Hell-ass!)

Crusades, Colonialism and Slave Trade

Siege of Antioch (1097-98), detail of a
medieval miniature, by Jean Colombe

THE CRUSADES, after the East-West Schism, were conducted under the sanction of the “Holy See”. Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095, with the declared goal of restoring Christian access to the Jerusalem area. There followed six major Crusades against Muslim territories in the Orient, and many minor ones, as part of a 200-year struggle for the control of the “Holy Land” that finally failed. After the fall of the last Christian stronghold in 1291, the Vatican mounted no further coherent response in the East. Similar papal-blessed military campaigns against “pagans”, “heretics”, and “excommunicated” people, undertaken in the Occident for various economic, political, or religious reasons, were the Albigensian Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, the Northern Crusades, and the Iberian Reconquista. The “burning of books and heretics or infidels”, of course, was in the agenda of all Crusades. The Crusaders’ conduct was shocking not only to modern sensibilities but to European contemporaries, as well, for the Crusaders pillaged the lands they passed through; there was also at least one case of cannibalism in the Levant! In the Rhineland, the First Crusade resulted in the slaughter of 8,000 Jews in the first of Europe’s pogroms. It also led to the massacre of at least 70,000 citizens in the fall of Jerusalem. The nobles carved up the territory that they had gained rather than return it to the Byzantines, as they had vowed to do. Even worse, the Fourth Crusade resulted in the conquest and sacking of Constantinople, and the partition of the Byzantine Empire. (On the Crusades, see Chronicle 9, Crusades and Lebensraum – Urban, Hitler and Zionists, and especially Crusades in the West, Chronicle 11, The Crusades).

The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, by Eugène Delacroix (1840)

● 1193. Nalanda, an ancient centre of higher learning with a great library in the Indian Bihar, was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders from southern Afghanistan. The university was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set it on fire…

● 1258. The House of Wisdom in Abbasid-era Baghdad was a library, translation institute and research centre. The scholars, mainly Persians or Greeks, translated all available Hellenic texts – scientific, philosophic, and many more. A great part of ancient Hellenic literature survived and became known in Europe thanks to these translations into Arabic. The House and all other libraries in the city were destroyed by the Mongol ruler Hulagu. The waters of the Tigris ran black for six months with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river…

Materia medica (Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς), by the Greek physician, pharmacologist and botanist Pedanius Dioscorides, translated into Arabic

● 1452. Pope Nicholas V may have tried to revive the spirit of the old Crusades in the East, one year before the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, as his nephew, Loucás Notarás, was the Byzantine Megas Doux (Grand Duke). However, European attention was already focused on the more promising opportunities opening up in the West. So, Nicholas’ papal bull, renewed repeatedly by future pontiffs, granted Portugal (and later Spain, of course) “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms… and other property… and reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.” Effectively, these “geographically unlimited” bulls extended the Crusades’ legacy all over the world justifying European colonialism and, by all means, “ushered in the West African slave trade”. This trade was about to take off with the transport of African slaves to America, and the popes would go on “granting permissions” and “issuing bulls” – as they were no fools – to guarantee their booty share!

● 15th century. Arabic Muslim books were burned wholesale by Catholic Spain. About 5,000 Arabic poetic manuscripts were consumed by flames in the public square at Granada, in 1499, on the orders of the Archbishop of Toledo. At the same time, a number of Hebrew Bibles and other Jewish books were burned at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition.

● The Aztec emperor Itzcoatl (1427-28 to 1440) had all historical codices burned – on the grounds that it was “not wise that all the people should know”! Thus the way was paved for the development of a state-sanctioned “history” and mythos – but also for the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1521.^(h) This signaled a new era of genocides and holocausts committed by Christians holding the cross in one hand and the sword in the other. The new crusaders and slave traders, together with the inquisitors, had new challenges to face, new frontiers to cross, new “books to burn and infidels to bury” in the “New World”, under the sanction and arbitration of the good, old “Holy See” – with profit in mind, as always!

Just take a look at Tenochtitlan (reconstructed): with a population of almost 300,000, it is believed it was the world’s largest city at the time, the capital of an empire of almost 5 million people. Compared to Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it. It was five times the size of the contemporary London. Entering the city the Spaniards thought it was a dream. These people were the “savages” that had to be Christianized and “civilized”…

● Tenochtitlan, today’s Mexico City, was the city of the Mexica (hence Mexico), dominating in the Aztec Empire and ruling over several other tribes. All these people, for sure, did not fall from the sky. Civilization in Mesoamerica appeared during the 3rd millennium BCE – in the era of the Cycladic and Minoan civilization in the Aegean, before the arrival of the Hellenes in Greece. The earliest known major civilization of Central America was the Olmecs (1500 – 400 BCE). However, there were pre-existing cultures as early as 2500 BCE that were gradually displaced. As the oldest civilization, it greatly influenced those that followed. Among these influences is what we consider to be their “black spot”: human sacrifice. The most characteristic artistic creations of the Olmecs are their sculptures of colossal heads, up to 3 meters high and weighing from 25 to 55 tons.

Mayan Kukulcan pyramid, Chichen Itza, in Yucatán, Mexico

The most outstanding and long-lasting civilization of the Western Hemisphere was developed by the Maya, noted for its most sophisticated writing system in pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, mathematics, calendar, astronomical system. They were excellent architects building pyramids, temples, and other elaborate edifices. Their culture reached the level of the most famous civilizations of antiquity. Their archaic period began before 2000 BCE, followed by the pre-classic period (2000 BCE – 250 CE), the classic (up to 1000 CE), and finally the post-classic period. They were also aware of the meaning of the number 0 (which… troubled the ancient Greeks), although they probably borrowed this knowledge from the Olmecs. The Maya should have had close relations with the Toltecs, as we can see from their mutual influence. The Toltecs (10th – 12th century CE) were the forerunners of the Aztecs (14th – 16th century). The latter considered the Toltecs as their spiritual ancestors and their culture as the epitome of civilization.

Urban core of Tikal or Yax Mutal, Guatemala, Maya, 8th century CE, reconstruction

● In conclusion, a fleeting glimpse at the “future”: Abelard, in the 12th century, was made to burn his Theologia himself. Later, he was judged as a heretic, since, among other things, he praised the pagan philosophers of classical antiquity. He was excommunicated by the pope, who ordered him to be perpetually silent, confined in a monastery, and his books to be burned. His pupil and colleague, Arnold of Brescia, refused to abjure his beliefs after a synod, where they were condemned, and went on to lead the Commune of Rome against the Vatican, but he was finally executed. The Church ordered the burning of all his writings, which was carried out so thoroughly than none of them survives. By the end of the 15th century, Savonarola ordered all the works of Ovid and also Boccaccio’s Decameron to be burned. In the 16th century, Servetus was burned in Geneva at the order of the city council, dominated by Calvin, because a remark he made in his translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia was considered heretic! Angelo Carletti’s theological work so infuriated Martin Luther that he had it publicly burned. In the 17th century, Luther’s German translation of the Bible was burned in parts of Germany controlled by the Catholics. In the 18th century, Voltaire’s works were burned several times in pre-revolutionary France. In 1821, Heinrich Heine, in his play, Almansor, referring to the burning of the Quran by the Spanish Inquisition, wrote: “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” It is the episode we’ve used as a starting point in these additional Chronicles, with the “burning of books and burying of scholars” in China. It goes without saying that “triumphal bonfires”, as “God-blessed work”, in a way, never stopped…⁽⁸⁾

Thousands of books smoulder in a huge Nazi bonfire during
a wave of book-burnings that spread throughout Germany

• ⁽⁸⁾ “Robert Drews described the Bronze Age collapse as ‘the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire’. Several people nostalgically referred to the cultural memories of the disaster as stories of a ‘lost golden age’, when ’civilization was wiped out’.” (See the conclusion of Chronicle 18).

Polish Catholic priests burn now (2020) books etc. they
consider “offensive”: the Inquisition moved to Poland!

That’s how we’ve described that catastrophe, the collapse of the Bronze Age; a description that perfectly fits the collapse of Antiquity. The Christians played the role of the Sea Peoples. If it was famine that triggered those dramatic events, what led to “The Triumph of Cretinism”? Hunger and thirst for power? Avarice? Christianism again found itself at the antipode of humanism.

Christianism, Slavery and Racism

THE SLAVERY CONVENTION (to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery), an initiative of the League of Nations in 1926, was followed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, explicitly banning slavery. The Christian Church? Too little, too late. Only in 1965, the Second Vatican Council declared without qualification that slavery was an “infamy” that dishonoured the Creator and was a poison in society. And what about the Orthodox Church? Or the other Churches?

The Bible (Old and New Testament) endorses slavery. Its prohibitions refer to all other matters but human enslavement (see previous Chronicle). In the Old Testament, God (i.e. the man who speaks in his name) not only approves the practice, but also lays down rules for buyers and sellers (ItalicusExodus) – as there was no… Ministry of Commerce at that time! And not only that: men are at liberty to sell even… their own daughters (Exodus)! The New Testament instructs slaves to accept their position with humility (Paul’s Ephesians), and also to please their masters in everything [?!] (Titus, cf. Colossians). But in case the slave owners are Christians, the slaves are commanded to serve them better than other masters, “so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed” [!] (Timothy). Jesus himself mentioned slavery more than once, but never with the slightest hint of criticism of it. He even glorified the master-slave relationship as a model of the relationship between God and humans – the “slaves of God” (Matthew). “Saint” Augustine’s view that slavery was ordained by God as a punishment for sin was endorsed by the Church. “Slavery among men is natural,” proclaimed another “saint”, Thomas Aquinas, “for some are naturally slaves according to the Philosopher” (Aristotle). A Church Council taking place at Gangra, in Asia Minor, in 362, excommunicated anyone who encouraged a slave to despise his master, or to withdraw from his service. This would in time be incorporated into Church Law, where it would remain until the 20th century.

Saul of Tarsos, the trouble-maker, in two paintings on the same topic – book-burning –
and by the same painter – Eustache Le Sueur: The Preaching of St. Paul at Ephesus (1649).
He set an example that the Nazis and other fascists followed later on with enthusiasm…

The Third Lateran Council in 1179 imposed slavery on anyone who opposed the papacy. The citizens of Venice were condemned to slavery three times: in 1309, 1482, and 1506. The same thing would happen to the whole of England in 1508. Soon the Church would become the largest slave owner in the Roman Empire.⁽⁹⁾ The popes and bishops owned slaves. Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gifts of large numbers of slaves from the royal couple of Spain: the exceptionally devout Isabella sent him numerous slaves from Málaga, in 1487. Ferdinand, the next year, so as not to lag behind, sent him 100 Black Moorish slaves, whom he then distributed to various cardinals and “nobles”. The Spanish Inquisition consisted of fanatics in everything – even in the enslavement of human beings. One single inquisitor, the notorious Torquemada, had 97,371 people condemned to slavery! In 1493 (the year after Columbus “discovered” the Americas), pope Alexander VI made explicit the rights of Catholics there. He authorized the king of Spain to enslave non-Christians of the Americas at war with Catholic powers – or, in other words, anyone who resisted the invasion and seizure of his land. Pope Paul III confirmed in 1548 that all Christian men and all members of the clergy had the right to own slaves. Papal galleys went on slave-hunting expeditions along the coast of Africa! “Sir” John Hawkins, the most notorious, but very “pious”, English slave trader, named his slave ships Angel, Jesus and Grace of God…

• ⁽⁹⁾ It had been common for polytheists, Greeks and Romans, to emancipate their slaves. But the emancipation of the Church’s slaves was declared impossible, on the grounds that these slaves were owned not by the clergy, but by… God himself; therefore only the slave owner could legally dispose of his… “goods”.

The Slave Trade (Slaves on the West Coast of Africa), by François-Auguste Biard (ca 1833)

Until the discovery of America, the slaves were mainly prisoners of war, debtors, or victims of religious persecution. However, black African enslavement did not result from wars, financial indebtedness, or religious prejudice. The reason was the need for labour in the Americas, after the failed effort to enslave the Native Americans. West Africans had agricultural knowledge and skills. They also had a relative immunity against malaria adapted from centuries of living in the tropics that the European indentured servants did not. These were the reasons for the African Holocaust. The brutal system of slavery and the subjugation of millions of people had to be justified with an ideology. After Christianism, this ideology was racism. Racists declared (also very “piously”) that the “white race” had been “chosen” to rule the earth “in God’s name”.

In conclusion…

THESE EXTRA “CHRONICLES WITHIN THE CRONICLES”, I remind you, had Ábdera of Andalusia as a starting point, during the revival of an ancient Periplus of Iberia in Chronicle 22. We then voyaged to Ábdera of Thrace and met its most celebrated citizen, Democritus. Plato’s antipathy towards the Atomist philosopher, asking his students to destroy all Democritean works they could find, in combination with the fact that no such works have survived, were more than a challenge for a “Periplus in the Archipelagos”, sailing on seas the “Big Brothers” erased helter-skelter from the maps. Oceans of abuses are hidden there. I’ve just gleaned some information on the initial period (until the time the first caravels crossed the Atlantic), limiting myself to cases of intentional crimes that came to my attention. A study in depth – I’m sure – would reveal the Prince of Darkness himself…

What conclusions can we draw? A “naïve” person would expect to find the first traces of the idea of human rights in religions, especially the monotheistic ones, which should uphold the “sanctity of human existence”. In fact, the history of human rights finds such traces in some legal codes of antiquity (Mesopotamia, Persia, India, Hellas, Rome), not in the Bible, skipping Judaism and Christianism. The reason is that those who cared about such rights were the philosophers and not the prophets (with the exception of Muhammad due to special conditions). The kings who wanted to conquer the world, the priests who wanted to conquer the mind, infringed as a rule on human rights. I guess that if the Declaration of Human Rights and Freedom of Religion had been adopted and observed since the dawn of the Common Era (AD), the only monotheists in the world nowadays might have been the Jews…

Arsons of Libraries

BOOKS ARE DEADLY ENEMIES OF “BIG BROTHERS”. ARSONS OF LIBRARIES are a form of cultural genocide or cleansing, a purge:

● Xianyang Palace and State Archives (China, 206 BCE): the palace was burned during Xiang Yu’s rebellion, triggered by the “burning of books and burying of scholars”.
● Library of Alexandria (Egypt, 48 BCE, 272 CE, etc.): by Julius Caesar, Aurelian, et al: multiple arsons by multiple perpetrators – but not intentional arsonists…
● Library of Antioch (Syria, 364): by Jovian, because Julian the “Apostate” had heavily stocked it with plenty of new… “apostate” volumes!
● Library of the Serapeum, with what was left from the Library of Alexandria (Egypt, 391): the building was systematically looted, burned, and razed to the ground, by Theophilus, on orders by Theodosius.
● Library of Córdoba (Andalusia, 976): by Almanzor, the de facto ruler of Al-Andalus, and religious scholars; in a surge of “ultra-orthodoxy”, they burned books of “ancient science”.
● Library of Ray (Tehran, Iran, 1029): by Mahmud of Ghazna, because its books were deemed as “heretical”.

Shah Mosque, Isfahan, by Pascal Coste visiting Persia in 1841

● Library of Avicenna (Isfahan, Iran, 1034): by Mas’ud of Ghazna, conquering the city.
● Library of Tripoli (Lebanon, 1109): by Baldwin’s Crusaders and mercenaries, looting and burning part of the city.
● Library of Ghazna (Afghanistan, 1151): by Ala al-Din Husayn, sacking and burning the city for seven days, destroying libraries and palaces.
● Library of Nishapur (Iran, 1154): by Oghuz Turks, who sacked and burned libraries, destroying partially the city.
● Nalanda (India, 1193): by Bakhtiyar Khalji, who sacked the University complex, the most renowned foundation of Buddhist knowledge at the time. The destruction is a milestone in the decline of Buddhism in India.
● Imperial Library of Constantinople (Byzantine Empire, 1204): by Crusaders (Franks and Venetians) who destroyed it, burning and selling its books.

Great palace, Constantinople, peristylium, ca 5th-6th century

● Library of Alamut Castle (Iran, 1256): by pro-Christian Mongols, who captured the castle and destroyed the library.
● House of Wisdom (Baghdad, Iraq, 1258): also by Mongols during the city’s siege.
● Libraries of Constantinople (Byzantine Empire, 1453): by Ottoman Turks, after the second fall of the city, when hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were removed, destroyed, or sold from the libraries.
● Madrasah Library (Granada, Andalusia, 1499): by Cardinal Cisneros, ransacking it and ordering its books be burned in a central square.
● Bibliotheca Corviniana (Buda, Hungary, 1526): by Ottoman Turks after the Battle of Mohács.
● Monastic libraries (England, 1530s): by Henry VIII, when they were destroyed or dispersed, following the dissolution of the monasteries.
● Cornish Colleges (Cornwall, England, 1548): by Henry’s successor, Edward VI. The smashing and looting of the colleges at Glasney and Crantock brought an end to the scholarship which had helped to sustain the Cornish language and cultural identity.

The Mayan Codices on fire

● Maya codices (Yucatán, Mexico, 1562): there was no Itzcoatl among the Maya with the “bright” idea to burn their codices. The arsonist was found in the face of bishop and conquistador Diego de Landa, a cruel, fanatical priest, as described by historians, who led a violent campaign against “idolatry”, burning almost all Mayan manuscripts (useful in deciphering Mayan script, knowledge of Maya religion and civilization, or the history of the American continent): “We found a large number of books in these characters [hieroglyphs, he said], and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they [the Maya] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction”… Only three extant codices are widely considered unquestionably authentic.

Aztec Calendar

The Arsons of Libraries Chronicle stops here. Not because there were no more arsons. The list, unfortunately, is too incomplete and never-ending. But this was our time frame: until the time the first caravels started crossing the Atlantic. And instead of transporting products and ideas, they used to carry murderers, spoils, and slaves…

As regards these two Chronicles, The Genocide of the Hellenes and The Triumph of Cretinism, they are dedicated to that kid, with his questions, on the beach of Theotokos, at the Sepias cape, in southeastern Pelion, asking: “Why, dad, have they built the chapel on ancient ruins?”

Why then? Because, in a way, the Genocide of the Hellenes never stopped… Shall we be able some day to estimate the hecatombs of the victims?

Demographic Decline of the Hellenes Due to the Genocide, as well

IN 500 BCE, c. 100 million people lived in Asia, Europe and Africa. The Hellenes around the Aegean numbered 3 million in the 5th century. In the 4th century, adding the colonists, as well, they approached 8-10 million. This means they represented 5-10% of the total – without counting those who were Hellenized during the Hellenistic period. Now, all Greeks, plus expatriates, reach 16 million, while the world’s population has risen dramatically to 7.7 billion. This, of course, means they represent just a very small percentage of only 0.21%.

• >> Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!”
• << Chronicle 23. THE GENOCIDE OF THE HELLENES

Next Chronicle 25. “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!” ● Colonization ● Tartessos: the Apple of Discord ● Impact of Persian Expansion ● Phoenicians and Punics ● Tartessos and Carthage Ruined ● Macedonia and Rome

The Alexandrian Library in its heyday…

Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)

Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 7. ΙΝΔΟΪΒΗΡΙΚΟ ΤΟΞΟ (Duende)

● Lorca and Duende ● Pohren and Flamenco:
Dance and Guitar ● Cithara and Pandura

Michales Loukovikas

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA gave lectures not only on cante jondo, but also on the Theory and Play of Duende (1930) – a keyword in order to get to the bottom of the essence of flamenco, of music in general, and penetrate the core of all the arts, especially the so-called performing arts. According to the dictionaries, duende means “fairy, demon, ghost, devil, goblin, spirit – holy or evil.” Dictionaries rarely clarify concepts related to music and culture. And why should we let ourselves in the mercy of lexicographers when we have Lorca as a guide? Let’s listen to him with due attention as we are introduced to the magic and mystical duende:

“All that has dark sounds has duende.” (Manuel Torre)

“All through Andalusia… people constantly talk about duende and recognize it every time it appears with a fine instinct… The old Gypsy bailaora [dancer] La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a piece of Bach, and exclaimed: ‘Olé! That has duende!’, but was bored by Gluck, Brahms and Milhaud. And [the Gypsy singer] Manuel Torre, a great artist of the Andalusian people, a man who has more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife, spoke this splendid phrase: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende’… – agreeing with Goethe who hit on a definition of duende, in speaking of Paganini: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Lorca’s English texts on Cante jondo and Duende are based on A. S. Kline’s translations.

“I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘Duende is not in the throat: duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive; meaning, it’s in the veins; meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation. It is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cádiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.”

Alhambra with Generalife by night

The “Dionysiac” and “mystic” Hellenes are here again in full force. Their theatre of action is Cádiz, the ancient Gádeira (Gadir), or Roman Gades.⁽²⁾ To this port of Andalusia outside the Mediterranean, on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, or the Pillars of Heracles, we will shortly return. For the moment, we continue listening to García Lorca spellbound:

• ⁽²⁾ The ancient root is retained in the adjective gaditano: of/from Cádiz, its native/inhabitant.

Sea Melodies, by Herbert James Draper (1904)

“For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende, not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse… Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form (Hesiod learnt from her)… While duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood. Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick… The true struggle is with duende.

“The great artists of southern Spain, Gypsy or flamenco, singers, dancers, musicians, know that emotion is impossible without the arrival of duende. They might deceive people into thinking they can communicate the sense of duende without possessing it, as authors, painters, and literary fashion-makers deceive us every day, possessing no duende: but we only have to attend a little, and not be full of indifference, to discover the fraud, and chase off that clumsy artifice.

“Emotion is impossible without duende.” (García Lorca)

Pastora Pavón, la Niña de los Peines

“Once the Andalusian flamenco singer Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines [The Girl of the Combs], sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya… was singing in a little tavern in Cádiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent… Pastora Pavón finished her song in silence. Only, a little man… sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something else.’

“Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but… with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite… La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity”…

Donn Pohren and Baile Flamenco

WHAT AN EVENING, INDEED! I’D LOVE TO BE THERE! Well, here we are back to Cádiz with the captivating description of duende by Lorca. It’s where we meet again Donn Pohren, who will lead us to the ancient city of Gadir via… India!

Donn Pohren

“Today”, Pohren writes in his Biographical History, Lives and Legends of Flamenco, the second book of his flamenco trilogy, “nearly all theoreticians of the dance agree that the baile flamenco is directly descended from the ancient religious dances of the Indian Hindus… What in all likelihood has taken place is that the highly-civilized Brahmanic temple dances were adopted by a lesser-developed people, shorn of many subtleties, and returned to a more natural and primitive art form concerned only with the expression of oneself and one’s emotions.

“Let us attempt to construct a brief history of the development of these Indian dances within Spain. First of all, how did they reach Spain? Traditionally performed only in the temples during Brahmanic religious rites, these dances eventually began to be danced more popularly outside the shrines in India. It was then that they were first introduced into other lands by way of early Mediterranean trading vessels and overland caravans. The point of entrance into Spain was most certainly Gadir, later called Gades, today called Cádiz, the oldest city in Spain, founded by the Phoenicians around 1100 BC. Gadir was an extremely important city, and it is likely that professional Indian dancers were brought in to entertain the city’s royalty, probably during the time of the Greeks, c. 500–250 BC, less likely during the reign of the Romans, c. 250 BC – 475 AD. (Hindu musicians and singers surely accompanied the dancers, and thus also introduced their art forms into Spain during this same period. This would partly explain the strong similarities that still exist between certain types of Hindu singing and music, and flamenco).”

● Although we have just heard Lorca telling us that “duende had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cádiz”, there was probably no Hellenic period then in Gadir. From the Phoenicians and the Punics (whom Pohren seems to ignore), the city passed into the hands of the Romans in 206 BCE. Irrespective of the error, what’s important is not who the master of the city was at the time, but the fact that Gadir functioned as a gateway for the Indian dance and music influence into Andalusia. Whatever the case, we know that in their symposia, the Hellenes, both in mainland Greece and also in the colonies, used to enjoy the art of foreign singers and musicians, mostly women, who (according to the symposiasts’ “tastes”) appeared dressed or nude, as we are told by Athenaeus (“Deipnosophistae”, 3rd century CE) and Suda (“Lexicon”, 10th century).

Symposium scene with an aulos playing girl [modestly dressed up, not nude], by Nicias painter

“These civilizations,” Pohren goes on, “with their emphasis on culture, undoubtedly introduced this religious dancing into their own temples, so that by the arrival of the Visigoths in Andalusia (c. 450–700), this type of religious dancing had already become so traditional as to be carried over into the primitive Spanish Church, encouraged and even performed by early Christian priests. (El Baile Andaluz, by Caballero Bonald: ‘It is now known that the fathers of the primitive Church openly admitted, and even fomented with their examples, the adoption by the Christian cult of certain elements of the sacred oriental dances, frequently danced by the very priests themselves’). The Visigoths accepted Catholicism and merged with the Hispano-Roman population,⁽³⁾ and religious dancing continued throughout their reign.

• ⁽³⁾ Pohren, just like Mascarenhas Barreto in the Chronicle 5, put the cart before the horse, speaking about Catholicism before the Schism. Although this doubling of the error makes me wonder: may Catholicism be synonymous with Christianism, and Orthodoxy is a… heresy? Terra incognita: religious affairs have never been my forte!

“It is postulated that during the reign of the Moors (c. 711–1492) these sacred dances were danced more and more popularly outside the confines of the church, possibly even by Spain’s first gypsies, who were thought to have come as camp-followers of the Moorish armies (after having arrived in North Africa from their homeground, India, by way of Pakistan, Persia, and Arabia). As both the gypsies and the Moors already cultivated a type of dance largely derived from the Brahmanic religious dances, their arrival most certainly gave the existing Andalusian dances a shot in the arm…

“Another historical event in the development of the flamenco dance was the arrival of the second migration of gypsies to Spain around 1450, shortly before the Moors were expelled from their last footholds in Andalusia. The gypsies arrived from India by the northern route (Persia, Russia, etc.), bringing with them their interpretations of Indian dances and songs, and adding fresh fuel to the Andalusian folklore…

“After the Moors were forced out, all religious connotations in the dance ceased. The dances were not only banned from the Church because of their increasing sensuality and ‘sinful movements’, but at one time persecutions were carried out against interpreters of certain dances regardless of where they were danced. It was then that the dance, together with the cante, went underground, becoming an art of the ‘lawless elements’ of society. This happened more or less simultaneously with the 16th century edicts ordering the expulsion of the Moors, gypsies, and Jews, and can probably be cited as the beginning of the formation of flamenco as we know it today.”

Cithara/Kithara > Guitarra

This panorama on the evolution of dance from the Indian Brahmanic temples to the Andalusian gypsy camps, with all intermediate stages, has a negative side: it is one-dimensional, presenting India as the matrix of the art of dance – and even more – leading to wrong conclusions. But if, instead of the dance, we trace the evolution of the guitar, the entire mosaic of exchange becomes balanced and three-dimensional. Our guide, Pohren, as a guitarist, moves now into far more familiar waters:

Ancient Hellenic cithara/kithara

“The Spanish guitar”, he remarks in the chapter of the same book (Lives and Legends of Flamenco) dealing with his instrument, “is the direct offspring of, principally, the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) and, secondarily, the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar), both of which are generally believed to have descended from the ancient kithara asiria (Oriental zither).⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ Note how terminology differs in the phases of the guitar’s development: cithara or kithara > guitarra. It refers to the time when the ancient cithara ceased to have the form of a large ancient lyre and acquired a “neck” or “arm”.

“First let us attempt to trace the kithara asiria [Assyrian]. José de Azpiazu, in his book La Guitarra y Los Guitarristas, makes the observation that we must look to Egypt and Babylonia for the earliest string instruments, including the zither, from whence they passed on to Syria, Persia, India, and the Middle and Far East in general. He bases this assumption on diverse archaeological finds, principally in Egypt, singling out in particular a bas-relief, dated at 3500 BC, discovered in the tomb of one of the Kings of Thebes. This bas-relief, now in the museum of Leyden (Holland), includes an instrument somewhat resembling today’s Spanish guitar. Azpiazu also states that around the time 1000–800 BC the Egyptians possessed an instrument greatly resembling the modern guitar. This instrument could easily have been the previously mentioned guitarra morisca, or one of its predecessors in its development from the kithara asiria.

Egyptian 3500 years ago playing a guitar-like instrument

“However, in view of continued archaeological discoveries, no date or place can be irrevocably pinpointed concerning the origin of any of the ancient stringed instruments. The discovery by an English archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, determining that the city of Jericho was teeming with life as far back as 6800 BC, makes the first Egyptian dynasty (3400 BC) seem relatively modern. In truth, the family tree of string instruments, in all of its rich variety, is as vague as civilization’s early history. Perhaps the only data available to sustain the belief that the guitar is descended from the ancient kithara asiria is the similarity and progression of the zither-guitar terminology in various languages, and the corresponding similarity and development of the instruments represented by the terms, as follows: qitâra (Chaldea – an ancient region in Southeast Asia, on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), quitar (Arabic), sitar (Hindi), kithara (Greek), cítara (Spanish) and guitarra (Spanish).

Vihuela: the bygone “aristocrat” cousin of the “folk” guitar, with six double strings, is the mother of the violas portuguesas, one of which accompanies the guitarra portuguesa, the lead instrument of fado.

“If we wish to follow the popular theory that the guitar was derived from the kithara (there is no good reason not to), the guitar’s development in Spain can be traced in rough outline. It is generally agreed that the kithara asiria (then called the kithara romana) was introduced into Spain during the time of the Romans, sometime before the birth of Christ.⁽⁵⁾ The kithara flourished in Spain until the fall of the Spanish Roman Empire (5th century), at which time it fell largely into disuse until the invading Visigoths were firmly established on the peninsula. The Visigoths set about reviving the old Roman culture, and the kithara again emerged. In the 7th century San Isidro wrote of wandering minstrels singing and accompanying themselves on the kithara… It was around this period that the guitarra latina, an instrument containing four sets of double strings and which resembled a small version of the present Spanish guitar, was developed in Spain, presumably, as we have stated, from the kithara romana.

• ⁽⁵⁾ “In my opinion”, footnotes Pohren, “it is more likely that visiting Hindu musicians introduced the kithara asiria, or similar instruments, into Cádiz before the coming of the Romans, probably during the reign of the Greeks”…

● Well, in my opinion, it is far more likely that the Greeks themselves introduced into Iberia their own version of this instrument: the cithara helénica!

A woman playing a lyre (an instrument that shows the
cithara to guitarra transition), by Cesare Saccaggi

“Meanwhile, in the Middle East the kithara asiria had long ago inspired the family of the guitarra morisca, an oval-shaped, three-stringed instrument introduced into Spain with the 8th century Moorish invasion. It is thought that the only significant characteristic that the Latin guitar borrowed from the Moorish guitar, in its development into Spanish guitar, was the idea of the single strings in place of the formerly-used sets of double strings.

“So by the 9th century there existed in Spain guitars not unlike those we play today, but until the troubadour period (the 11th through the 13th centuries) the guitar was not widely introduced to the general populace. Little structural change of any significance took place in this guitar until the 16th century, when Vicente Espinel began using a fifth string. (This was not Espinel’s invention, as guitars had existed previously with five strings. Espinel merely made the fifth string fashionable. Many musicologists express the belief that the famous Ziryab himself first innovated the use of the fifth string in the 9th century). With this development the Spaniards finally seemed to feel that the guitar was their instrument, and it was then that the guitarra latina was rechristened the ‘Spanish guitar’.⁽⁶⁾ Two centuries later the final radical development was made, which was the addition of the sixth string by fray Miguel García, a monk also known as Padre Basilio, an excellent classical guitarist and the guitar instructor of King Carlos IV, Queen María Luisa, and the famous concert guitarist, Dionisio Aguado. Thus, except for its growth in size and quality, by the latter third of the 18th century the Spanish guitar was as we know it today.

• ⁽⁶⁾ Except the guitarra española, there is also a guitarra portuguesa, which resembles more a lute than a guitar. It descends from a medieval “guitar”, the citole, and is now the solo instrument of fado. It is accompanied by a “normal” guitar, which is called viola to be distinguished from the guitarra portuguesa; the word viola probably comes from another old guitar, vihuela, or viola de mão. In the 15th century, some musicians played it with a bow, and that’s how the viol, or viola da gamba, was born; it was later replaced by the violin family, especially the cello.

Bayad plays the oud to the Lady (from the Arabic tale Bayad
and Riyad) – or Ziryab’s Garden (Andalusia, 13th century)

“Now that we know something of the development of the guitar, let us look into the development of the music. According to Lévi-Provençal (La Civilización Árabe en España), the great tradition of Andalusian music was molded together and developed in the Cordovan conservatory of music established and directed by the Mesopotamian musician, Ziryab, in the 9th century. (Ziryab arrived in Córdoba in 822, in his early thirties, and remained there the rest of his life). What he must have done was gather, and become proficient in, the Andalusian folklore of that period, which was, of course, highly Oriental in nature, and conserve and teach it to attending minstrels and nobility in his conservatory. As he had spent years in the courts of Baghdad, and was the supreme musician of his time, he undoubtedly added to, and purified, what he found. Ziryab, in fact, is credited with having played the major musical role in making Andalusia the outstanding cultural center of the world at that time.”

“Ziryab played the major role in making Andalusia the outstanding
cultural center of the world in the 9th century.” (Donn Pohren)

Chelys: lyre made with a tortoise shell

IN THIS MONUMENTAL MURAL, created mainly by Lorca and Pohren, with all the others contributing, we only need to apply some extra brushstrokes to… exonerate the Assyrians, who became notorious in history mainly for their cruelty, but also to show that in social processes, parthenogenesis is out of the question in all places and all times – even in the case of the ancient “Hellenic miracle” that has been feasible due to borrowing intellectual achievements and know-how from the Orient.

The cithara was an instrument of the professionals, while its little sister, the lyre, of the amateurs. According to the Encyclopedia of Ancient Hellenic Music by Solon Michaelides (the source of much valuable information throughout our Chronicles), the cithara was called Ἀσιάς (Asian). Plutarch (1st–2nd century CE) claimed that “it was called Asian because it was used by the Lesbian citharodes [or citharoedes, or citharedes (cithara + ode), i.e. cithara players who also sang] dwelling close to Asia”. This is, of course, a pretext – even if Lesbos is actually close to Asia Minor. The truth is found in the writings of Hesychius of Alexandria (5th century CE), who explained that the cithara was defined as such “for it was invented in Asia”. The adjectives Ἀσιάς and Ἀσιᾶτις (Asian, Asiatic) were used not only in relation to the cithara, but also to music in general; as Strabo points out: “… καὶ ἡ μουσικὴ πᾶσα Θρᾳκία καὶ Ἀσιᾶτις νενόμισται”; “… all music is thought to be Thracian and Asian” (see the Chronicle 11. “Music Is Thracian and Asian”). Ancient Thrace, mind you, was not a part of ancient Hellas.

A Konso girl playing a krar lyre (southern Ethiopia)

These instruments of the cithara and lyre family have been extinct for centuries now because they were left behind in the development of music, becoming inadequate and thus unable to satisfy the needs of the people – musicians and listeners. They are now rarely found still in use among primitive tribes, primarily in northeastern Africa – and this is indeed a pleasant surprise! Certain German ethnomusicologists recorded, among others, the sound of a lyre played by a cattleman, member of the Hamar tribe in Ethiopia, and put his photo on the cover of the album. Isn’t it impressive? The symbol of so many “serious” music institutions, the “musical instrument par excellence” of the ancient Greeks, the celebrated chelys of Hermes, who offered it to Apollo (to atone for stealing his oxen!), to be “degraded” in the hands of primitive Africans, and also been made with a tortoise shell? It can’t be, these Germans should have been related in some way to… Fallmerayer!⁽⁷⁾

• ⁽⁷⁾ Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790 – 1861) was a German Tyrolean traveller, journalist, politician, and historian, best known for his controversial discontinuity theory concerning the racial origins of the Greeks.

In conclusion, if we assume that the guitar descended from the ancient cithara, the latter must have been combined with some kind of lute – that is, with an instrument having a “neck” – as the guitar belongs to this lute family. The only similar instrument in ancient Greece was the so-called tríchordon (three-string), or pandura, pandurís, pánduros, and phánduros. In the Hellenistic era there was already a whole family of such instruments that became later even larger with the additions of the erudite thambura (tambur of Constantinople), folk tanbur-saz or bağlama, and also bouzouki (see Chronicle 9. The Celebrated Tríchordon).

Bow harp (ennanga from Uganda): descendant of the musical bow and precursor of the string instruments

Pollux (2nd century CE), writing about the origin of the instrument, is very clear: “Tríchordon, which the Assyrians called pandura; it was also their own invention.” Therefore, etymologically and organologically, the pandura was Assyrian. We can assume, as a result, that the cithara asiria, which Pohren referred to, should have been related to the pandura. The term tríchordon that the Hellenes used for the pandura means that it was a three-string instrument. Let us not forget that the guitarra morisca, descending from the cithara asiria, was also a tríchordon.⁽⁸⁾

• ^(h) Cithara probably means tríchordon, three-string. The Indian sitar (of a common etymological origin), though it’s multi-stringed now (about 20 strings; 6-7 melodic and the rest sympathetic, “sympathizing”, i.e. vibrating, with the melodic ones) should have been three-string and Persian in origin (seh-tar in Farsi means “three-string”); besides, in Iran there is still in use a kind of three-string (already four-string) tanbur called setar.

It’s so thrilling to imagine that the starting point of all these instruments was the primitive hunter’s bow; that in time of rest could become a musical bow…

• >> Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS…
• << Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)

Next Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS… ● “Mosaic” of Andalusia ● Cultural “Crossroads” and “Purity” ● Natural and Artificial Hybrids ● “Creative” Commercialization ● Paco de Lucía

Musical bow

Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON

Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 9. TΟ ΠΕΡΙΩΝΥΜΟΝ ΤΡΙΧΟΡΔΟΝ

Persian setar (seh-tar = tri-chord = 3-string): Indian sitar’s “relative”

● Flamenco and Rebetiko, Guitar and Bouzouki
● Modal and Tempered Music ● Ross Daly
● Tanburs ● Ashiks ● Foustalieris and Iován
Tsaoús ● Entertainment and Edutainment

Michales Loukovikas

FLAMENCO AND REBÉTIKO’s lead instruments have been the guitarra and bouzouki respectively: the sound of these two instruments has become an absolutely necessary condition – sine qua non, as they say – for the two genres in their interpretation. Yet, the guitar and bouzouki may be evaluated as rather unsuitable for such musical idioms.

Rebétiko and flamenco: modal music genres accompanied by tempered instruments.

In terms of melodic themes, rebétiko and flamenco come under the category of modal music: that is, each song is based not on a simple musical scale but rather on a mode (“harmony”, or “echos”), with its own character, mood, and ethos, and with a variety of intervals that greatly outnumber the tempered-equal intervals of Western European music. In the accompaniment, however, both genres are dominated by the Occidental concept of chords and melodic phrases played on tempered instruments: the bouzouki and guitar’s frets are positioned according to these equal intervals, allowing the performance of just the notes of the piano. This contradiction, undoubtedly, creates various problems, imposes restrictions – but at the same time imparts a raw beauty to music when it flourishes at the borderline of distinct cultural areas. Its interpreters act like rope-dancers while balancing themselves between two worlds.

Bouzouki

The development of the guitar in its final phase, from the Renaissance onwards (seen in Chronicle 7), ran parallel to the development of Occidental music, with polyphony, counterpoint, and all the rest. The relationship between instrument and music, therefore, has been harmonious. The bouzouki, on the contrary, as a newcomer, has suffered from split personality. Even if it cannot be played with the classical guitar techniques that have crept into flamenco, it has gradually moved willy-nilly on the westernizing way of rebétiko, while major and minor scales have been substituting the multitude of modes.

Radical changes in the orientation of a musical genre are clearly reflected on its instruments. Although Music never reveals her face, the transformations of an instrument are clearly visible to the naked eye. Thus, we’ve seen the bouzouki undergoing a mutation and turning from a three-string (tri-chordon) into a four-string and electric instrument, while at the same time its tuning has changed, adopting that of the guitar just to facilitate virtuosities. This four-double-string… “guitarized” bouzouki was introduced by the superstar Manoles Chiotes (who was originally a guitarist), although it was not his own invention. Note that these developments occurred while rebétiko was on its deathbed.

Bouzouki mutated before and after the rebétiko era:
it was at first “mandolinized”, and then “guitarized”,
turned into a four-string and electric instrument.

Lavta with movable frets

That was the second mutation of the instrument. The first one happened before rebétiko moved into the spotlight, when the bouzouki, as a “prodigal son”, broke away from the tanbur family where it was raised, becoming a… Franco-Levantine: it lost both its tanbur-like appearance, and its movable frets enabling tunings according to the intervals of the mode to perform. They were replaced by the far fewer fixed metallic frets that permit the performance of just the tempered intervals. This metamorphosis was accompanied by other structural changes also modeled on the mandolin. In short, the instrument was at first… “mandolinized”. It continued “speaking” Greek, one might say, but with a foreign “accent”… ⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Considering the fixed frets and their tempered intervals, the only way to approach the original sound of old rebétiko, i.e. the sound of modal music, is to use several tunings called düzenia,* depending on the mode. The only bouzouki player I’ve listened to using such tunings “live” (not in some special event or during a musicological program) has been another… guitarist, Demetris Mystakides. Thus while the rest of his program favoured vocal duets, the düzenia required ison (drone) – i.e. music had moved away from Occidental-style “harmony” towards Oriental echos and ethos.
  * Düzen: tuning, harmony (in Turkish).

Nevertheless, there is a type of bouzouki still in use that has remained true to its origins and is proud to be a brother of the tanbur. It is the Arabic bouzouki, the buzuq, or bozuq, played in the region of ancient Phoenicia: in Lebanon and the surrounding area. The country of the cedars is where the great modern virtuoso of the instrument has emerged: the gypsy-born Matar Muhammad,⁽²⁾ who might turn even “four-string” Chiotes… pale, even though he had allegedly earned Jimi Hendrix’s admiration for his playing!

• ⁽²⁾ Note that Matar’s repertoire featured the Greek spongers’ song Dirlada. The song was included in The Fool’s Garden album (1969) by Dionyses Sabbopoulos – who was taken to court in 1973 for its credits. Despite the rebétiko composer Iannes Papaiohannou’s testimony that he’d known the song for years as traditional, despite the fact that by 1970 it was already an international hit recorded by Dalida in French and Italian as Darla dirladada, the court ruled that next to the song title on The Fool’s Garden cover and disc, a phrase should be written (in parenthesis): “Adapted by Sabbopoulos; composed by P. Ghines or traditional”… You could take your pick! The song was also recorded in Serbian, Finnish, Hebrew, etc. Other interpreters in Hellenic included Domna Samiou, Nikos Xylouris, and Marinella.

Crusades and Lebensraum – Urban, Hitler and Zionists

It seems as a modern version of the age-old competition – but also emulation and exchange – between Phoenicians and Hellenes during the colonizing phase in the Mediterranean: the former on the southern coastline, the latter by the northern shores – without excluding reciprocal incursions. This very competition went on (and still goes on) with other protagonists: Punics and Romans, Arabs and Byzantines – until the Crusaders appeared on mare nostrum upsetting the status quo. You can see how old the idea on “spheres of influence” is, where the concept of Lebensraum (vital, living space) recently emerged as a fatal malignant tumour.

● Pope Urban II made probably the most influential speech of the Middle Ages on November 27, 1095, giving rise to the Crusades, by calling Christians to war against Muslims. The chronicler Robert the Monk put this into the mouth of the pope:

“… this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population… and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators… Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves… Dieu li volt [It is God’s will]!”

● How identical the papal words were to Adolf Hitler’s: “We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources”, he shouted. Germany has “a tightly packed racial core”, and thus the Germans are entitled to “greater Lebensraum than in the case of other peoples.” As for Urban’s “wicked race”, the Nazis interpreted it as referring mainly to the Eastern European Slav population… There was, therefore, a long history of equivalent mentality between the “Holy See” and fascism; it wasn’t just a case of… love at first sight! (See also Chronicles 23–24).

● Adding to this historical irony, some of the Nazis’ victims, the Jews, under Zionist leadership, have embraced verbatim and wholeheartedly Urban’s call and Hitler’s Lebensraum theory and practice, encroaching on the lands of that old “wicked race”…

Tanbur, Pandura and Tríchordon

What is the origin of this instrument and of its various variants? It is apparently located in Assyria, as Pollux has already said about the pandura (see Chronicle 7, conclusion). How come that these various variants developed in Levante and Hellas, without influencing the rest of the Arabs, nor the Turks that found themselves in between in the meantime? We may just speculate on that; especially since the word “bouzouki”, according to Nicolas Andriotes’ Etymological Dictionary of Modern Greek, is believed to have been Turkish in origin (büzük).⁽³⁾ We can see in this case, too, one of etymology’s so many oddities: an instrument’s godfather not to care much about it.

• ⁽³⁾ In fact, when the Turks say büzük, they mean a kind of bağlama; and when they say bağlama, they mean a kind of saz… (Some Greeks ordered from Constantinople “some little baglamás”… You can imagine their astonishment when they finally saw what they had bought!) So, the Greek terms bouzouki and baglamás are loans from Turkish referring to different, although related, instruments of the tanbur family, extending as far as India with the drone instrument, tanpura. Note, in addition, that the term tambour also denotes some kinds of drums. In the percussion category we have more derivative terms such as tambourine, tambora, tabor…
  ● The term büzük-bouzouki probably originates from a large Persian lute, the tanbur e bozorg.

Ross Daly

Unfortunately, we do not know how exactly the tambourás was played in Greece in the 19th century. Its playing, however, should have been quite different from that of the bouzouki or (at least today’s) Anatolian saz, though there are people who try hard to convince us of the opposite, for they introduce themselves as “masters of the tambourás”, while the instrument they play is in fact the saz – an instrument of the tanbur family in the form it has acquired in Asia Minor. Ross Daly describes the efforts to resurrect the tambourás:

“In recent years there has been much talk in various music high schools, educational institutions, schools of music and so-called conservatories about an instrument that is mentioned in Greek history, called tambourás. The instrument has not survived to this day. There has been no ongoing tradition since ancient times that, as they say, the tambourás originates. We can find old Byzantine theoreticians’ descriptions, folkloric descriptions, or references in books, we know more or less how it was tuned, what its form was; but we have never listened to it live.”

● The tríchordon: a three-string instrument of the lute family, also known as pandura, pandurís or pánduros. It was probably the only instrument with a neck used by the Greeks. In the Hellenistic times the term pandura was used to refer to a whole family of similar instruments played with a plectrum. Sachs says: ”it had a long arm…, small body, frets, and three strings”. According to Pollux: ”tríchordon, which the Assyrians called pandura; for it was their own invention”. We are told by Pythagoras that ”the pandura was made by the Red Sea Troglodytae with white laurel that grows by the sea”. In his Manual, Nicomachus writes that the monochord was called phánduros. Hesychius uses the term pandurís for the instrument and pánduros for the performer; pandúrion[, he claims, is] a diminutive of the word pandura. But Photius says: ”pandúrion, i.e. a Lydian instrument played with the fingers without a plectrum”. In his Dictionary Zonaras notes: “pandúrion… a kind of cithara”. (Solon Michaelides, Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Music).

Muse playing a tríchordon-pandurís

“There is an instrument played today in Turkey that is considered as closely related to the tambourás: it’s the saz. Some say it’s one and the same instrument. First of all, it is not – and anyone can see that by a simple comparison of the two instruments. Besides, the style, the music an instrument plays, its construction – everything – are all in one. You cannot separate one thing from the other.

“What we have now as a result is a whole army of young people who have learned how to play the saz in recent years not through some kind of training or tradition, but completely self-taught and off-hand. They present themselves as tambourás masters though it’s obvious they have not the slightest idea. The people here know nothing about the saz, tambur, ney, not even the oud, although the Greeks have participated in the development of Anatolian culture. There have been numerous excellent Greek oud players; the best example may have been Yorgo Bacanós [Badjanós], the leading oud player in Istanbul in the mid-20th century: every Turkish oud player now drinks water to him. But, unfortunately, this tradition did not take root in Greece, and there was no follow-up.

“After this tradition had died out for some decades, with the revival of rebétiko in the early 70s, and even more around the 80s, when the people became interested in the Smyrnaic style,⁽⁴⁾ every bouzouki player bought an oud, as well; and started tinkering with it as if playing a bouzouki. This is one thing; another thing is to be initiated in the living tradition of this instrument in Turkey or Arabia where the oud is played now.

• ⁽⁴⁾ Smyrnaic (from Smyrna) and Piraeotic (from Piraeus): the two main styles of rebétiko.

Oud

“I cannot consider all these bouzouki players that were suddenly interested in the oud as successors of the tradition carried over by Bacanós, Agapios Tomboules, Lambros [Leontarides], the lyra player, or Lambros [Sabbaides], the qanun player. All these musicians carried a living tradition but, unfortunately, while they were alive, no one was interested in it; that’s why they left no successors.

“One could say, of course, the tambourás survived in Crete through Stelios Foustalieris’ bulgarí. However, Foustalieris changed completely his instrument, while he was deeply influenced mainly through his contact with rebétiko. His playing may be helpful; but this is not enough to revive an entire tradition. Let’s utilize whatever we have at our disposal; but without all that nationalist hot air specifically about this instrument that has become a symbol: ‘the tabourás of Makryiannes’!⁽⁵⁾ Some persons use it like a gun!”

• ⁽⁵⁾ General Iannes Makryiannes was a leader of the Greek struggle for independence (1820s).

Crete’s exchange with Constantinople and Smyrna, and also the wider area of Anatolia and the Balkans, was continuous until the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922. That’s how several tunes, and also the bulgarí, an instrument closely resembling the cura (tzurá), arrived there. But which cura? Here, too, the terms are confusing. The tzurás for the Greeks is the middle-sized instrument of the three that make up the bouzouki triad, while the smallest of the family is the Lilliputian baglamás, a typical prison instrument: due to its size it can be easily hidden. However, the smallest of the Anatolian tanburs is not the bağlama but the cura! Babel…

The pandura tradition in Asia Minor is autochthonous,
indigenous, at least since the Hittite and Assyrian times.

Different words, obviously, indicate differences not only in terms of dimensions, construction in general, but also in relation to the root of either the instruments or their users. Settling down in Anatolia, the Turks should have had instruments of the tanbur family, as we can presume based on the origin of these terms. But the peoples of Asia Minor had already been using similar instruments, such as the pandura, since time immemorial: at least since the time of the Hittites and the Assyrians. The tanburs, therefore, have been autochthonous there and their tradition has been Anatolian rather than Central Asian (Turkish).⁽⁶⁾

Âşık Veysel

• ⁽⁶⁾ I insist that the Ashik tradition has been Anatolian, not Turkish (Central Asian). During the international Musicological Symposium at Delphi in 1988 e.g., Reinhold Schlötterer analyzed the structure of Âşik Veysel’s song, Black Earth, pointing out that this melody corresponds to the ancient Hellenic musical system. Still, he hastened to add that we should not draw arbitrary conclusions claiming that the Anatolian music was actually dependent on ancient Greek culture. Besides, he concluded, Hellenic music had received antecedent idioms from Asia Minor. As we can see, Schlötterer compared ancient Greek and Anatolian cultures. He never intended to take into account in his analysis some Central Asian culture. Conclusion: Veysel’s source of inspiration, albeit in this song, was the ancient tradition of Greece and Asia Minor, not that of Central Asia. Therefore, the Ashik tradition is autochthonous, born and bred in Anatolia.

Ashiks, Alevis, Bektashis

We tend to forget this fact as we are under the false impression that the erudite Constantinopolitan tradition’s origin, on the one hand, has been Arabo-Persian (and Byzantine, of course, but we also forget) and, on the other hand, that the Anatolian folk music is “purely Turkish”… Would you expect anything else? It’s more than obvious that these advocates of “purity” – in sound and also race – are a global phenomenon. And if in this case the “purists” are Turks, OK (so to speak). But what if they are foreigners?

“At the court of the Ottoman sultans”, commented Alain Gheerbrant, who recorded and released songs of Âşık Veysel, “the official arts were so encumbered by flowery Arabo-Persian art poetry as to become less and less understandable to the common people. At the same time, the ashiks, often illiterate itinerant folk poets, maintained a tradition of poetry in song on Turkish soil. Since the 12th century, their poetry, worded in rigorous language and free of foreign influences, could be heard from the shores of the Mediterranean as far away as China.

“The Ottoman Empire disappeared; the popular tradition did not. Although there may no longer be any ashiks in Khorasan, they are still present in Anatolia. Âşık Veysel was not only the most brilliant of them all, he was also one of the greatest contemporary poets of the Turkish language. The tradition from which he drew his inspiration dates from the great semi-legendary figures of yesteryear, such as Yunus Emre (13th century) and Pir Sultan or Kaygusuz Abdal (16th century). His work shall remain, alongside that of his predecessors, in the collective memory of the rural peoples of Anatolia.

“His influence is also plain to see elsewhere, for the ‘Kemalist’ revolution has placed Turkey on the road to recovering its identity. A reconciliation was needed for that to take place: for the literate to abnegate their caste, set apart by jealousy, and recognize and hear the illiterate élites. Today’s Turkey has reached that understanding: one needs only to open a novel by Yaşar Kemal or view a few scenes from a Yilmaz Güney film to understand that Âşık Veysel, the aged, sightless bard, opened the eyes of all contemporary thinkers and artists, those who have carried the voice of their people beyond their nation’s borders eliminating the barrier of misunderstandings, preconceptions, and platitudes that impede all positive interaction between cultures.

Statue of Pir Sultan Abdal, who was
martyred and hanged for his beliefs

“Veysel, like all the ashiks, was of the Alevi–Bektashi faith, and therefore voluntarily alien to the rigid code of the Sunni Muslims. His philosophy, a fusion of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks of Asia Minor and the generous warmth of his Central Asian ancestors, was one of tolerance and freedom. He preached unity, understanding, and equality between all men and women, based on a religion that was turned inwards towards the earth, rather than outwards towards the sky”…

What a “flowery” garden… Had we not known Turkey, we would have thought it’s a heavenly land of the angels! Was the French researcher really serious, or did he tell one white lie after the other winking meaningfully at us? After all, why should he mention two prominent Kurds, such as Yaşar Kemal and Yilmaz Güney, who were jailed by the “‘Kemalist’ revolution”? And they were not the only ones. The most important persons of the arts and letters in Turkey have been treated collectively as subversive elements. Let alone how the Sunni state dealt with Alevis and Bektashis. What is, indeed, the use of such texts, except perhaps to serve public relations and personal gain?

● The Alevis, who live… persecuted in Turkey (indiscriminately and at all times: in the Ottoman, Kemalist or Islamist periods), should not be confused with the Alawites in Syria, who form a ruling minority. Alevis are grouped together with Shias (Shiites), though their religion, a syncretism of Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Shamanist beliefs, differs from both main branches of Islam. They usually gather for their ceremonies in houses rather than mosques, drinking wine, listening to music and dancing: an ashik plays bağlama singing their didactic “spirituals”, while both men and women dance whirling like Dervishes. Unlike Muslims, whose ceremonies are performed in Arabic, the Alevis use mainly Turkish, or Kurdish, if they are Kurds. At least half the Alevis think they are not Muslims. Sunnis accuse them of “heresy, heterodoxy, rebellion, betrayal, immorality”. Alevis, on the other hand, preaching love and respect for all, tolerance towards other religions and ethnic groups, equality between men and women, and respect for working people, consider Sunnis as “reactionary, bigoted, fanatic, anti-democratic”, opposing free and independent thinking. Alevis now see themselves as an offset to Sunni fundamentalism. Take into account that 1/4 to 1/3 of the inhabitants of Turkey are Alevis. Native Alevis in Greek Western Thrace are thought to number 3000 people.

Bektashi hymns

● Alevism is associated with Bektashism, as both groups honour Haji Bektash Veli (13th century). Bektashis had a strong presence not only in Asia Minor but also in the Balkans, especially in Albania, “North Macedonia” (Vardar Banovina, or ancient Paeonia), Bulgaria, and Greece, primarily in Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace and Crete. It seems only in Bosnia they failed to take root. Influenced by Sufi mysticism and also accused of pantheism, they share some ideas with Shias, and are not dogmatic. Sultan Mahmud II abolished various orders (Bektashi, Janissaries, etc.) in 1826. Mustafa Kemal banned Dervish Sufi orders and shut down their lodges a century later, in 1925. While Enver Hoxha acted accordingly, outlawing religious practice in Albania. Kemal and Hoxha acted on the basis of their ideas and interests. One would surely expect that the rest of the Balkan leaders, except, of course, those who are under Ankara’s aegis, would do the same taking advantage of the Sunni-Bektashi conflict, given that the great majority of the Balkan Muslims have been Bektashis. Yet, acting stupidly as bigots in power, they too turned against them, handing them over to the Turkish leaders. It’s what we describe as “politicians with foresight”!

Although most Balkan Muslims are Bektashis, the Balkan states did not take advantage of the Sunni-Bektashi conflict, and turned against them, as well…

A Hittite with a small pandura

LET’S GO BACK to the tríchordon-pandura and its long history in Asia Minor. There is ample evidence that instruments of the tanbur family have been played by Anatolians since age-old times. Christian Poché says:

“Asia Minor was from earliest antiquity the favoured land of the long-necked lute, as shown by the Hittite archaeological finds… Long before Arabic Spain, this geographical area served as a link between Orient and Occident, and as such transmitted through the ages these types of long-necked lutes that in classical Europe gave birth to the pandura, colascione, mandora…

“In Turkey, these lutes take on different names according to their dimensions, the populations who use them and the way they use them. The Turkmen term baglama or baglamaq, literally ‘tying’ (of strings around an instrument) is the one found most often, as opposed to the other widespread term, saz, a Persian word which designates the music, the act of playing it on any instrument, especially the long-necked lute. A third term, of probable Indo-Iranian origin, also serves in support of the musical vocabulary: tambura.⁽⁷⁾ Like the preceding ones, it designates a fretted instrument of six strings in pairs, whose terminology finds more favour among the Kurdish populations.”

• ⁽⁷⁾ Personally, I think that the term tambura probably originates from the Assyrian pandura or a similar Hittite word. If so, the term must be Mesopotamian-Anatolian and not Indo-Iranian.

A Greek islander with a tambourás (18th century)

Thus, with the exception of the Kurds, the term tanbur is avoided in Turkey in relation to this long-necked lute because a related but very different instrument, called tambur, is used in the erudite Arabo-Persian music of Constantinople. There are two variants of this instrument: plucked (the older version) or bowed (yayli tambur), depending on the way it is played – with a plectrum or a bow. In Greece, of course, the term baglama in relation to the same long-necked lute is also avoided for the same reason, so as not to be confused with the well-known homonymous small instrument, the bouzouki’s little brother.

The Bulgarí

Unfortunately, the etymology of the terms relating to the several variants of the tanbur does not explain what the origin of the word bulgarí may be. Excluding the possibility of a Bulgarian origin, there’s only one alternative: the word vulgar referring to the common people, the “lower” classes – anything “debased”. This possibility, together with the characterization of the Greek demotic as “vulgar”, shows how class, racist, or sexist language may sometimes become – well, not language itself but man, the one who uses it…

● Words are boats and their etymology is a map of their voyages together with the peoples using them. On second… searches for bulgarí’s genealogy, my first guess proves to be in a way correct: after all, there is a “Bulgar connection”! The instrument may not originate from Bulgaria but from Anatolia among the Turkomans or Oguzes around the Taurus; it may not be directly linked with similar Balkan lutes, such as the tambura, tamburica or bugarija; but its name derives from the Bulgars, the proto-Bulgarian tribes of the Volga Bulgaria region, with whom the Turkomans-Turkmens had contacts. These Bulgars, on the contrary, had no contacts with the (European, Slavic-speaking) Bulgarians for more than a millennium.

The bulgarí spread in the Mediterranean, especially to Crete and Egypt. Guillaume André Villoteau, a French musicologist, mentioned in 1807 a tanbour boulghari or guitare de Bulgarie among other instruments of the tanbur family he saw in Cairo: bağlama, sharki, and bozuq (replaced later on by the buzuq). The bulgarí was either brought to Crete by Anatolian refugees in the 1920s or, most probably, was already in use at least since the 19th century among both Christian and Muslim populations. Stelios Foustalieris e.g. bought his first bulgarí in 1924, having seen the instrument being played by older musicians. It is still in use mainly as a lead instrument and not for accompaniment, a role that was gradually taken over by the laouto.

The bulgarí has 16-22 movable frets, but some musicians, e.g. Foustalieris replaced them with fixed frets. It’s the main instrument of the tabachaniotika, a style close to rebétiko, supposedly developed by “Turco-Cretans”. The tabachaniótika are urban folk songs influenced by Anatolian, Syrian, or Andalusian–Maghrebian music. Ross Daly and Pericles Papapetrópoulos are now bulgarí’s most accomplished performers.

Iován Tsaoús and Foustalieris

At any rate, Foustalieris’ vulgar or Bulgar bulgarí, together with the instruments performed by Iannes Eidjirides (or Etseirides), the famous Iován Tsaoús, were the only kinds of tambourás that Grecian discography actually recorded. But what a pity! These instruments seem to have little in common with those played by the fighters of the Greek War of Independence: the bulgarí is a Cretan peculiarity, while Iován Tsaoús’ instruments are Anatolian – hence unsuitable for restoring the Hellenic tambourás and its sound.

Iován Tsaoús

Iován Tsaoús, i.e. Sergeant John, was born in Pontus and worked with famous musicians and singers, playing even in the sultan’s Court, as they say. On the contrary, when he fled to Greece after the catastrophe of ’22, “he never played on stage because he seemed to disagree with the way the musicians functioned: he remained an ‘edutainer’ of his friends.”⁽⁸⁾ This is what Panaiotes Kounades says at least; which means that he did not like the role of an entertainer, as he was used to a different situation in Asia Minor and Constantinople, where musicians functioned otherwise:

• ⁽⁸⁾ Edutainment (edu-cation + enter-tainment) is so weak and pale compared to the Hellenic term ψυχαγωγία (ἀγωγὴ ψυχῆς = soul leading, training, education of the soul) – but what can I do?

“Arabo-Perso-Turkish music,” the qanun player Nikos Stephanides commented, “in earlier times was performed by musicians playing saz, bouzouki and tambourines in folk songs; while serious music was performed by an ensemble called ince saz (fine instruments) consisting of the following: tambur (pandura), psalterium [psaltery] – qanun in Greek, Arabic and Turkish – violin, oud, ney (reed flute). The ensembles had singers called hanendes. They had beautiful voices and played tabors – tambourines – keeping the various rhythms of the melodies being performed.

“When the ensemble played and the hanende sang, everyone was silent in the venue. Even the waiters did not move from their positions. Only during the breaks, when the ensemble stopped playing, the public discussed or ordered the waiters whatever they wished for. If they wanted the ensemble to play a song, they put a card with the order and a corresponding tip inside an envelope, and the waiter carried it to the artists so as to perform the piece he wanted. Such was the order inside the venues, which in those old times were equipped neither with loudspeakers nor with amplifiers and, although the musicians played with a natural sound, the audience were able to listen even in the large venues, where they oftentimes numbered more than 500-1000 persons, because they were completely silent”…

Panaiotes Tountas

When you are accustomed likewise – playing high-standards music with such partners and in front of such audience – how is it possible to restrict yourself to the role of an entertainer? Iován Tsaoús, therefore, chose to open a… tailor’s shop, which he later turned into an ouzo tavern, playing for his pleasure and not for the entertainment of the patrons of an establishment. Fortunately, he met Panaiotes Tountas, the greatest composer of the Smyrnaic style, and also artistic director of phonographic companies; so he recorded a number of his own songs and some other compositions, mainly by Tountas. These few recordings (about twenty in all) took place in just two years (1935-36), because when the Metaxas dictatorship imposed censorship on lyrics and music (and music!), Iován Tsaoús abandoned the idea to continue, as some others did, as well, such as Vangelis Papázoglou, Giorgos Batis, and Anestos (Artemes) Deliás (see Chronicle 13).

But anyway, less is more: these moments in the studio – however few – reflect the virtuosity of the musician who became a kind of “master” of the Piraeotic rebétiko protagonists: Batis, Deliás, Markos Bambakares, Stratos Paioumtzēs – that is, the “Famous Quartet of Piraeus”. They learned from him the names and techniques of the musical “routes” (modes), the art of improvisation (taqsim), and also the several tunings, the düzenia. All the above, combined with his unusual personal style and “eccentric” instruments that the bouzouki players of rebétiko did not dare to touch, let alone play, created a myth around the name of Iován Tsaoús, or… “Sgt. Iován”.⁽⁹⁾

• ⁽⁹⁾ Sgt. Pepper, who “offered” the Beatles their masterpiece, was an imaginary person. But on the contrary, Sgt. Iován, in Greece, was real. Unfortunately, no one has ever had the idea to form a… Sgt. Iován’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!

Canción Malagueña, by George Apperley (1931)

In our “modern” world, unfortunately, the musicians have no way out from the stranglehold of the entertainment circuit (clubs, festivals, etc.). That is, there has been no parallel “edutainment” circuit on a professional basis. In Andalusia, on the contrary, at least until the 60s, there was such a circuit for flamenco artists. Up to the latest development of the genre into concert and theatrical flamenco,⁽¹⁰⁾ these artists were divided into two major categories: the commercial entertainers worked primarily in tablaos, while the authentic “edutainers” were employed in juergas, the feasts organized by flamenco aficionados.

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ Concert and theatrical flamenco: having as protagonists the guitarists and dancers respectively: yesteryear’s leading artists, according to flamenco’s traditional hierarchy, the singers, have been sidelined – together with cante jondo and duende that avoid concert halls or theatres…

There’s been no way out from the stranglehold of the entertainment
circuit for the musicians: there’s been no parallel edutainment circuit.

Stelios Foustalieris

The other tambourás master, Stelios Foustalieris or Foustalierakis, together with his partner, the excellent singer Iannis Bernidakis or Baxevanis, belonged to the large batch of musicians and singers, who appeared in Rethymnon during the interwar period. The instruments accompanying the lyra at that time were the bulgarí and mandolin, according to Lambros Liavas. They were later replaced by the laouto. But Foustalieris managed to turn bulgarí into a solo instrument and worked with two Anatolian musicians playing the oud and santur. They were among those who sought refuge in the island after the catastrophe of 1922. So they should have imparted to him musical elements from the original cradle of his instrument. Unfortunately, there are no recordings from this collaboration.

Later he came into direct contact with the sound of the Piraeotic rebétiko. It was in the period of 1933-37, when he lived in Piraeus and also met Batis, Markos, Stratos and many other musicians of rebétiko, as well as Tountas, with whom, of course, he collaborated in discography. But here, too, the output was meagre: just 24 discs.

We wonder if the two tambourás masters, Iován Tsaoús and Foustalieris, finally met; if there was some exchange of knowledge and expertise. Having so many acquaintances in common, one would expect that this meeting did happen. But there is no available information.

Iován Tsaoús died 49 years old, in 1942, during the German occupation of Hellas that “wiped out” the vast majority of the élite of Greek musicians and singers: the Anatolian refugees. Apparently they failed to go through one more calvary so soon. On the contrary, Foustalieris passed away 50 years later, in 1992, when he was 81. Being… “the last of the Mohicans” among the select few traditional masters of tambourás, we suppose he attracted the attention of the authorities. This would have happened in almost any country; but not in Balkan Greece…

While Foustalieris was still alive, in 1987, I had a discussion on the radio with Sakis Papademetriou and Ross Daly – who concluded as follows:

“Crete, compared perhaps with other parts of Greece, somehow maintains its tradition in a better shape, in the sense that it’s been renewed. But because there have been neither significant studies on music nor recordings, each passing decade brings terrible losses. In the few years that I’m there, I’ve met old musicians who in the meantime have died and with them many archives have been lost. There are very few now left.

Stelios Foustalieris, Giorges Gogas, Kostas Mountakis and Ross Daly.

“Foustalieris, the last bulgarí player, is still alive. He’s around 75, but no one has gone there with a tape recorder to tell him: ‘Play – and when you get tired, stop!’ However, no private individual can do such a thing because Foustalieris will be afraid he’ll be exploited. In such cases, an official state agency can easily surpass any problems and Foustalieris, as a man with an old mentality, will warmly respond. At least something like that, now that there is still time”…

● Time’s passed, Foustalieris has died, the rest of the masters follow, but there have been no recordings – an undertaking of minimal expense. “Hellas, the eternal”…

● On second dispassionate thought, I wonder whether – as a daydreamer – I ask “too much” from a country that has not given a damn about the essence of Makryiannes’ Memoirs. Why then should they care about the way he used to play his tambourás? Let alone about Foustalieris and his own bulgarí…

● So, our only hope is to see the fulfillment of a verse, albeit paraphrased, of a most beautiful old song, Staphidianós, played superbly by Foustalieris on his bulgarí, having beside him an amazing Baxevanis:

“The good old Foustalieris song will never fade away”…

• >> Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE”
• << Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS…

Next Chronicle 10. THE… “SUN LANGUAGE” ● Linguistics à la Turca ● İsmail Beşikçi and the Kurds ● Egyptian, Graeco-Byzantine, Arabo-Persian, Turkish Music ● Assimilation Through Religion and Language ● Arabic Music Schools

Ross Daly playing tarhu

Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS…

Chronicle 8. A HYBRID’S HYBRIS…

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 8. ΥΒΡΙΔΙΩΝ ΥΒΡΙΣ…

● “Mosaic” of Andalusia ● Cultural “Crossroads” and “Purity” ● Natural
and Artificial Hybrids ● “Creative” Commercialization ● Paco de Lucía

Michales Loukovikas

THE PARABLE OF FLAMENCO

THE CULTURAL “IMPORT” OF THE ORIENT may have far-reaching effects in a land of the Occident, as we have already seen in Spain, and especially in Andalusia: locals, Iberians and Celts, Phoenicians and Hellenes, Punics and Romans, Berbers and barbarians, Arabs and Moors, Jews and Gypsies (or Roma), along with many others, who had been the fruit of other intermarriages, created a complex and diversified racial and cultural blend, full of vitality and dynamism.

It goes without saying that Andalusia, Iberia as a whole, is not a unique case: there are similar ethno-cultural mosaics in each and every crossroad of space and time, of geography and history. If Iberia is the bridge between Europe and Africa, the Balkans and Asia Minor form an infinitely more important passage connecting the “old” world of Europe with the even “older” and “wiser” Asia. It is as clear as a sunny day, “brighter than the sun”, as the Greeks used to say, that a “passage” between Scandinavia and Greenland, e.g. Iceland, would be of interest to almost no-one – except the Vikings. It is the destiny of those areas where, among other things, the sun is anything but bright!

If Iberia is the bridge between Europe and Africa, the Balkans and
Asia Minor form an infinitely more important passage connecting
the “old” world of Europe with the even “older” and “wiser” Asia.

“The lack of racial purity” in ethno-cultural crossroads, “has had crucially beneficial resonances”, Béla Bartók has already made clear. “A complete separation from foreign influence means stagnation; well-assimilated foreign impulses offer possibilities of enrichment.”

Yet, a positive process ends up as negative, and everyone is in a hurry to secure exclusive rights on common, undivided heritage. Rebetiko e.g. is “authentically Hellenic, free from outside influence”; flamenco, too, is “purely and absolutely Andalusian”. If we had politicians verbalizing, we would pay no attention; but we have musicologists, the “experts”. The flamencologist Donn Pohren, however, as an American, is not obsessed to see everything… pure as the driven snow:

“There are few pure gypsies left in Andalusia, and as for pure
andaluces; just what is a pure andaluz?” (Donn Pohren)

“In their patriotic insistence on regional purity of expression I cannot help but think that these Andalusian musicologists have overlooked one thing: that Andalusia is a fabulous blend of races and cultures, and as such has only relatively recently developed a culture it can call its own. If they would only permit themselves to think of their blood mixture: Phoenician, Greek, Celtic, Roman, Vandal,⁽¹⁾ Visigothic, Moorish, Negro (Negroes were first introduced into Spain as Moorish slaves and soldiers), Jewish, Syrian, Indian, and so forth. And as much as both sides might wish to deny the fact, there has certainly been a strong intermixing of gypsy and andaluz blood in Andalusia. There are few pure gypsies left in Andalusia, and as for pure andaluces; just what is a pure andaluz?” (Lives and Legends of Flamenco, A Biographical History, The Dance Introduction).

• ⁽¹⁾ The Vandals: Andalusia’s “godfathers”, as it was initially called Vandalusia. Etymology is quite strange, indeed: it links – at least etymologically – a highly cultured land to vandalisms…

Artistic creation at these crossroads of the Mediterranean is highly attractive – for the additional reason that during the last centuries, it is strongly influenced by external factors: mainly by developments in northern Europe and across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the components of such hybrids, born through a natural process, are anything but stable: they may vary depending on circumstances. The fragile equilibrium of these heterogeneous elements that imbues them with irresistible charm is sometimes in danger of being upset. Their advantage may well turn into a disadvantage.

Hence, we can see that conditions similar to those which made all these hybrids be born, can now wipe them out. When new political conditions emerge and frontiers are surpassed or redrawn, the situation changes most radically. Such a radical change has been the creation of the European Union, or of the so-called “global village” – as it was equally radical on Iberian scale centuries ago when the Castilians became dominant throughout the peninsula except Portugal, with the expulsion of the Arabs, Moors or Berbers, that brought about the end of Muslim rule in Iberia.

Alhambra, Granada: the Moors’ last stronghold in Andalusia

Flamenco began to take shape in those new circumstances, in the midst of the persecutions the Castilians unleashed against all non-Catholics, spearheaded by the odious “Holy” Inquisition. Therefore, flamenco is only indirectly related to the Andalusian music that flourished during the preceding centuries on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, being restricted later just in the Maghreb: the two arts never coexisted.

This fact, however, does not seem to bother those who, either in search of their cultural identity (a romantic quest), or commercial gain (a cynical quest), try to create new hybrids, either cloned or not, hoping that under the new “globalized” conditions, they will be sustainable and – even more important – profitable. Unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately), viable hybrids are born in real life rather than in a test tube, bottom-up and not top-down, through a long coexistence of ordinary people from different ethnicities, not through some initiatives, noble or not, by individual artists, however distinguished and talented they are.

Viable hybrids are born in real life rather than in a test tube, bottom-up
and not top-down, through a long coexistence of ordinary people from
different ethnicities, not through some initiatives by individual artists…

Reunion: Indian dancer accompanied by flamencos

According to their own genealogical trees, those “romantics” highlight either the Arabic or the Indian elements of flamenco, having related collaborations.⁽²⁾ There are, however, some… “realistically romantic” musicians, suffused with “romantic realism”, whose work, although not commercial, lies on a firm and sound basis. Their aim is not to combine two different – albeit akin – genres with an eye to… sex or marriage (i.e. mating or pairing them), but merely to revive a once live tradition, such as the Andalusian, in Spain. The simplest and most reasonable quest is often the most marginal.

• ⁽²⁾ These collaborations are already bilateral. Anoushka Shankar e.g., playing with flamencos, is on the road that her father, Ravi, inaugurated working together with Yehudi Menuhin or the Beatles – a road which is no more one way to the Orient…

Whatever the case, the conditions favour such ventures: the Arab world is a next-door neighbour, and the revival of Arab-Spanish relations is a very positive perspective – both economically and politically. The Indies, on the other hand, appear not only distant but also exotic. Even if the political motive is absent, such collaborations satisfy the public’s thirst for exoticism. This is one of the reasons that such hybrids proliferate – and are… sold out! The aficionados may turn their backs on such projects and thus the musicians alienate themselves from their best allies, but this hardly seems to bother them. Perhaps because they no longer depend on the aficionados; they depend on the venues and the companies distributing music and organizing concerts. Living under a “market economy”, it is also natural for them to have “market mentality and behaviour”. The corrupting money…

Anoushka Shankar with the flamenco guitarist Melón Jiménez

“Money, not afición,⁽³⁾ is today’s God, overwhelming both purity of expression and the flamenco way of life”,⁽⁴⁾ Pohren comments in the Foreword of his Lives and Legends of Flamenco. And in The Song Introduction, under the heading Creation, he explains:

• ⁽³⁾ Let’s consult Pohren’s Glossary: afición: enthusiasm; aficionado: fan, enthusiast; cantaor: male flamenco singer; cante: singing, song; copla: verse of a cante.

• ⁽⁴⁾ Pohren thinks that flamenco’s “golden era” was the café cantante period – that Spanish “19th century café-bar with flamenco entertainment”. Such an establishment, as a term, corresponded to a café chantant, but essentially it was equivalent to an Oriental café aman. Café chantant: a French café, originally outdoors, especially between the 19th and 20th centuries, where small ensembles performed lighthearted, sometimes risqué, even bawdy, songs, but not particularly political, as opposed to the cabaret tradition. This type of entertainment spread to the Orient, as well, but with Occidental-style music. Café aman: born in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, it received its name from a type of Oriental song performed there, namely amanés, a kind of long improvisational lament (from the exclamation of despair aman).

“In recent years there have been various attempts at creativity within the cante.⁽³⁾ One has been the movement to take flamenco back to its Arabic roots, the result being called Andalusí. Lole and Manuel started the movement when she began singing Moorish-sounding love songs to a bulerías beat. The result was interesting, but not considered flamenco by the serious aficionado.⁽³⁾ Along the same lines Juan el Lebrijano and his guitar accompanist got together with a group of Moorish musicians, including an excellent Moorish singer, Mohamed Chkara, and alternated coplas.⁽³⁾ The effect was much more Moorish than flamenco, exotic and catchy and a good seller of records… But el Lebrijano was tame compared to Enrique Morente, many of whose innovations were so unusual as to be nearly unrecognizable as flamenco. Some of Camarón de la Isla’s innovations carried more flamenco punch – others were based on crowd pleasing pop songs…

Monica Saucedo of Ensemble Español in Bolero

“I have tolerated El Turronero’s renditions of la caña and el polo to the accompaniment of a punk rock group and two sexy go-go girls.(*) I have witnessed La Bernarda de Utrera on stage in Madrid sing only cuplés por bulerías.⁽⁵⁾ This is truly sacrilege, for La Bernarda is capable of excellent, meaningful cante. I have watched such excellent flamenco dancers as El Güito and Merche Esmeralda merge flamenco with modern dancing to Emilio de Diego’s abstract guitar composition (taped) and the equally as abstract singing of a young cantaor.⁽³⁾ The guitar composition was interesting if overly repetitious, but the dancing was simply dull and might be crossed off as a not-so-dazzling experiment. What was really maddening is that Güito and Merche, two of the finest flamenco dancers, were each permitted to dance only one authentic flamenco dance during the entire show. More subtly distressing was a performance of Enrique de Melchor, son of the late, great Melchor de Marchena. Enrique, in an accompanying role, proceeded to prove to the audience that he is without doubt one of flamenco’s top guitar virtuosos; he was simply bubbling over with technique… In the process, of course, he completely overshadowed the singers he accompanied, which used to be a major sin for accompanists. Oddly enough, if the singers realized what was happening (they must have) they didn’t seem to mind, for Enrique is much in demand as an accompanist. Perhaps the singers are getting used to it… Lastly, there are the many groups who have incorporated a variety of instruments into their pseudo-flamenco efforts…”

• ^(e) The cuplé was a popular risqué Spanish theatre song style in the late years of the 19th century. The songs were a feature of the ”género ínfimo” (lowest type), sung by female singers, or men in drag (women’s clothes), and attended mainly by men. But in the beginning of the 20th century, the cuplé, in a more respectable form, became more family-friendly, associated with stars of the Spanish theatre. The cuplé prefigured the copla of the 1930s.

● The copla, or canción andaluza or española or folklórica, or the tonadilla, is a form of popular song that flourished in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s, and is epitomized by songwriters such as Antonio Quintero, Rafael de León and Manuel Quiroga. One of the first singers was Raquel Meller, who initially sang cuplé, which later evolved into the copla, as it is known today. Other famous singers of coplas are Imperio Argentina, Estrellita Castro, Lola Flores, Marifé de Triana, Concha Piquer, Manolo Escobar, Sara Montiel, and Juanito Valderrama. Recent singers of coplas include Rocío Jurado, Isabel Pantoja, and Miguel Poveda; more lately, Pastora Soler, Concha Buika, and even opera singer Plácido Domingo. Certain artists have bent and stretched the genre into directions that have come to be known as Nueva Copla. The lyrics often feature marginalized characters, such as escaped convicts, prostitutes, sailors, gypsies and so on, and have themes based on the “illegitimacy of relationships outside the heterosexual marriage” (i.e. mistreated women, abandoned children, extramarital affairs, and so on).

Exuberance, by Penny Warden

● The definition por bulerías means the song is played in the fast 12-beat rhythm of bulerías.

(*) Let’s consult The Encyclopedia of Flamenco in the first book of Pohren’s trilogy, The Art of Flamenco, to realize how grave El Turronero’s sacrilege was:

“The caña and polo have become known as the most pure and ancient forms of flamenco still in existence… [They] say that they are the first outcroppings of gypsy cante. [Nevertheless], they are much too formal in structure, and greatly lacking in primitive emotion, signifying that they had a more literate background, very likely religious, probably the Gregorian chant…⁽⁶⁾

• ⁽⁶⁾ Or even the Byzantine chant, as Felip Pedrell, Manuel de Falla, and Federico García Lorca said in Chronicle 6, especially about siguiriyas.

“Far more flamenco than theorists like to think had its origins in the
Oriental music of Spain’s neighbors to the South.” (Donn Pohren)

“Two early literary references to the caña cast light on its naming and pre-flamenco origin. The earliest was written by the Englishman Richard Ford in 1830. He wrote that the caña, ‘is actually the guannia, or Arabic song’… Another early writer, Estébanez Calderón, wrote in 1847 much the same information about the caña having derived its name from the ‘guannia’, which signifies ‘song’ in Arabic. He goes on to describe the singing of the caña in much the same way as Ford. What does this signify, if these gentlemen are correct? For one thing, that the name ‘caña’ came from ‘guannia’, and that before becoming flamenco it was an Arabic song. It follows that the polo had much the same birth. And something else, more important: that no doubt far more flamenco than theorists like to think had its origins in the Oriental music of Spain’s neighbors to the South.”

It is in such cases that those who consider a hybrid to be a bastard are justified. And it’s sad because, behind such characterizations and arguments, racist views perhaps underlie. Alas, it is true: Although appealing with an irresistible charm, a hybrid may occasionally end up as ὕβρις-hybris (or hubris)…

Soledad Barrio

Paco de Lucía’s case

SACRILEGE is… a two-way avenue: the ones who commit it, unfortunately, are not only the artists, engaging in various “market creations”, but also the public, who push the artists in the same direction, in order to… get their “dose”! Referring to Paco de Lucía the Great, Pohren explains (Lives and Legends of Flamenco):

“Paco de Lucía, born Francisco Sánchez Gómez in December of 1947, adopted his mother’s name for artistic purposes after beginning as Paco de Algeciras…⁽⁷⁾ His father, a guitarist, had early discovered Paco’s enormous natural talent for the guitar and had determined that Paco was to become flamenco’s greatest guitarist ever. Thus, Paco’s childhood consisted of the guitar and flamenco, flamenco and the guitar… under his father’s tutelage and watchful eye… But the many years of hard work and little play (his lack of childhood, as he puts it) had taken their toll. Paco had done it all too early. He became restless, and began dabbling elsewhere; an early collaboration on a jazz record, a fascination with bossa nova and other musical forms, all of which began creeping into his flamenco, taking him away from tradition and more and more into the world of international music…

• ⁽⁷⁾ Paco died in February of 2014. His birthplace was Algeciras, next to Gibraltar, opposite Tangier.

“With his solo LP that included the rumba Entre Dos Águas the seemingly impossible occurred: Paco passed over the line from flamenco hero to national hero, the first time in history this has happened to a Spanish guitarist, flamenco or otherwise. He was recognized in the streets, hounded for his autograph, lionized by society, played standing-room-only concerts in Madrid’s Royal Theater, was news throughout the media.⁽⁸⁾ Against his wishes he became too big for an accompanying role. In the last festival in which I saw Paco accompany, he was attempting to hold back and accompany like the Paco of old, but the public would not hear of it, drowning out the singer with demands for Paco to do something sensational. Finally, to shut them up, he was forced to open up with an extraordinary chord progression followed by an incredible picado run,⁽⁹⁾ all in countertime. The crowd screamed its approval, the singer was forgotten, Paco was helplessly embarrassed.”

• ⁽⁸⁾ “It got so bad that Paco even became a political issue. On one occasion he innocently made some remark to a reporter that was printed out of context, and Paco was beaten up on the streets of Madrid by a gang of far-right thugs.” (D.P.)

• ⁽⁹⁾ Picado: “a guitar-playing technique; the alternate striking of a string by the index and middle fingers, or, less commonly, by the middle and ring fingers, the index and ring fingers, or, rarest of all, the index and little fingers. When developed well, the picado can be lightening fast.” (D.P.)

• >> Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON
• << Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)

Next Chronicle 9. THE CELEBRATED TRÍCHORDON ● Flamenco and Rebétiko, Guitar and Bouzouki ● Modal and Tempered Music ● Ross Daly ● Tanburs ● Ashiks ● Iován Tsaoús and Foustalieris ● Entertainment and Edutainment

A Café Cantante in Seville (ca 1885-88)

Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)

Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 6. ΙΝΔΟΪΒΗΡΙΚΟ ΤΟΞΟ (Jondo)

● Roma, Bartók, Pohren and Flamenco
● Lorca, Falla, Pedrell and Cante Jondo

Michales Loukovikas

IT’S A PLEASANT SURPRISE whenever you meet the familiar figures of ancient Hellenes emerging from the pages of books about other peoples’ ways of life and expression – such as fado and flamenco – and also playing leading roles in legends that are probably unknown to modern Greeks.

No doubt “casting” those heroic Hellenes in the mythological dramatis personae of the world is not so strange a phenomenon. It is a measure of the splendour of ancient Grecian civilization. But what’s quite unexpected is to find such legends in books dealing with music (see the previous Chronicle).

Indeed, there are so many myths, stories, and tales, about Heracles, Odysseus and, even more, Alexander! And it’s no coincidence at all. It’s them that have defined our common historical background: the westward voyages of Heracles and Odysseus, and the eastward drive of Alexander, outline this wider area, the one that, schematically more or less, I described as the historical space of the Mediterranean.

Alexander’s exploits in the Orient are still widely acclaimed and echo in so many legends about Iskandar. In the western Mediterranean, on the contrary, the whole picture is rather obscure; it lacks clarity. It was quite natural for me to focus my attention there for an extra reason: until recently almost everyone in Greece referred to the Eastern Mediterranean, not just as the “gravitational” centre of this historical space, but as though it constituted an area apart from both the western half of mare nostrum, and also the eastern extension of the Mediterranean space into continental Asia.⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Now everybody’s talking of the one, unified Mediterranean. Well, that is something! Once upon a time – not so long ago – the cliché and catch phrase (overused ad nauseam) was “ἡ καθ’ ἡμᾶς Ἀνατολή”, meaning something like “our own Orient”, and referring to the long gone Hellenistic East. The exact meaning differed widely depending on the person using it. The best description of the phrase I know is Cavafy’s poem In the Year 200 B.C. (see Chronicle 2). The worst ones are found in the speeches of politicians who, in the past, combined it with the so-called “Megale Idea” (“Great Idea”, about an even “Greater Hellas”), which proved to be not a “great idea” at all, and has since become a national nightmare…

The Rock of Gibraltar, the European Pillar of Heracles (1850)

Andalusia, the western end of our historical space, has received
so many cultural elements from its eastern end, India, that
the wide scope of exchange becomes more than evident.

Well, I searched for evidence to the contrary; and I arrived to the conclusion that there’s no better and more convincing example than music – or rather, culture – of Andalusia: the western end of our historical space has received – and indeed repeatedly – so many cultural elements from its eastern end, India, that the wide scope of exchange becomes more than evident.

If the Hellenes have also been involved in this give and take, so much the better. But apart from les enfants terribles de l’antiquité, there are some others, as well, that delineate our historical space; a quite humble people who, without having bequeathed to mankind splendid monuments of art and literature, were able to leave their indelible mark wherever they passed through, despite the relentless persecution they suffered. I’m talking about the Gypsies, the Roma who, in their own way, remind us that civilization is not only sublime art and culture; it is also the primitive but authentic way of human expression – which, we need never to forget, was the starting point of every art form.

So, let’s go and meet them remaining on Iberian soil: from the world of fado in Portugal, we cross into that of flamenco in Andalusia – and what we hear first of all is… a passionate dispute about the origin of flamenco! It’s an old controversy still going on strong between the advocates of an Andalusian birth certificate and those who see the genre as a Romani creation.

Gypsy dance in the gardens of the Alcázar, in front of Charles V Pavilion, by Alfred Dehodencq (1851)

Even prejudiced persons are obliged to recognize that the Gypsies – or at least some of their tribes – have an innate talent for music. They are quick though to assert that the Roma are not distinguished for their creative inspiration, but just for their skill in the execution of music. Although self-contradictory, this view was expressed, in all seriousness, even from authoritative personalities, perhaps with good intentions. It’s true such controversies erupted in countries, like those in Eastern Europe, with a strong gypsy presence, during the formation of the so-called “national schools” in music. But the root of the problem goes far back:

Music was not a lucrative – and hence respectable – occupation for
centuries, when the only professional musicians around were Gypsies.
After the economic conditions had changed and many locals became
musicians, it was almost impossible to “purify” the local musical idioms…

Music as a profession was not a lucrative – and hence respectable – occupation for centuries, when the only professional musicians around were Gypsies. After the economic conditions had changed and many locals had become musicians, it was almost impossible to identify and set apart the indigenous musical elements from gypsy additions – or with a different phraseology, to “purify” local musical idioms. Still, we cannot blame the Gypsies for this “problem” (if, indeed, there was one)…

Béla Bartók

“Contact with foreign material,” according to Béla Bartók, the celebrated Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist, “does not merely imply the exchange of melodies, but – and this is even more important – is also a stimulus for new styles to arise… The current situation of Eastern European folk music can be summarized as follows: As a result of the continuous interaction of several peoples’ folk music, a tremendous wealth of melodies and melody types has emerged… Therefore, the lack of racial purity that has appeared as a final result has had crucially beneficial resonances. A complete separation from foreign influence means stagnation; well-assimilated foreign impulses offer possibilities of enrichment.”

“Contact with foreign material is a stimulus for new styles. Racial purity means stagnation; well-assimilated foreign impulses offer possibilities of enrichment.” (Béla Bartók)

Only racists would reject such important conclusions. But nationalism is also a problem, especially in an area like Eastern Europe as it was already described. Even Bartók was not immune to such “national sentiments”. When he realized that Hungarian folk songs traditionally employed by “classical” composers were not autochthonous, he decided to make a research. So, in 1908, he and Zoltán Kodály, his colleague and compatriot, travelled into the countryside to collect old Magyar folk melodies, which had previously been categorized as “gypsy music”. In contrast, they discovered that these folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, as those of Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia.

Gypsy Girl with a Mandolin,
by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

● First of all, the Magyars themselves are anything but autochthonous: they came from the Urals to what is now Hungary rather recently: in the 10th century CE. The Roma perhaps arrived there somehow later but without plundering the area around, as the Magyars did. (Alas, this is the reason why there’s no Roma state today…) Why, then, should the Magyars care so much about indigenity? What Bartók and Kodály proved after all was that old Magyar folk melodies originated in Asia, and therefore, were not autochthonous either!

● Concerning the other melodic treasures of this area, Bartók said: “As a result of the continuous interaction of several peoples’ folk music, a tremendous wealth of melodies and melody types has emerged.” All of these melodies and melody types have been neither Austro-Hungarian, nor Czecho-Slovakian, nor Serbo-Croatian, nor Romanian or even Romani (since the Gypsies have also participated in this give and take). They belong to all without exception – and this is quite annoying to all nationalists!

● As regards the erudite compositions implied above, the “classic” example is Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which he based on popular tunes and melodies performed by Romani bands of the time. Another famous work (by a non-Magyar composer) is Brahms’ Hungarian Dances – his most profitable, although only three out of the 21 dances (11, 14, and 16) are his own compositions.

In a land of “gypsy violins” famous worldwide, playing mainly heptatonic scales, a heated controversy broke out in 1933 regarding the point at issue. When Bartók intervened, he claimed that:

“If we want to be precise, the term ‘gypsy music’ is incorrect, and what is described as ‘gypsy music’ is in fact nothing but Hungarian music played by Gypsies”…

Alas, this “contact with foreign material” seems rather a “great idea” as long as it excludes Romani contributions! Nota bene, any “pure”, “autochthonous”, melody anywhere in the world would be tantamount to a chimerical “Holy Grail”!

Gypsy school (of violin and other strings in Hungary), by Janos Valentiny (1896)

Gypsies in Andalusia and Flamenco

LET’S RETURN to Andalusia and flamenco to delve into the substance of this point at issue. The cultural substratum here is far richer in finds, with the successive layers of several civilizations. It is obvious how misleading the dilemma “Gypsies or locals?”, “black or white?” is – and if you don’t suffer from colour blindness, you realize very soon that this can be nowhere true.

“In flamenco music”, says Christian Scholze, “there are elements of Arab, Indian, North African, Greek and Jewish influence, and the respective proportions of these are hotly debated by flamencologists. What they do agree on is that the roots of flamenco lie in the suppression of the Gypsies. Wherever Gypsies found refuge and shelter over the centuries are today’s centres of flamenco.”

Voilà! There is Greek influence detected in flamenco! Most important, though seemingly paradoxical: among all those cultures referred to by Scholze, the only one that did not have “bearers” actually present in Andalusia, when flamenco’s formation began during the 16th century, was Hellenic culture. Additionally, at that time, both Greece and the Byzantine Empire were not “on the map”, having already lost their independence.

What I mean to say is that, apart from the local andaluces, there were at that time in Andalusia Arabs and North African Moors; there were also Gypsies (as “bearers” of North Indian culture), and Jews. They were all the heterodox people that the decrees of Ferdinand and Isabella had declared personae non grata in the name of religious “purity”, a kind of racism, in order to consolidate the “new (Catholic Castilian) order”. That was the end result of the Crusades: a sanctified ethnic cleansing!

Death and Apocalypse, by Hieronymus Bosch

The dilemma was clear-cut: convert to Catholicism or get the hell out of here! And “for fear – even terror – of the Jews” and the rest of the heterodox people, the infamous “Holy” Inquisition began a persecution spree “in the name of God”. Most Arabs and Jews (the Gypsies had no… address and it was difficult to track them down) were forced out of their homes, finding refuge mainly in Morocco and hoping that they would soon return – a hope shared by all refugees such as those from Asia Minor. Others (mainly Jews, not Moors who found themselves in a familiar environment in the Maghreb) chose to emigrate and ended up in the lands that until recently were Byzantine, but had already passed under the control of the Ottomans – inter alia, in Thessalonica.

All those who stayed without changing their religion, or some others, who were judged as insincere in their “repentance”, went underground, lived together and closed ranks out of necessity, despite all their differences, in order to confront the common enemy. Very soon this unlikely mixture of people was “enriched” with “new blood”: the Andalusians, who passed in turn to the other side due to various problems with the new authorities. The conquest of America, you see, started then, and the necessary “manpower” was recruited mainly in Andalusia.

Flamenco was born in such circumstances from these fugitives. But where were the Greeks? And how did they manage – being absent and from afar – to exert their influence? There can be only one answer: thanks to the splendour of their civilization – even though it was already a relic of the past.

El jaleo, by John Singer Sargent (1882)

An eristic could possibly dismiss scornfully Christian Scholze. His view, however, is not new-fangled. It is shared by most musicologists who say more or less the same. The editors of the Classic CD magazine e.g., publishing an interview with the guitarist Paco Peña, epitomized the origins of flamenco as follows:

“A synthesis of several styles, the music of the Gypsies at the base of the Iberian Peninsula comes from Moorish, Byzantine and Jewish sounds, and at a certain point of its evolution it acquired the name flamenco.” (These editors forgot a most important parameter: India).

If that is not enough for you, here’s the American flamencologist and guitarist Donn E. Pohren, author of a trilogy on flamenco (The Art of Flamenco, Lives and Legends of Flamenco, A Way of Life) translated into many languages, and teacher of the Andalusians, in Jerez de la Frontera’s Cátedra de Flamencología – without “lecturing” at all, as he has experienced flamenco’s way of life side by side with Gypsy and local performers of this music before it became fashionable:

“Contrary to a widespread belief, the Spanish gypsies were not the sole creators of the mysterious art called flamenco. Rather, it is generally agreed that flamenco is a mixture of the music of the many cultures that have played important roles, directly or indirectly, throughout the centuries in Andalusia, the most important of these being the Muslim, Jewish, Indo-Pakistani and Byzantine.”

It’s the very first paragraph in the main part of his book dealing with The Art of Flamenco when he sets out to examine it. This chapter, Origin and Background, ends up with the etymology of flamenco: “Where did the term flamenco come from?”, Pohren wonders. “Again, no one knows, but theories abound”… We have already met the fugitives who probably created flamenco. Dismissing several theories about the origin of the word, rather picturesque (e.g. Flemish, flamingo, flame, etc),⁽²⁾ Pohren presents the most credible:

• ⁽²⁾ Flemish, due to the Spanish Jews who found refuge in Flanders; flamingo, because of the supposed similarities in posture between the bird and a flamenco bailaor(!); and flame, as a graphic metaphor of flamenco’s essence.

“Possibly the most likely theory states that the word ‘flamenco’ is a mispronunciation of the Arabic words ‘felag’ and ‘mengu’ (felagmengu), which means ‘fugitive peasant’. It is likely that this term was borrowed from the Arabs (Arabic was a common language in Andalusia at that time) and applied to all the persecuted people who fled to the mountains. Through usage in Spanish ‘felagmengu’ was transformed into ‘flamenco’, until eventually the term flamenco was adopted by the fugitives themselves and in turn applied to their music.”

Cante jondo (Lorca, Falla, Pedrell)

If all the above are again not enough for you, I need to resort to… indisputable sages – meaning in other words to invoke the views of acclaimed Spaniards who surely know what they’re talking about. Well, how about Federico García Lorca, his friend and tutor, Manuel de Falla, or his mentor’s mentor, Felip(e) Pedrell?⁽³⁾

• ⁽³⁾ The composer, guitarist and musicologist Felip Pedrell has been the instructor of almost every outstanding composer of Spain’s “National School”: not only Manuel de Falla, but also Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina.

García Lorca used the title Poema del Cante Jondo for a collection of poems in 1921. The next year he helped Falla in the organization of the Concurso de Cante Jondo, held in Granada on 13 and 14 of June 1922, with a memorable series of performances held at the Alhambra. Cante jondo or grande (deep, great song) is the most breathtaking of the flamenco forms, the most authentic or pure and, in the interwar period, the most marginalized. That’s why the two friends tried to support it. The other two forms – cante (inter)medio and chico (intermediate and small) – were considered as rather vulgarized forms, a point of view perhaps corresponding to the realities of the interwar period; Lorca will soon present his own well-grounded explanation.

Federico García Lorca, by Emily Tarleton

To promote the Concurso, Falla wrote the essay El cante jondo (canto primitivo andaluz), in which he presented the results of his own research indicating that the primary foreign influences contributing to the origins of jondo were three: Byzantine ecclesiastical music coming from the eastern Mediterranean; Moorish music from North Africa and Arabia; and especially that distinct music of India and its rhythms, brought by gitanos, who began arriving in Spain more than five hundred years ago. Lorca on his part gave a lecture on February 19, 1922. Citing Falla, he also put forward these three historical events that shaped jondo:

• “a) the Spanish Church’s adoption of [Byzantine] liturgical chant;
• “b) the Saracen invasion; and
• “c) the arrival in Spain of numerous bands of Gypsies.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ Lorca’s English texts on Cante jondo and Duende are based on A. S. Kline’s translations.

“This mysterious migrant folk”, Lorca went on, “arriving in Andalusia, united ancient indigenous elements to what they themselves had brought, and gave cante jondo its definitive form. That is shown by the qualifying term ‘gitana’ which the siguiriya retains. This is not to say, of course, that cante jondo is purely gypsy, since Gypsies exist throughout Europe and elsewhere in our peninsula, while these songs are only nurtured in Andalusia. It is a cante purely andaluz, the seeds of which existed in this region before the Gypsies arrived.”

Except local elements, there are Graeco-Byzantine, Arabo-Moorish,
Indo-Romani, perhaps even Jewish influences detected in flamenco
(García Lorca, Falla, Pedrell, Pohren, Scholze, et al.)

Flamenco guitar

In Falla’s conclusions, as well as in Lorca’s lecture, we find the same contributing factors in the formation of flamenco; with only one exception: Jewish influence is conspicuously absent… Regarding the Romani contribution, Lorca evaluated it in its proper dimensions, avoiding to speak neither in favour of an Andalusian parthenogenesis – for the Gypsies “gave cante jondo its definitive form” – nor of a Romani birth: despite the many similarities he cited among key elements of cante jondo and some Indian songs, mostly love songs (he will deal about that later, as well), Lorca persistently insisted that “jondo is a cante purely andaluz”.

Indeed, flamenco was impossible to be born in India; but, without the Roma, not even in Andalusia; just like rebetiko: it was impossible to be born in Asia Minor; but, without the Anatolian refugees, not even in Greece; or just like the blues: it was impossible to be born in Africa; but, without the black slaves, not even in America. If this is true about the blues, an almost exclusively black music, you can imagine how much more relevant it is in the cases of flamenco and rebétiko where two locals became leading figures: Paco de Lucía and Basiles Tsitsanes.

Flamenco was impossible to be born in India; without the Roma not
even in Andalusia. Rebetiko was impossible to be born in Asia Minor;
without the Anatolians not even in Greece. Blues was impossible
to be born in Africa; without the blacks not even in America.

Rebet, etching by Tassos

“Every cloud has a silver lining”: the truth of the apophthegm is revealed in these diamonds of musical culture. We can now enjoy their sparkling beauty thanks to the Roma, the Anatolians and the black Africans – those that played the role of a catalyst in processing and refinement of these diamonds of the Orphean art – who, nevertheless, suffered tremendously. Of course, some people had to play the role of the villains. For the Gypsies, among others, the villain was Timur. For the Anatolians, it was Kemal. For the blacks? Here we lose count…

Lorca also analyzed the difference between cante jondo and flamenco in general – “an essential distinction based on antiquity, structure and spirit”:

“The essential difference is that the origin of cante jondo must be sought in the primitive musical systems of India, that is, in the first manifestations of song… It is cante imbued with the mysterious colour of primordial ages; flamenco is relatively modern and it cannot be said to acquire its definitive form until the 18th century…

“Spiritual colour versus local colour: that is the profound difference. Cante jondo is, then, the rarest specimen of primitive song, the oldest in Europe, bearing in its notes the naked shiver of emotion of the first oriental races. Manuel de Falla affirms that the Gypsy siguiriya is the only genre on our continent that preserves in all its purity the primary qualities of the primitive songs of the oriental peoples.”

Let’s have a closer look at this siguiriya gitana, an appropriate song to express sorrow, deep pain, despair. According to Falla, it is the archetype of cante jondo, as Lorca defined it in another lecture entitled Architecture of Cante Jondo (1931). Whether the siguiriya is “gitana” or “purely andaluz” we better leave it to the Spaniards. For us outsiders, far more interesting is the common position of the three musicians mentioned above, namely Pedrell, Falla, and Lorca (he was also a musician, let’s not forget). I quote from his lecture of 1922:

Felip Pedrell

“The great master Felipe Pedrell, one of the first Spaniards to treat questions of folklore scientifically, writes, in his magnificent Cancionero popular español:

“‘Musical orientalism survives in various popular songs and is deeply rooted in our nation through the influence of ancient Byzantine civilization on the ritual used in the Spanish Church, from the conversion of our country to Christianity until the 11th century when the Roman liturgy [i.e. Gregorian chant] can be said to have been fully introduced.’⁽⁵⁾

• ⁽⁵⁾ So, we can also speak of siguiriya griega, or bizantina, not only of indiana, gitana or andaluza!

“Falla adds to this statement of his old master, specifying the elements of Byzantine liturgical chant revealed in siguiriya, which are: the tonal modes of primitive systems (not be confused with those known as Greek modes), the enharmony inherent in those modes, and the lack of metric rhythm in the melodic line.

“‘These same properties characterize certain Andalusian songs which appeared long after the Spanish Church’s adoption of Byzantine liturgical music, songs which have a close affinity with the music which in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia is still called… «the music of the Moors of Granada».’ [The siguiriya gitana has] ‘specific forms and characteristics distinct from its relationship to sacred chant and the music of the Moors of Granada’.”

Falla, concludes Lorca, “has found an extraordinary agglutinative Gypsy element… of Indic origin.”

“Chanting is the earliest form of language”. (Falla, García Lorca)

Nevertheless, the findings of this triad (Pedrell, Falla and Lorca) go far beyond the relatively recent past, to prehistoric times. Lorca explains:

Manuel de Falla: “El… músico brujo”

“The essential similarities that Manuel de Falla notes between cante jondo and certain songs of India are:

“‘Enharmonics, as in intermediate modulation; a restricted melodic line, rarely exceeding the compass of a sixth; and the reiterative almost obsessive use of a single note, a process proper to certain forms of incantation, including recitations which might be termed prehistoric, and have led many to suppose that chanting is the earliest form of language.’⁽⁶⁾

• ⁽⁶⁾ Chanting: a short, simple series of syllables or words sung on or intoned to the same note or a limited range of notes; a monotonous rhythmic call; a primitive “recitative”, vocalism; prosody (“melos of speech”, according to Aristoxenus), i.e. the “melody” produced during ancient Hellenic speech (see Chronicle 12, footnote 7, and Chronicle 14, Music as the Mother of Speech).

“In this manner cante jondo, especially siguiriya, creates the impression of sung prose, destroying all sense of rhythmic metre, although in fact its literary texts are assonant tercets and quatrains.”

Going way back into history, we can parallel this incantation-recitation with the so-called paracatalogē (παρακαταλογή) of ancient Hellenic tragedy, “a kind of melodramatic recitation of tragic and pathetic parts”, as Giorgos Iohannou says, “something intermediate between the catalogē, i.e. the usual recitation of chants, and the proper song, the ode.” Note that Iohannou defines as a “chant” even the catalogē. Let us not forget that the ancient drama was all in verse. That is why the modern Grecian word for song, tragoudi (τραγούδι), comes from tragedy, while out of paracatalogē the word paralogē (παραλογή, ballad) was coined. Besides, the above quotation comes from an Iohannou’s collection of ballads.

The paracatalogē was accompanied – usually by aulos; in this sense it differed from the catalogē; as a melodramatic recitation, it was not a sung recitative; it also differed from the ode, because there was no melos (melody), other than a certain rhythmic emphasis, and the tonal or pitch accent of the ancient Hellenic language, which was musical, not dynamic like modern Greek. The tragic and pathetic effect was achieved by inserting paracatalogē within sung parts (ἐν ταῖς ᾠδαῖς). This technique enhanced the dramatic appeal of the text.

In Hellenic tragedy, “paracatalogē, a kind of melodramatic recitation
of tragic and pathetic parts, was something intermediate between the catalogē, the usual recitation of chants, and the proper song, the ode.” (Giorgos Iohannou)

• >> Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende)
• << Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Next Chronicle 7. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Duende) ● Lorca and Duende ● Pohren and Flamenco: Dance and Guitar ● Cithara and Pandura

Roman sarcophagus with scenes of Bacchus depicting various ancient instruments:
tympanum, aulos and cymbala (210-220 CE)

Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

Chronicle 5. IBERIA’S ODYSSEY

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 5. ΙΒΗΡΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ

● Hellenes in Portugal ● Fado and Fate ● Odysseus
and Calypso in Lisbon; Their Son in Santarém
● Creto-Iberian Ties: Bull Worship and Bullfight

“Mosaic of a Phoenician trading ship” was the caption. Almost every word is a lie: the ship is neither Phoenician, nor trading; we also see in BIG, Hellenic letters: ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙΑ (ODYSSEY)… Inopportune comments of someone unable to read Greek!

Michales Loukovikas

“IN REMOTE TIMES, even prior to the 6th century BC, the Greeks colonised what is now Portuguese territory, exploiting mines, founding and fortifying towns, especially along the coast and in the basins of the larger rivers.”

Fado has been proclaimed as Intangible Cultural Heritage. Rebetiko, too: better late than never!

This historical flashback is Augusto Mascarenhas Barreto’s starting point in his bilingual (in Portuguese and English) book on Fado / Origens Líricas e Motivação Poética (Lyrical Origins and Poetic Motivation). It is the first chapter (Identity and Origins), following the preliminaries about fado: Portugal’s urban folk song was born in two of its oldest cities, Lisbon and Coimbra (with a distinct form in each); it is Provençal in origin, with Arabic melodic and poetic influence; it is a way of life (like rebetiko, flamenco, blues, tango, or any other authentic folk mode of expression, however “humble”, or even “marginal”, it is considered in origin); it’s dominated by nostalgia, by saudade, a keyword in fado coming from the Arabs, as well, and found corrupt elsewhere: it is Cape Verde’s sodade characterizing its nostalgic song, morna.

The Hellenes, says the Portuguese author, “mingled with the aboriginal inhabitants and the Iberians, who inherited from them certain ethnic and cultural characteristics. It is presumed that the Iberians were a people originating in the East of Europe. Iberus was the ancient name of the River Ebro, in Spain.”

Such homonymous toponyms are quite strange. It’s not only the Ἕβρος (Hebrus or… Maritsa) in Thrace, the river dividing Greece and Turkey; it is also Caucasian Iberia, west of Caucasian… Albania (a part of Azerbaijan), i.e. Caucasian Georgia, in the hinterland of Medea’s homeland, the ancient Colchis, where Jason sailed with the Argonauts for the Golden Fleece. Logic says the Iberians’ cradle should have been there – but most scholars, on the contrary, show to the direction of North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean.

North of the Greater Armenia, between the Black and Caspian Seas:
Colchis, Iberia and Albania. The Amazons were further north.

Among the cultural characteristics the Greeks bequeathed to Iberia (the Iberian Peninsula), Mascarenhas Barreto singles out the Moerae:

“The Hellenic Moira is to be found in the spirit of Fado… The word fado, derived from the Latin fatum, means fate, destiny – what has been foretold by the Oracle and which nothing can alter… Later, Moira became allied to Arab Fatalism.”

The foreigners, you see, attribute to the Hellenes cultural characteristics that the latter claim they are due to the 400-year-long Ottoman yoke…

Odysseus and Calypso in Odyssey-Lisbon

Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, Attic black
figured amphora (ca 7th century BCE)

MUCH MORE IMPRESSIVE is what Portuguese mythology says about the Iberian adventures of that “man of many ways”, “man for wisdom”, “of many wiles”, “of many turns”, “of twists and turns”, “of much resource”, the “skilled”, “ingenious” and “very resourceful” man,⁽¹⁾ Odysseus. He was the one who founded and walled Lisbon (see Chronicle 21: Iberian “El Dorado”):

• ⁽¹⁾ The… “polytropic” versions of Homer’s word “πολύτροπος” (polytropos) rendered into English by Richmond Lattimore, George Chapman, Alexander Pope, Allen Mandelbaum, Martin Hammond, Albert Cook, Robert Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Samuel Butler, Emil V. and D.C.H. Rieu.

“Legend”, says Barreto, “attributes the building of the ancient walls of the city [Lisbon] to the great Greek hero of antiquity, Ulysses, king of Ithaca and conqueror of Troy, who is supposed to have given the place the name of Ulissea – whence the word Ulissipo.⁽²⁾ Anyway, what is certain is that Lisbon was inhabited by the Phoenicians about 600 BC, and they named it Alis Ubbo, meaning ‘Calm Bay’. It was certainly visited by Greeks and Carthaginians, who established trade relations with the primitive peoples inhabiting the country. These tribes, who had mingled with the Celts and the Iberians, formed an ethnic sub-group: the Celtiberians.”

• ⁽²⁾ Ulissea, that is, Odyssey, from the Latin version of the hero’s name, Ulysses or Ulisses, hence Ulissipolis (Odysseupolis) > Ulissipo(na) or Olisipo(na).

“Legend attributes the building of the ancient walls of Lisbon to
the great Greek hero of antiquity, Ulysses”, i.e. Odysseus (Barretο)

The “Snake God” found in Tavira – the only Portuguese town, next to Huelva, where the Phoenicians actually settled.

● Ulysses’ Ulissipo is a “legend”, according to Barreto, but the Phoenicians’ Alis Ubbo is a “certainty”: it is the “classic” historical… science fiction. How can he really combine this conclusion with his starting point that “in remote times, even prior to the 6th century BC, the Greeks colonised what is now Portuguese territory”? Well, “what is certain is that”… if we are based on facts, neither the Hellenes, nor the Phoenicians or also the Punics ever settled in Portugal. This land could not compare with Andalusia that magnetized all the above due to its mineral wealth and strategic importance. The only area of Portuguese interest that drew their attention was the also mineral-rich Galicia. (By the way, I mean Galicia of Iberia and not that of Eastern Europe). Generally, Alis (Allis) Ubbo (Ubo) is also interpreted as “Safe” (or “Pleasant”, “Enchanting”, “Serene”, “Delightful”) “Harbour” (or “Port”, “Haven”, “Gulf”, “Cove”, “Shore”, “Inlet”): all versions describe a good anchorage and, therefore, all have something to do with the sea. In an article about the presence of Mycenaeans in Sardinia, Demetris Michalópoulos wrote inter alia:

“In ancient times, Cagliari, the current capital of Sardinia, was called Caralis. In all likelihood, the toponym derives from the Semitic word car, which means ‘white rock’”.

We assume that Caralis meant Bay (or Harbour, etc.) with a white rock, a toponym that was probably given by the omnipresent Phoenicians. Can we associate the Semitic alis with the Indo-European root sal-, e.g. the English salt, and Grecian ἅλς (hals), meaning both salt and sea? If so, Indo-European and Semitic languages should have had some common ground (at least on matters shared in common, such as navigation), with loan words probably derived from Mediterranean tongues, e.g. the Minoan Cretan.

“During the Punic Wars – between Rome and Carthage – the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by the Romans and, in 205 BC the town – then called Olissipo – was raised to the category of a Roman municipium. In 100 AD it was named Felicitas Julia, in honour of Julius Caesar, and the name was a promise of good fortune. In the year 376, the Visigoths invaded the peninsula. In 404 the territory was still occupied by Romans and barbarians, but in 522, after the departure of the Romans, a single Visigoth kingdom was formed, and the town came to be known as Olissipona. In 711 the Arabs invaded the peninsula from North Africa and occupied the town, to which they gave the name Lissibona… In 1147 Lisbon was re-conquered by Dom Afonso Henriques.”

An English frigate in choppy waters in the Tagus passing the Belém Tower,
by John Thomas Serres (1823)

That’s how we ended up to Lisboa, the current capital of Portugal, adds Barreto. But this is not the end of his story. There’s more to it:

“Santarém is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC
by Abidis, of Greek origin,” son of Ulysses and Calypso. (Barretο)

“Santarém, [which] stands looking over the River Tagus… is believed to have been founded in the 10th century BC by Abidis [or Habis],⁽³⁾ of Greek origin, who gave it the name of Esca-Abidis. This prince, grandson of Gregoris [Gárgoris], king of the Iberian Peninsula, is also said to have founded towns… in Spain. According to legend, he was the son of Ulysses. Betraying the trust of Gregoris after having been given Alis-Ubbo (Lisbon), Ulysses secretly espoused Calypso, daughter of the peninsular king, who rushed with his army on Lisbon. Ulysses fled by sea, abandoning his spouse”…

• ⁽³⁾ Or Habido, Abido, Abidas, Αbidis, Gabis, Gabid: his name’s versions in various variations of the legend.

Odysseus and Calypso (with… Habis?), by Gerard de Lairesse

Consequently, Calypso was not a nymph on the Isle of Ogygia, as Homer says. Deviating from the greatest of the rhapsodes, the Lusitanians adopted Calypso as a princess of Iberia and daughter of Gregoris/Gárgoris, not of Atlas. Note that we remain in the same places that Heracles had earlier toured for the golden apples of the Hesperides and Geryon’s cattle. It is assumed that Ogygia must have been nearby the Pillars of Heracles, since Odysseus had to travel for 18 days in an easterly direction to reach Scheria, the Phaeacian Island, which many identify with Corfu. There’s a chance that Ogygia was one of the Pillars, today’s Spanish Ceuta on Moroccan soil, opposite the other Pillar, the Rock of Gibraltar. Although it is not an island now, it may have been one in the days of Homer.

According to Hesiod, the conqueror of Troy – and also of numerous… women (for he was so “skilled”, “ingenious” and “resourceful”) – had in total 16 sons and a daughter from six women. But in his long list, he includes no Abidis, Habis, or what. Odysseus had three sons from Penelope, one from the daughter of Thoas the Aetolian, eight sons and a daughter from Circe, two sons from Calypso, one from Callidice, the queen of Thesprotia, whom he later married, and another from Euippe, daughter of Tyrimmas, king of Dodona in Epirus. Note that, if we accept Hesiod’s genealogy of Odysseus, with nine children from Circe and two from Calypso, we must reverse the time he lived beside these two nymphs, according to Homer: one year with Circe and seven with Calypso.

Circe, by Charles Gumery

With such a “proliferation”, of course, Odysseus was in danger of falling by the hand of some… close relative – something that did happen in the sequel of the Odyssey, in the Telegony, or Thesprotis, the Epic Cycle’s final episode, attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene or Cinaethon of Sparta. Circe’s son, Telegonus, so the story goes, while searching for his father, landed on Ithaca where – according to the custom of the era – started plundering and slaughtering, among others, also his genitor. Overwhelmed with remorse, as he realized he became a patricide, he collected Odysseus’ body and, accompanied by his half-brother, Telemachus, and Penelope, returned to the island of his mother, who turned them immortal. This “saga” ends merrily there with a happy end worthy of… a Greek film of the ’60s: with the marriages of Circe with Telemachus and Penelope with Telegonus! Finally, only poor Odysseus was enveloped by murky darkness!

A similar end awaits our hero in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The father of Italian poetry presents a traditional variation of the Homeric version, in which Odysseus himself says that he never returned to Ithaca. From Circe’s island, Aea, Aeaea, or Aeaeë,⁽⁴⁾ he passed through the Pillars of Heracles into the Atlantic, crossed the Equator, sailing in the southern hemisphere for five months, until he reached a big mountain. Then a tornado had the ship spin three times and sink. They all drowned there. But where? In the “underworld”, or in the “new world”, in America? Logic, based on today’s geographical knowledge, makes us draw wrong conclusions. Moreover, the narrative takes place in Dante’s Inferno (see also Chronicle 15. Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!, Homer’s Odyssey is a poetic periplus).

• ⁽⁴⁾ It’s another homonymous toponym with the capital of Colchis, Aea (today’s Kutaisi). But there’s an explanation now: Circe was the sister of Aeëtes, the king of Colchis, and aunt of Medea, with whom she shared magic powers – and also temperament: they say that Circe was exiled to the solitary island of Aeaea by her subjects and father because she had killed her husband…

The Lusitanians, however, didn’t bother to… “set out for Ithaca” with Cavafy, nor cared about Odysseus, after he escaped, leaving Calypso behind. Naturally, they were more concerned about what happened “at home”; hence they paid much more attention to Abidis/Habis:

Olissipo-Lisboa with the port on the Tagus (16th century)

“When Abidis was born,” says Barreto, “Gregoris ordered him to be thrown in a cave to be devoured by wild beasts. In answer, however, to the entreaties of his daughter, he consented that the child should be delivered to Fate, according to primitive custom, and the boy was put in a basket and taken away by the current of the river.⁽⁵⁾ A hind adopted him and when the child was later found in a wild state by some huntsmen, his mother recognised him by a mark. Gregoris forgot his former anger and gave him schooling, so that he could succeed him in the government of the peninsula. The name Esca-Abidis (Escalabis) in Greek means ‘food of Abidis’,⁽⁶⁾ in memory of the place where he was reared by the hind.

• ⁽⁵⁾ Quite biblical the image, recalling “Moses baby” on the waters of the Nile… Conclusion: there’s no originality in the Judaic mythology, although it has since acquired “dogmatic authority”… (See also Chronicles 18, footnote 2, and 21, footnote 4).

Roman mosaic in Pedrosa de la Vega (Castile and León). The only known evidence of transparency.

• ⁽⁶⁾ Ἐσχάρα (eschara): hearth, fire-place (like ἑστία); pan of coals, brazier; (the camp’s) watch-fires; sacrificial hearth; fire-stick.

Ἑστία (hestia): hearth of a house; the house itself, home; household, family; altar; the hearth goddess Hestia, or Vesta in Latin. Hestiatórion is the Greek word for restaurant.

“As regards history, the Romans rebuilt the town in 153 AD and called it Scalabis-castrum. Julius Caesar raised it to the status of a capital – one of the four in Lusitania… In the year 500 when the Visigoths came to Lusitania, the barbarians and Lusitanians formed in that region a single people. In 632 the town of Tomar was the scene of the martyrdom of Irene… a nun. Her body, thrown into the river, was carried down as far as Scalabis… Nineteen years later, King Recceswinth, who was Catholic,⁽⁷⁾ changed the name of Scalabis to Santa Irene. When… the Arabs occupied the town (715), they called it Chantireyn” – and that’s how we ended up to Santarém.

• ⁽⁷⁾ Force of habit: “Catholic” is what Barreto wrote, instead of “Christian”, as he should, because the Schism was still to come…

Creto-Iberian ties due to Mediterranean Minoan Thalassocracy.
A common cultural characteristic was bull worship and bullfight.

GRAECO-IBERIAN TIES, clearly suggested by Portuguese mythology, date back to much earlier times than the Trojan War, to the pre-Hellenic era of Minoan Thalassocracy in the Mediterranean: they were Creto-Iberian. A common cultural characteristic of the Cretans and the peoples of Iberia was bull worship and bullfight, or rather bull-leaping (taurocathapsia; see Chronicle 17. Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy, conclusion).

In his Memoriae Historicae, Strabo, a geographer-historian of Roman times, who was born in Amaseia of Pontus (64-63 BCE) and died probably in Rome (24 CE), referred to the Lusitanian equestrian bullfight (“… the peoples of the coastline, who are fond of meeting, on horseback, the fierce Hispanian bulls”, he wrote).⁽⁸⁾

Reconstruction of a relief fresco of a bull by Arthur Evans
at the northern Propylaea of Knossos

• ⁽⁸⁾ The ancestor of the Iberian bull, aurochs, was described by Julius Caesar as “somewhat smaller than an elephant, swift and powerful; attacks both men and animals.” Charlemagne hunted a similar animal, known as bubalo. It is likely that the savage creature killed by St. George was an aurochs, and not a dragon, as the plastic artists present him. The aurochs (aur = wild + ochs = ox), or urus, is the bos primogenius that is now extinct. It survived until 1627 in a forest of Poland.

Apart from bullfighting on horseback, there was also the pega – from the verb pegar, which means catch, seize… the bull by the horns! In one kind of pegas, the so-called forcado was not only completely unarmed, but had nothing to fool the bull (e.g. cape). He should withstand the initial impact (the tremendous weight of the attacking animal plus speed), and the subsequent shaking of his head so as to get rid of an unwelcome rider on his neck…

There were more forcados, usually eight, as assistants in the pega to master the bull. It is the picture we have from the Minoan bull-leaping in an extant fresco of Taurocathapsia dating back to the 15th century BCE. Isn’t it impressive? Even more so if we take into account that these Cretan “forcados” included women!

Taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), Minoan fresco

Arriving at the other side of the Mediterranean, we can find the earliest known description of such a bullfight in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the legendary hero of Mesopotamia, whose name became associated with his futile struggle to obtain immortality. The epic, dating back to c. 2100 BCE, describes how the hero and his companion, Enkidu, kill the Celestial Bull that the goddess Ishtar has sent to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances:

“Enkidu seizes the celestial bull by the horns”, while Gilgamesh “approaches it slowly and jumps on its back; then grabs it by the tail”…

“The pegas”, Barreto concludes, “probably originated in the Neolithic ritual hunts. We may wonder whether the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula learnt this from the Cretans of the 3rd millennium BC, or if they themselves may have been the teachers, since the bulls were taken from their natural habitat in the peninsula to the island of Crete.”

But still, if you talk about so extensive exchange going on five millennia ago – whether it is bull-leaping, or even bull shipments from Iberia to Crete – how is it possible to be concerned about trivial “problems”, as to who were the initiators of this practice?

● Bull-leaping was a Minoan ritual connected with bull worship, where the bull was not killed, contrary to bullfight. When it passed to the Mycenaeans, it was called in Greek ταυροκαθάψια; from ταῦρος (“bull”) and κάθαψις, a rare noun composed of the words κατά- (“across”) and ἅπτομαι (“touch, reach”); thus, literally, “touching of the bull”. Representations (frescoes, statuettes, seals, etc.) of the ritual, outside Crete or Hellas, have been found in Asia Minor (Smyrna, Hattusa), Canaan, Egypt, Bactria, and the Indus Valley.

Juanito Apinani‘s speed and bravery in the bullring of Madrid,
from the etchings “La Tauromaquia” by Francisco Goya (1815-16)

● Non-violent taurocathapsia (bull-leaping), practiced in Spain, were called recortes. The recortadores competed at dodging and leaping over bulls without a cape or sword. Some used a long pole to literally pole-vault over the charging animal, which was not restrained by any guiding rope or similar safety device. The recortes were common in the 19th century. Etchings by painter Francisco Goya depict these events.

● In neighbouring Portugal, the bullfight’s second stage, called pega (“holding”), was the one referred to by Barreto. The so-called forcados challenged the animal directly without protection or weapon of defense. The front man provoked the bull into a charge to perform a pega de cara (face grab), secured its head and was aided by his fellows who surrounded and subdued the animal. The bull was not killed in the ring, in the audience’s sight, but by a butcher. After an exceptional performance, some bulls were healed, released to pasture until their end days and used for breeding.

● A “safer” style of this ritual, practiced in French Gascony, used young cows instead of bulls, which were furthermore guided by long ropes attached to their horns, so that they ran directly towards the sauteurs (“leapers”) and écarteurs (“dodgers”), and were restrained from trampling or goring them should they miss a trick.

● In faraway South India, in Tamil Nadu, there was a related ritual, the jallikattu, as part of the harvest celebration. The participants tried to leap onto a bull, reaching for the money packets tied to its horns as a prize. The event has been depicted in rock art dated at least to the 3rd century BCE.

• >> Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo)
• << Chronicle 4. ON DEMOCRACY

Next Chronicle 6. INDO-IBERIAN ARC (Jondo) ● Roma, Bartók, Pohren and Flamenco ● Lorca, Falla, Pedrell and Cante Jondo

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

ii) INTERLUDE

Crossing the Atlantic

 

Chronicle 15. SAILING TO RIO DE JANEIRO!

● Periplus: (Luso-Hellenic Wanderings) ● An Atlantic Odyssey

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΠΛΩΡΗ ΓΙΑ RIO DE JANEIRO!
/PORTUGUÊS/ NAVEGANDO PARA O RIO DE JANEIRO!

Afro-Brazilian Museum

ΙΙΙ Festival

SO DISTANT
SO NEAR

Music and Poetry in the
Portuguese Language

Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro, May 2013

Tão Longe Tão Perto Organized in collaboration with the ensemble Música Surda: Andréia Pedroso, Antônio Jardim, Artur Gouvêa and Eduardo Gatto.

Michales Loukovikas

WHEN AMÉLIA MUGE AND I BEGAN researching and exchanging recorded material from our traditions, the Lusitanic–Portuguese and the Hellenic–Greek, several people raised ironically their brows:

“Oh, they are loucos”, they thought – some even said. “Portugal and Greece are so far apart. Impossible to find common ground”…⁽¹⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Imagine what people with “raised brows”, just like them, will say now that we are talking about a triangle (not that of… Bermuda): Portugal, Brazil and Greece. Well, Portugal and Brazil, OK, the relation is too obvious: former metropolis and colony; but what about Greece?(!)

● This text was presented during the festival Tão longe, tão perto, in Rio de Janeiro.

I confess that our collaborative results astonished even us! Or even me, I should add, that I have been researching this field for years, arriving to the conclusion that civilization, culture, is the result of give and take, of exchange. I have also shown during my radio program (Mediterranean periplus, 9.58 fm, ERT3) that lands located so far apart, like, say, India and Iberia, have been interconnected for thousands of years, since ancient times…⁽²⁾

• ⁽²⁾ “Ancient” for the Hellenes means BCE (before the Common Era), or BC (before Christ), if you like.

Flamenco (by Hyatt Moore): an exciting art
interconnecting Iberia and India

All these ideas were further reinforced when Amélia and I started working on Periplus.⁽³⁾ For sure, there are some “dark spots” still now; questions that remain unanswered. A big question for me e.g. is: how can Amélia, a Portuguese born in Mozambique, compose in an ancient style? You see, all three themes of ancient Grecian music and poetry we have in Periplus (Seikilos’ Epitaph, the First Delphic Hymn to Apollo, probably by Athenaeus, and Mesomedes’ Hymn to Nemesis) were included after certain compositions of hers reminded me of these ancient Hellenic songs. It’s very strange, indeed.

• ⁽³⁾ It’s not so obvious but there is something like a “periplus” in different human endeavours, too. Music was born together with speech. In an advanced stage, in ancient Hellas, music was either instrumental or song. Poetry was inconceivable without music in classical Greece. The two arts got… divorce later, in the 4th century BCE. However, either before or after, a “periplus” was (and still is) needed to combine sounds with words, and express the meaning of the words through sounds. Something similar happens in a translation: then the “periplus” concerns two tongues. It is the voyage of a text, of its meaning and style, content and form, while it is adapted in order to start breathing in another language environment.

Andalusian ivory cylindrical pyxis,
i.e. a box to keep precious cosmetics
or jewelery (10th century)

However, apart from these “dark spots”, which will always challenge us to come up with some satisfactory answers, we were soon able to assemble the rest of the puzzle rather easily. And when our Periplus was released, I could say:

“You know, the links are there, waiting for us to bring them to light. One only needs to search, of course, methodically, with a proper compass – a bússula, as we say in Greek, or bússola, as you say in Portuguese”.⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ We have the same word coming from Greek (pyxos > pyxis-pyxida > buxis-buxida > box, boîte, and bussola), with the plant pyxos (> boxwood) as a starting point; this hard, compact, durable wood has been used since ancient times to construct vessels, such as pyxides, and also musical (string and wind) instruments. Note that its seeds are kept in a capsule also called pyxis. Indeed, who among the non-specialists would ever imagine that the English box is of a Greek origin?

Anticythera Mechanism

The Mediterranean and the Oecumene beyond

THE GREEK PENINSULA AND ARCHIPELAGO was not a beginning in world history. The Hellenes received much wisdom from the Orient (Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt) and turned it into science;⁽⁵⁾ it was a great feat! What they left behind was a marvelous literature – uma literatura maravilhosa, indeed! Thus the Hellenic civilization became the foundation of the Occidental cultures.

• ⁽⁵⁾ There can be no great civilization without equivalent technology. A marvel in this domain is the Anticythera mechanism, the earliest analogue computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. Dated to c. 100 BCE, it was recovered in 1901 from a wreck between the Peloponnese and Crete, but its significance and complexity were not understood until a century later. Devices of a comparable level would reappear in the 14th century CE in Europe, with the construction of astronomical clocks. Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University, who led a 2006 study of the mechanism, said:

“This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, and the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. In terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”

Victoria, the sole ship of Magellan’s fleet to complete the world’s periplus (detail from a map of Ortelius, 1590)

The extant peripli took place on the Mediterranean, the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans. Herodotus wrote about a periplus of Africa by Phoenicians on behalf of an Egyptian pharaoh. Some Greek from Alexandria, Egypt, described the Indian Ocean coasts of eastern Africa and India. Pytheas, from the Hellenic colony of Massalia (modern Marseille, France), voyaged north to the British Isles and also Scandinavia, and concluded a periplus of Europe sailing via European rivers from the Baltic to the Black Sea and back to the Mediterranean. There are people who believe that the Minoan Cretans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and Punics, and other ancient peoples, such as the Chinese, sailed to the Americas long before the Vikings, Columbus – or, of course, Magellan, who attempted a periplus of the Earth but was not fortunate enough to conclude it.

Hence these voyages started long before recorded history, in the Bronze Age. There are historical clues that the Minoans, in the time of their Thalassocracy, travelled as far as Cornwall, Britain, in search of tin – or else, they obtained this important metal at harbours in southern Gaul. Tin is a necessary component of bronze (±90% copper plus ±10% tin). There were vast quantities of copper in the Mediterranean. Cyprus e.g. was full of copper and the name Cyprus comes from copper (and vice versa). But tin? There were very few places with tin in the Mediterranean and in limited quantities.

The Minoans, and later the Greeks and Phoenicians, sailed initially to Iberia that was rich in these minerals. The Andalusians probably led the Cretans to Galicia, Brittany and Cornwall: they knew the way… These places, especially Cornwall, had massive tin deposits. There, close to Galicia, or even Cornwall, were the so-called Cassiterides Nēsoe, the Tin Isles (tin is cassíteros in Greek). Herodotus and other historians wrote also about the links of the Hellenes and Phoenicians with Tartessos, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and several people now correlate the legendary Andalusian city with the elusive Atlantis.

Tartessos – identified here with Sanlúcar de Barrameda (?) – and Gadeira-Gadir-Gades-Cádiz, on three islets with Greek names (Erytheia, Kotinoussa and Antipolis), outside the Pillars of Heracles,
the Strait of Gibraltar, in the Sea of Darkness, the Atlantic

Critical questions as the starting point of the research

MY RESEARCH, in the first part we have already voyaged, aimed at that complacent Greek highbrow “hot air”, summed up in the phrase “our own Orient” (see Chronicle 6, footnote 1). So, I raised that vast “Indo-Iberian arc” to demarcate the Mediterranean historical and cultural space. The starting point in the second part was these simple questions that had to be answered:

● Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze?

● Who were the established maritime traders of the time to bring this most crucial metal to the Mediterranean, as tin was rare around the basin?

I attempt to give some answers in the 2nd part, Cassiterides Archipelago: sailing to Tartessos, following the 1st part, Mediterranean Periplus: in Search of Orpheus. (Hellenic) music is my focus in the 1st part; (Mediterranean) history in the 2nd.

One of the Riace Bronzes, two Greek full-size nude warriors (ca 460–450 BCE), recovered in 1972, considered as a symbol of Calabria.

Α. Mediterranean Periplus, in Search of Orpheus

Prologue. Before Sailing Off
1. The Universal Mediterranean
2. It All Started Here…
3. A Chronicle of the Humans
4. On Democracy
5. Iberia’s Odyssey
6. Indo-Iberian Arc (Jondo)
7. Indo-Iberian Arc (Duende)
8. A Hybrid’s Hybris…
9. The Celebrated Tríchordon
10. The… “Sun Language”
11. “Music Is Thracian and Asian”
12. “Do Not Maltreat Our Music!”
13. Professionals or Amateurs?
14. Music Made of Body and Soul

Β. Cassiterides Archipelago, Sailing to Tartessos

15. Sailing to Rio de Janeiro!
16. Mediterranean Periplus-Paraplus
17. Minoan Cretan Thalassocracy
18. Aegean: Knossos, Mycenae, Troy
19. Phoenicia’s Stroke of Fortune
20. The Enigmatic Sea Peoples
21. Iberian “El Dorado”
22. Iberian Periplus Revival
23. The Genocide of the Hellenes
24. The Triumph of Cretinism
25. “Carthago Delenda Est!”
26. Iberian Cross-Check
27. An Archaeologist’s Waterloo

Appendix: 28. The Making of the Mediterranean Periplus | 29. Biblio – Disco – Graphy | 30. Michales Loukovikas – bio.

A general conclusion is that certain needs motivated humans to live together, to communicate, to exchange. That’s how society was born, the cities were created, the classes and division of labour emerged, and writing was invented. People’s coordinated interaction concerned material needs but transformed at the same time all those who worked together, exchanging ideas or ideals; it was a process that led to the birth of culture, of civilization.

Homer’s Odyssey periplus

HOMER’S ODYSSEY IS A POETIC PERIPLUS. According to the Lusitanians, Odysseus’ wanderings were Luso-Hellenic, as well: he founded Lisbon and had a child with the princess of Iberia, Calypso. Homer described Odysseus’ descent into the Hades, the underworld, which was outside the Pillars of Heracles, that is, the Strait of Gibraltar. The Hellenes located in the same area the Garden of the Hesperides or the Makarōn Nēsoe, i.e. the Fortunate Isles, the Islands of the Blessed, or Elysium, what today is thought to be Macaronesia (the Azores and Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde).

Strabo and Solinus said that Odysseus, after the fall of Troy, navigated westward to Lusitania, founded Lisbon, and then desired to try his fortune on the Atlantic – where he disappeared, with no trace left behind. This is a version of Odysseus’ story mentioned also by Pere Antoni Beuter, a Valencian historian, who referred to Dante Alighieri, saying he shared this view. Indeed, in his Inferno, the Italian poet described Odysseus’ descent into the underworld with no return. The king of Ithaca, he wrote, went out of the Pillars of Hercules, sailed south, crossed the Equator, and then continued voyaging for months, until he reached a bay with a big mountain. Then, a tornado sank his boat; everybody drowned there.

I really don’t know why, but I feel this bay with the big mountain is… the River of January: Rio de Janeiro! I would really love to confirm that…

The siege of Lisbon, by Roque Gameiro (1917)

Appendix: An Atlantic Odyssey

● A modern Greek Homerist, Iohannis Kakridís, argues that the Odyssey is a work of poetry and not a travel log (i.e. a navigator’s periplus). According to W. B. Stanford, Cape Maleas and the nearby island of Cythera, where Odysseus met storms (see the Odyssey, book 9), are “the last clearly identifiable places in his wanderings. After this he leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland” – a wander in wonders!

Nevertheless, due to the great impact of the Homeric epics, the attempt to work out “a Geography of the Odyssey” started as early as Hesiod, a Homer’s contemporary most probably, and by the Hellenistic period, the literature on the subject had really thrived. There were even passionate debates among the scholars whether Odysseus’ wanderings were confined within the Mediterranean, or if they indeed expanded into the Atlantic – indicating that for them the ocean was not a “terra” (mare) incogita.

Sappho and Alcaeus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Despite that, other scholars, turned against this euhemerism –⁽⁶⁾ or even against the great rhapsode. The mythographer-grammarian Apollodorus of Athens (2nd century BCE) wrote that Homer imagined the wanderings as having taken place in a kind of fairyland in the Atlantic. Strabo (1st centuries BCE-CE) thought that at least Ogygia and Scheria, the islands of Calypso and Nausicaa respectively, were “imagined in fantasy” as being in the Atlantic – so, they both mentioned the Atlantic! In addition, he insisted that any hypothesis at all, no matter how outrageous, is more plausible than saying “I do not know”… Yet, Eratosthenes (3rd – 2nd centuries BCE) remarked rather sarcastically: “You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.”

• ⁽⁶⁾ Euhemerism: from the mythographer of Sacred History, Euhemerus: a view that the gods have been deified humans and that the myths have a historical basis.

Plutarch (1st – 2nd centuries CE) was sure Ogygia was in the Atlantic, and specifically west of Britain. Additionally, he repeated what Plato had described as a continent on the other side of the Atlantic, claiming that from this continent Ogygia was about 900 kilometres distant. The German astronomer Kepler (1571 – 1630) estimated that this “great continent” was America and attempted to locate Calypso’s island.

Map of Rio de Janeiro (Dutch Atlas 1600)

● In her research entitled The Wine Dark Sea (1964), the American Henriette Mertz argued that Circe’s island was Madeira, Calypso’s island one of the Azores, while the intervening voyages recorded a discovery of North America: Scylla and Charybdis were in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada, while Scheria, the Phaeacians’ land, was in the Caribbean, in the Gulf of Mexico, possibly in Florida. Such travels were done with the help of sea currents she studied. It was them, mainly the (Mexican) Gulf Stream, which took Odysseus to the Sirens (Haiti or Cuba, and to the Island of the Sun, of Helios (Nova Scotia or Newfoundland).

Enrico Mattievich, an Italian-Peruvian retired Professor of Physics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (where our festival took place), “brought” Odysseus to South America, proposing that his journey to the Underworld actually took place there. The river Acheron is the Amazon, he argued in his Journey to the Mythological Inferno (1992). After a long voyage upstream, Odysseus met the spirits of the dead at the confluence of the rivers Marañon and Ucayali – i.e. at the starting point of the Amazon.

Another study connected to that of Mertz’s is Siegfried Petrides’ Odyssey – a Naval Epic of the Greeks in America (1994). Grecian literature is full of references about the geographical and astronomical knowledge of the Hellenes, which allowed them to use the constellations for directions. Petrides’ long experience as a sailor allowed him to confirm, or even clarify, Mertz’s conclusions, providing extra details on the wind directions, sea routes, islands, etc. A clarification is that ancient Greek sailors did not rely on mere chance to reach America but had fast and versatile vessels that could easily cross the Atlantic. They also knew perfectly well how to combine and take advantage of both the sails and the rows, thus covering very long distances.

Demetris Michalópoulos, of the Institute of Hellenic Maritime History, described a Peripeteia [Adventure] in the Atlantic: Ulysses’ voyages between Europe and America – referring also to Petrides. His anything but controversial starting point is the coast of Libya, the land of the Lotophagi. His next stop, the land of the Cyclopes, seems to be nearby: Sicily or somewhere in Magna Graecia, according to the prevailing opinion in late antiquity. All the same, there is no mention to Italy in the Homeric text. The only information given by Homer is that, in the past, the Cyclopes were neighbours of the Phaeacians in the “immense Hyperia”. Yet, the latter were compelled to migrate to Scheria, because the Cyclopes were anything but friendly… But where was Hyperia located? If we now accept what we have just rejected, i.e. the prevailing opinion in late antiquity, the Cyclopes lived in the Mediterranean near the Laestrygonians. In the Homeric text, there are some indications about the Laestrygonians’ land: “the outgoings of the nights and of the days are close together”… Michalópoulos supposes that the Laestrygonians lived in a region where, in summer, the days are very long and the nights very short, that is, in Scandinavia. He also refers to Tacitus, who wrote that Odysseus reached at least Germany. Hence Hyperia was somewhere there. Yet, there is a “little problem”: between the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians, Odysseus voyaged to Aeolia that, although “floating”, is identified most possibly with Mallorca. But a return trip between Scandinavia and the Balearics is… a little too much!

Then we set sail to America. Circe’s Aeaea, the Underworld, the Hesperides and the Gorgons were all in the “remote West”, according to Hesiod. Ogygia, wrote Plutarch, was five days away from Britain. Arriving there, one must navigate through “a heavy sea, muddy and agitated by currents”. Such a place can be the Sargasso Sea, in the North Atlantic Ocean, where Bermuda may be the location of the isle of Calypso. The nymph instructed Odysseus to sail with the Ursa Major constellation on his left. After eighteen days, he reached Scheria, possibly in Iberia. Ithaca’s king and other Trojan War heroes had made their presence felt in the peninsula. According to Strabo, even a town therein was named after Odysseus. There is a tradition, as well, adopted by Camões, that the etymon of Lisbon is Ulysses, i.e. the Latin form of the name of our hero. Hence the “Homeric” river of the Phaeacians is the Tagus, whose bed was so rich in precious metals that it was described as “equivalent to the Pactolus”, the well-known gold river of Asia Minor (Silius Italicus).

Odysseus may not have been the first Greek (or European) to step on American soil: according to Mertz, some time before the Trojan War and the Odyssey, circa 1300 (or 1225) BCE,⁽⁷⁾ the Argonauts travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to the Gulf Stream, crossed the Sargasso Sea (Apollonius of Rhodes’ “floating islands”) and then touched at Puerto Rico. They sailed southwards by South America, past the mouth of the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro until the Río de la Plata of Argentina, and, following it upstream, reached the altiplano of Bolivia arriving at Colchis, or Tiwanaku, where the Golden Fleece was kept. Centuries later Tiwanaku became the cultural, religious, cosmological and commercial centre of a pre-Columbian Empire extending around Lake Titicaca in present-day western Bolivia, southern Peru and northern Chile from 300 to 1150 CE. But this area must have been inhabited as early as 1500 BCE.⁽⁸⁾

• ⁽⁷⁾ Michalópoulos (The Argonauts in the Black Sea) moves the expedition to a distant past in the first half of the 19th century BCE. In very ancient times, he says, “voyages were longer and more venturesome than those in late antiquity”, while “the Euxine had been a center of international trade”. The Argonauts were Minyans, the most prominent tribe of the Pelasgians. The latter are presented as ancestors of the Hellenes, colonizers of the Black Sea, and also of Italy, inventors of the alphabet – a civilizing people.

• ⁽⁸⁾ Both the expedition of the Argonauts and the Trojan War that followed aimed at the control of the Black Sea by the Hellenes. The legend of the Golden Fleece was based on a practice of the local tribes: they would place a lamb’s fleece at the bottom of a stream to entrap gold dust that was washed down from upstream. In some regions this practice is still now in use. The capital of Colchis, Aea (Kutaisi), is said to have been one of many cities that were founded in Eurasia by Egyptians. This account is combined with one by Herodotus, citing Egyptian priests. Their story was about the legendary pharaoh Sesostris, who once led an army north through the Levant and Asia Minor, all the way to Colchis. He settled colonists there, at the river Phasis (modern Rioni), and then he turned westward across southern Russia, and south through Romania and Bulgaria, until he reached eastern Hellas, from where he returned home. Herodotus cautioned that much of this account came second hand via Egyptian priests, but also noted that the Colchians were commonly known to be Egyptian colonists. According to Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, Sesostris conquered the whole world, from Ethiopia in the South, to Scythia in the North – or, who knows, even South America in the West!

● Some writers interpret the Homeric epics as “British ballads” or “Viking sagas”, and in this way pass off their North-to-South cultural-transmission theory. Such pseudo-theories are centuries older than German nationalism, and definitely inspire all the Northerners – who may figure out they are descendants of the “Hyper-Northerners”, the Hyperboreans!⁽⁹⁾ The idea that the inspiration for Plato’s Atlantis can be found in the Baltic was the… “grandfather” of all these books. In the “heroic” 17th century of Sweden, the foremost champion was the all-round Renaissance scholar (astronomer, physician, “archaeo-historian”, and even more) Olaus or Olof Rudbeck, who caused consternation with his mammoth, 2,500-page work, Atland eller Manheim, translated into Latin for scholarly use as Atlantica. He claimed there, among other things, that the oldest district of his home town, Uppsala, was the centre of “lost Atlantis”; thus – by the extravagant logic of cultural diffusion – Sweden was the cradle of western civilization going back to Adam and Eve! Despite ridicule from his local university colleagues (who also accused him of forgery), he was turned into a national icon – and not only: he was admired at the court of Louis “l’état c’est moi!”, proposed as a member of the Royal Society in London, celebrated in cafés, salons, and academies across the cosmopolitan “Respublica literaria”, and read avidly by Montesquieu and Leibniz, while Isaac Newton wrote to request… a personal copy of Atlantica! After his death, Swedish monarchs would be crowned over his grave! He had fanatic followers and became the subject of a satiric illustration, captioned: “The archaeologist Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) reveals his ‘Predecessors’ – Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Apollodorus, Tacitus, Odysseus, Ptolemy, Plutarch and Orpheus – the ‘Truth’ about Atlantis”…

• ⁽⁹⁾ Along with Thule, the Hyperborean land was among several terrae incognitae to the ancients. The Hyperboreans were a race of giants, three metres high, enjoying lives of sheer happiness and living to the age of one thousand! The sun was supposed to rise and set there only once a year – hence living a thousand days would be the same as living a thousand years! This also, to modern ears, suggests a possible location within the Arctic Circle. They were the most blessed of peoples, living in a perfect land, located “beyond Boreas”, the North Wind. The coldness of the northern countries was due to the cold breath of this wind. Thus the land “beyond Boreas” was a warm and sunny land! Besides, the only one among the Olympians, who was venerated there, was Apollo: the Hellenes thought he spent his winter there. The giants reciprocated by sending their delegation and offerings to his sacred Aegean island, Delos! Pindar sang of “the marvellous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans: Never the Muse is absent | from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry | everywhere maiden choruses whirling. | Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed | in their sacred blood; far from labour and battle they live.”

Arctic continent on the Gerardus Mercator map (1595)

● “Northerners and Hyper-Northerners”: I started with wordplay, but we ended up filled up with swastikas! Northerners, mainly Scandinavians, wishing to counter the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean culture, identified themselves with the Hyperboreans. This trend was very strong in the 17th century in Sweden, when it was a great power, where the champions of the ideology of Gothicism declared Scandinavia to be both the Hyperborean land and lost Atlantis! After all, the Arctic Circle is their land… Generally, European culture self-identified as Hyperborean. Inevitably, adaptations followed by the ethnologist Karl Penka (Origins of the Aryans, 1883), John Bennett (The Hyperborean Origin of the Indo-European Culture, 1963), and several others. According to some esotericists, the Hyperboreans were part of the Golden Race (where, of course, all these “thinkers” belong, for sure), and their land was the Golden Age polar centre of civilization and spirituality. Mankind, they claim, does not rise from the ape, but devolves progressively into an ape-like condition, as it strays physically and spiritually from its mystical otherworldly homeland in the Far North, succumbing to the South Pole’s daemonic energies… Some outright charlatans, like Robert Charroux, the alter ego of Erich von Däniken, relate the Hyperboreans to an ancient astronaut race of “very large, very white people”, who arrived here and selected “the least warm area on the earth because it corresponded more closely to their own climate on the planet from which they originated”…

● Except perhaps the last ones, who profit out of their… charlatanism, all the rest are racists and fascists. The Nazis e.g. considered Hyperborea as the cradle of the “Aryan race”, while their party was hatched within the “Thule Society”. Let’s remind them (pulling their legs) that Hyperborea, as a terra incognita, was located by ancient writers in the far North, of course, but all across Eurasia, from NW Europe to NE Asia. So, some “Chinks” claimed that the Hyperboreans were Chinese – a view that would be strongly disputed especially in Japan, but also in Mongolia and Siberia!

None of Rudbeck’s descendants ever achieved such a Triumph. Most unlucky was a Belgian lawyer, named Théophile Cailleux (Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère: Ibérie, Gaule, Bretagne, Archipels, Amériques; Théorie nouvelle. Atlantic lands described by Homer: Iberia, Gaul, Britain, Archipelagos, the Americas; New Theory. 1878). Troy, he claimed, was situated in East Anglia, on the heights outside Cambridge, known as the Gog Magog Hills (rather far from the sea); while Ithaca, he believed, should be sought in southern Andalusia, between Jerez and Cádiz, in the Delta of the Guadalete (where a Trojan War hero, Menestheus, allegedly settled: see Chronicle 22). Yet, some time after Cailleux’s book was published, Heinrich Schliemann triumphantly proved that Troy and Mycenae existed as powerful cities, at the right time and in the right place to have fought a Trojan War such as the epics describe. As a result, there was no thirst for geohistorical speculation then in the market…

Homère, L’Odyssée; lithographies by Marc Chagall

More than a century later, the Dutch Iman Wilkens presented the same idea again. His book, Where Troy Once Stood (1990), takes us to the same hills that Cailleux pinpointed, but with a scenario somewhat modified: the Trojan War was fought c. 1200 BCE between groups of Celts. Those living in Cambridgeshire were attacked by fellow Celts from the Continent to win access to the profitable tin mines in Cornwall. Wilkens further suggests that the Sea Peoples (see Chronicles 18, 19, 20) were Celts who settled in Greece and the Aegean as Achaeans and Pelasgians, bringing with them the oral poems that were translated and written down in Hellenic around 750 BCE, forming the basis of the Homeric epics. He locates Scylla and Charybdis at present day St. Michael’s Mount, at the tip of the Cornish peninsula, moves a bit Ithaca from the Guadalete to Cádiz, while the topography of the Laestrygonian capital, Telepylos (“Far-off port”), looks to him similar to that of Havana, Cuba. But he’s got an Achilles’ heel; he (too) is a nationalist:

“It appears that Homer’s Greek contains a large number of loan words from western European languages, more often from Dutch rather than English, French or German”, he thoughtlessly wrote, speaking of tongues that have not existed until at least 1000 years after Homer!⁽¹⁰⁾

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ If one takes Cailleux and Wilkens for granted, the Trojans left Britain after the war to settle in Italy. Anyway, three generations later they returned to found the “British nation”. Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth, begins with the Trojan Aeneas who, according to Roman legend, settled in Italy after the war. But his great-grandson Brutus was banished, started wandering and was finally directed by the goddess Diana (Artemis) to settle in the western ocean, on the island of Albion, which he named Britain after himself. He then defeated the giants who were the only inhabitants there, and on the banks of the Thames he established his capital, Troia Nova, renamed later as London.

A variation of this North-to-South cultural transmission is that early Grecian sailors might have come for long-distance trade in tin etc. and also took this wonderful epic tale back with them, transforming it into an “ethnic” epic when it was written down in verse. The northern peoples preferred not to write out their compositions, relying on prodigious feats of memory (as Caesar said of the Celtic bards). However, over time the original northern version could have been lost in wars and migrations. Another North-to-South cultural-transmission theory is that the northern tribes were the Sea Peoples who swept south to attack also Hellas, around 1200 BCE. The Greeks that survived assimilated the northerners’ campfire tales and made them their own when they flourished again, also thanks to these tales, after their Dark Ages.

Atlantis, Poseidonis: the last remnant of the lost continent (imaginary reconstruction)

This “theory” was foreshadowed in several books by Jurgen Spanuth (1907-1998), a German pastor, classical scholar, and amateur archaeologist. He maintained that all these events survive in distorted version not just in Homer but also in Plato’s Atlantis parable. Spanuth compared Homer’s and Plato’s descriptions on a point-for-point basis, and suggested both derived from a common origin. This was the rise and fall of a mighty Bronze Age seafaring nation living in the Jutland area, which fell when an “Atlantean” North Sea flood drove them southward into the Mediterranean; they were the Sea Peoples that the Egyptians defeated in the Nile Delta. Their tale of how their vast empire collapsed in a flood was recorded by the Egyptians, and then Plato picked it up through Solon, who was briefed by priests when he visited Egypt (Das Entratselte Atlantis; Atlantis – The Mystery Unraveled; 1953, all through Die Atlanter; Atlantis of the North; 1976). German nationalism was all too clear in these inflated claims – in effect assuming credit for another people’s cultural foundations – and the reception of the books was rather cold in the reviews. Rebuffed by the mainstream, the pastor turned to some right-wing German magazines, which marginalized him further. If he succeeded in something indirectly is that he rekindled interest for new excavations in sunken North Sea ports, e.g. Rungholt, where ceramics were recovered evidencing trade between Frisia and Minoan Crete dating back to 1600-1400 BCE!

The other variant of the North-to-South cultural-transmission “theory”, with a largely Scandinavian setting, has a certain peculiarity: the storyteller is an Italian, the nuclear engineer Felice Vinci – probably the only Mediterranean accepting that his ancestors received the “lights of civilization” from the North. The reception was dismissive, as usual, and the Finns were quick to label it “an interesting joke”! The book is entitled Omero nel Baltico (Homer in the Baltic, 1998), or The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth. The Achaeans were a Baltic people at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, coming to Greece around the 16th century (after the Trojan War that took place in the 18th century), bringing their traditional oral sagas to the Aegean. Odysseus himself, claims Vinci, was Dutch(!); the islands of his kingdom, Ithaca, Dulichium, Cephallenia, and Zacynthus, correspond to islands in the Danish archipelago of South Funen, and Troy to Toija in SW Finland; the Hellespont could not be identified with the Dardanelles, but the Gulf of Finland; Mycenae stood in the same place as modern Copenhagen; and Odysseus’ voyage would have taken place along the coasts of Norway: Ogygia could be identified with one of the Faeroe Islands (among Britain, Scandinavia and Iceland); the Phaeacian land, Scheria, with Bergen’s environs; Circe’s island, and the places she describes (the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis) may be placed in the Lofoten archipelago of northern Norway; and Aeolus’ island in the Shetland archipelago, NE of Scotland. The same region is the setting of other Hellenic mythological tales such as the Argonauts, adds Vinci. Referring to Plato’s dialogue Critias, he claims that Athens rose formerly on a flat fertile zone in the Baltic, perhaps near Karlskrona in southern Sweden.

Il Ritorno di Ulisse (Odysseus’ Return), by Giorgio De Chirico (1968)

● Regarding Homeric epics’ background, the Flemish Karel Jozef de Graeve, in his République des Champs Elysées (Republic of the Elysian Fields, 1806), pointed out the area around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta.

Finally, the French Gilbert Pillot, in Le Code Secret de l’Odyssée (The Secret Code of the Odyssey, 1969), “saw” Odysseus crossing the Pillars of Heracles and voyaging on the Atlantic, initially to Morocco, the Canaries and Madeira, and then heading north to Ireland, Scotland and Iceland. He most probably thought – quite rightly – that “secret codes” are… sold out, and claimed he discovered “a secret message in the Odyssey”, with a “hidden” itinerary over the Atlantic, from the Canaries to Iceland through the British Isles. The verse epic, he argued, was a Hellenic syndicate’s way of concealing navigation data inside an “entertainment” – acting as an elaborate mnemonic. The Greek mariners could thus remember, yet protect, the key details (sailing directions, times, dangers) of their all-important northern trade route, leading to the sought-after sources of tin: the Cassiterides, or Tin Isles – a terra incognita, as Herodotus complained, impossible to locate, but a key to prosperity mainly in the Bronze Age.

Eternally mapping Homer’s Odyssey

MAPPING HOMER’S ODYSSEY, Armin Wolf concluded that Scheria-Phaeacia should have been in Calabria, Italy, as it is located between two seas: the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian Seas. The capital of the Phaeacians stood at the Tiriolo and Marcellinara region, in the Catanzaro province, he claimed. Additionally, he referred to the dozens (or hundreds?) of attempts to map the Odyssey; several of them we have already presented; but he added some more:

In 1898, an anonymous author with the pseudonym Eumaeus claimed that Odysseus had completed a periplus of Africa (centuries before the Phoenicians, mentioned by Herodotus), and had even discovered America. Pseudo-Eumaeus (the real one was Odysseus’ swineherd and friend) was the first to use the ocean currents to trace the route of the king of Ithaca. In 1925, even the distinguished archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld drew a map of Homer’s world in which, apart from the “established” stops of the Odyssey, he pinpointed the southernmost tip of Africa, and there he located Telepylus of the Laestrygonians and also – like “Eumaeus” – Aeaea, Circe’s island.

After World War II, several maps placed the Odyssey on the Atlantic and North Sea: British Isles, Iceland, Norway. The Swiss F. J. Wil, in 1950, added Faeroes in the list, while the German Otto Zeller, in 1959, expanded the map from Gibraltar and the Azores to Norway and Heligoland. Karl Bartholomäus, professor of archaeogeodesy, in 1977, tried to prove by astronomical calculations that the track from Calypso to Nausicaa leads from the Azores to Heligoland. The German judge Hans Steuerwald, in 1978, “sent” Odysseus to Cornwall and Scotland. The wine produced on Circe’s isle (identified with one of the Hebrides), he added, was in fact Scotch whisky…

Incan Golden Solar disc, used as a star map.
It was lost during the Conquista.

A multitude of writers have created fantastic routes on the oceans of the earth. This mania of inventing “theories” probably reached its climax in 1983, with the Austrian ethnologist Christine Pellech, who argued that Odysseus had sailed right around the earth – before Magellan! She saw no difficulty in the great hero taking just seven days to row from the Mediterranean to Norway, and then in a single day the whole way from Norway to Canada! It goes without saying, of course, that he discovered the Strait of Magellan and Australia…

● More extreme views about the geography of the Homeric epics keep on surfacing, either centered on the Atlantic, or extending all over the globe. Some others turned their eyes to the sky arguing that the Homeric geography is to be found there, and that the Iliad and Odyssey can be decoded as a star map. What we will hear next, I suppose, is that the Trojan War was actually a… Star War!

LABYRINTH OF MAPS

● TROY. NW Asia Minor, Turkey: Hisarlık || E England: Cambridgeshire || SW Finland: Toija.
● LOTUS EATERS (LOTOPHAGI). Libya: a headland in the Gindanes area | Gulf of Sidra || Tunisia: Djerba (Meninx) island.
● CYCLOPES. Italy: SE Sicily, near Etna and Lentini (Leontini) | Marsala, W Sicily | Gulf of Naples || Spain: Balearics archipelago || Scandinavia.
● AEOLIA. Italy, N Sicily: Aeolian Islands (Lipari [Meligounis], or Stromboli [Strongule], or Ustica) || Spain: Balearics archipelago (Mallorca) || Scotland: Shetland archipelago.
● LAESTRYGONIANS. Italy: SE Sicily | N Sardinia || France: S Corsica || Scandinavia || Cuba: Havana || S African tip.
● CIRCE’S AEAEA. Italy: Monte Circeo, Lazio-Latium (< Latinus, Circe’s son) | Ischia, Gulf of Naples || Portugal: Madeira || Norway: Lofoten archipelago || S African tip || Scotland: Hebrides archipelago.
● HADES, UNDERWORLD. NW Hellas: Acheron river || Italy: lake Avernus (< Greek Aornos = with no birds), near Cumae, Campania, where Aeneas also found it || Peru: Amazon River.
● SIRENS. Italy: Cape Faro, by the Strait of Messina | Sirenuse archipelago, or a headland between the Gulfs of Naples and Salerno | Naples itself | Lucanian coast || Haiti or Cuba || Norway: Lofoten archipelago.
● SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS. Italy: Strait of Messina || Canada, Nova Scotia: Bay of Fundy || SW England: St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall’s tip || Norway: Lofoten archipelago.
● THE SUN (HELIOS) ISLAND. Italy: Sicily || Canada: Nova Scotia or Newfoundland.
● CALYPSO’S OGYGIA. Maltese archipelago: Gaudos, modern Gozo || Morocco-Spain: Pillars of Heracles (Ceuta) || Portugal: Azores || Bermuda || Denmark: Faeroes.
● NAUSICAA & PHAEACIANS’ SCHERIA. NW Hellas: Corcyra (Corfu) || Cyprus || Carribean-Gulf of Mexico-Florida, USA || Portugal: Lisbon || Norway: Bergen || Germany: Heligoland || Italy: Calabria.
● ITHACA. W Hellas: Ithaca, or Cephallenia, or Leucas || Andalusia, Spain: Guadalete Delta or Cádiz || Denmark: S Funen.

Celestial map by the Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit (17th century)

Homer’s mystery: the epimyth of a myth

ANY HYPOTHESIS AT ALL, NO MATTER HOW OUTRAGEOUS, is more plausible than saying “I do not know”… After all, what do these stories show, even those that are crazy and nuts? What else but the greatness of Odysseus and Homer, the creator of the Iliad and the Odyssey; two wonderful epics that the classicists initially treated as written poetry and also the rhapsode as a writer. Until Milman Parry (1902–1935) appeared in the 1920s, and indicated it was oral musical-poetic tradition. His research on the process of oral poetry improvisation through “stock epithets” and “reiteration” (words, phrases, stanzas) established that these formulae were artifacts easily applied to the hexametric lines of oral tradition. A two-word stock epithet (e.g. “the resourceful Odysseus”) is reiterated, permitting the rhapsode to improvise and complete the verse. This research by Parry and his assistant, Albert Lord, was conducted in Yugoslavia.

Homer (a Hellenic name in Aeolis) was born in Smyrna (Ionia’s northern limit), or on the island of Chios, and died on the Cycladic island of Ios. His name means hostage, follower, or blind (ὁ μὴ ὁρῶν: “he who does not see”). Like Thamyris or Hesiod, Homer was a wandering minstrel, who hanged around with ordinary people – fishermen, sailors, potters, shoemakers, or elderly men – at harbours.⁽¹¹⁾ This image, of course, is far from that of a court musician-poet. Rapidity-ease of movement and plainness of expression-thought do not distinguish the great epic poets Virgil, Dante, or Milton. They rather distinguish the humbler epico-lyrical school. But Homer does not belong to that school, neither his poetry is in any sense ballad poetry. This is apparent through the higher artistic structure and value of his poems. It is his noble and powerful style that eventually separates Homer from all forms of ballad poetry and popular epic. His art is distinguished from the works of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, due to the comparative absence of underlying motives or sentiments. In Virgil’s poetry, a sense of the greatness of Rome is the leading motive of a passionate rhetoric, veiled by the considered delicacy of his language. Dante and Milton are still more faithful exponents of the religion and politics of their time. French epics display sentiments of fear or hatred of the Saracens. In Homer’s work, the interest is purely dramatic. There is no antipathy of race or religion. He is principally interested in human feeling or emotion, and also drama. Indeed, his poems are often referred to as dramas.

Above all, we need to remember that Homer recited his epics; Virgil, Dante, and all the rest wrote them down…

• ⁽¹¹⁾ An elderly Homer, it is said, was going around Ios, the last stop of his life’s voyage, together with children, singing the carols of the day.

● Influences from the mythology and literature of Near East have been seen in the Odyssey. Martin West has noted some parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. Both Odysseus and Gilgamesh travel to the ends of the earth, and even to the underworld. Odysseus follows instructions given to him by Calypso, or Circe, a daughter of the sun-god Helios. Their islands are located at the edges of the world. Gilgamesh also gets directions from the goddess Siduri, who also dwells by the sea at the ends of the earth. Others correlate Homer with Hittite epics. It seems that the great epic poet was equally “resourceful” with his protagonist, Odysseus.

THE “CLASSICAL” MEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY

● [1] TROY. Setting sail, Odysseus and his men were greeted by friendly and calm waters. He had not committed hubris yet…
● [2] ISMARUS, LAND OF THE CICONES. Odysseus and his men looted the city and robbed it of all its goods. The crew refused to leave quickly and fell asleep on the beach. The next morning the Cicones returned with their fierce kinsmen from the mountains. Odysseus escaped but lost many men. On leaving, his twelve ships were driven off course by fierce storms.
● [3] THE LOTUS EATERS’ ISLAND. Odysseus’ scouting party ate lotus fruit with the natives. This caused them to fall asleep and stop caring about ever going home.
● [4] THE CYCLOPES’ ISLAND. The giant one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus devoured two of Odysseus’ men each day. Odysseus gave Polyphemus intoxicating wine and then blinded him with a wooden stake. As a result, Odysseus was haunted by the wrath of Poseidon, the Cyclops’ father, who cursed Odysseus to wander the sea for years.
● [5] AEOLIA, LAND OF AEOLUS, GOD OF THE WINDS. Aeolus gave Odysseus hospitality for a month and then a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, so as to return safely home. However, the crew foolishly opened the bag while Odysseus slept, just as Ithaca came into sight, thinking that it contained gold. The resulting storm drove the ships back to Aeolia, but Aeolus refused to provide any further help.
● [6] TELEPYLOS, IN THE LAND OF THE LAESTRYGONIANS. These man-eating giants attacked the fleet with boulders, sinking all the ships but one and killing hundreds.
● [7] AEAEA, CIRCE’S ISLAND. Circe turned all of Odysseus’ men into pigs after feeding them cheese and wine. Hermes gave Odysseus a drug called moly in order to resist Circe’s magic. She agreed to change Odysseus’ men back to their human form in exchange for his love. They remained on the island for one year feasting and drinking.
● [8] HADES, THE UNDERWORLD. Guided by Circe’s instructions, Odysseus crossed the ocean and reached a harbour at the western edge of the world where he sacrificed to the dead and summoned the spirit of the prophet Tiresias to advise him.
● [9] SIRENS. Odysseus escaped by having all his men plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast. When he heard their beautiful song he begged the men to untie him but they ignored him.
● [10] SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS. Circe advised Odysseus to sail closer to the six-headed monster Scylla, for the whirlpool Charybdis could drown the ship. However, Scylla devoured six of his men.
● [11] THRINACIA, HELIOS’ SACRED ISLAND. Though Odysseus warned his men not to kill any of Helios’ sacred cattle, they disobeyed. Helios’ daughters told their father and he destroyed the ship and all men save Odysseus.
● [12] OGYGIA, CALYPSO’S ISLAND. The nymph made him her lover for seven years. On behalf of Athena, Zeus sent Hermes to tell Calypso to let Odysseus go.
● [13] SCHERIA, THE PHAEACIANS’ ISLAND. Washed up on the shore, Odysseus was found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, who entertained him and escorted him to Ithaca.
● [14] ITHACA. On the twentieth day of sailing Odysseus finally arrived home.

• >> Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS
• << Chronicle 14. MUSIC MADE OF BODY AND SOUL

Next Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS ● Periplus: Circumnavigation or Log ● Navigators and Intellectuals ● The Peloponnesian War and Euripides ● Nomos (Law Song)

MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS – bio

MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS – bio

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ ΜΙΧΑΛΗΣ ΛΟΥΚΟΒΙΚΑΣ – βιογραφικό

MICHALES LOUKOVIKAS, born in a Thracian musical family, was taught music by his father, with whom he made his first professional steps at 15, as a musician (accordion, guitar) and singer, taking an interest in various genres: varied world music, rock, music based on poetry, songwriting, theatre and film music, rebetiko, especially the school of Smyrna, and modal music.

Studying in Thessaloniki, he directed student musical ensembles, and later participated in rebetiko and popular musical groups. He was a member of the Eurydice company, writing and producing plays for various genres (theatre, puppetry, shadow plays), where he also composed or selected musical themes. Besides, he contributed to the soundtrack of the film Stories of a Honeycomb (1981), by Nikos Vergitsis, as a composer (theme music), singer and musician.

He graduated in English Language and Literature from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and worked as a teacher and translator of English, publisher (Research publishers), and journalist (Macedonia, Thessaloniki, and Angeliophoros newspapers, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) radio stations), specializing on the international arena, and culture (news, analyses, chronicles, music, art, education, and editorials). He wrote texts on music for special publications, and collaborated on radio educational programs (texts, selection of music, presentation).

Wishing to delve into the differences between the Oriental and Occidental music, he focused on the modal tradition, folk or classical. Turning points in his research were his acquaintance with Ross Daly in 1987, and his participation in the International Musicological Symposium at Delphi on Mediterranean music in 1988.

A series of articles on cultural exchange in the Mediterranean, entitled Mediterranean Paraplus (a term similar to Periplus, Thessaloniki newspaper), evolved into a successful radio program lasting for more than twelve years (1998-2010, 9.58 fm, ERT3). It followed programs such as Flamenco: the Rebetiko of Andalusia, where he adapted Donn Pohren’s The Art of Flamenco, indicating the similarities between the two genres. In addition, he took part, together with other musical producers of the radio station, in the album Radio… com+positions (2002).

He worked as a musician with the composer and musical producer Paris Paraschópoulos for the theatrical play Alexandria–Athens (2003), on the Parallel Lives of the poets Constantine Cavafy and Kostís Palamás, produced by the art company Aktis Aeliou, Thessaloniki. He also teamed up with the writer, researcher and songwriter Thomás Korovinis in concerts.

 

 

 

 

A result of his research in modal music was The Gold in the Sky (2008), a West-to-East musical voyage based on Ares Alexandrou’s poetry, featuring 35 distinguished musicians (such as Manos Achalinotópoulos, Giorgos Andreou, Ross Daly, Kyriakos Gouventas, Andreas Karakotas, Harris Lambrakis, Kostas Theodorou, and Eleni Tsaligopoulou). He presented the Gold (voice, piano, accordion) in the Small Theatre, Thessaloniki, in company with K. Theodorou (double bass, guitar, percussion).

His meeting with Amélia Muge in the “Internet sea” led to a productive partnership, initially with his English adaptation of her songs in Uma Autora, 202 Canções (2009), and then with her Portuguese version of The Gold in the Sky poems, in the bilingual book-disc O Ouro do Céu / Ares Alexandrou por Michales Loukovikas (2011), presented in the bookstores Buchholtz, Lisbon. Amélia and Michales appeared for the first time together in the same hall, playing in company with the pianist Filipe Raposo in 1910.

Adapting ancient and traditional songs, as well as composing originals on line, Amélia and Michales carried out their Periplus / deambulações luso-gregas (Luso-Hellenic Wanderings in the international edition, 2012), with the poetess Hélia Correia, the singer E. Tsaligopoulou, and the vocal ensemble Outra Voz, as special guests. Periplus was presented in Guimarães (Centro Cultural Vila Flor), Lisbon (Culturgest), Sines (Festival Músicas do Mundo), Thessaloniki (Demetria Festival, Womex), Athens (Ianos bookstores), and Rio de Janeiro (Festival Tão Longe, Tão Perto, on music and poetry, at the University of Brazil, in four concerts, two of them together with the ensemble Música Surda.

Michales participated in Amélia’s work on Amália Rodrigues’ verses, Amélia com versos de Amália (2014), as artistic co-director, composer, arranger, and with Amália’s verses adapted into an English version. He also took part as a guest in Amélia’s concerts in Alte (Algarve), Auditório Carlos Paredes (Benfica, Lisbon), and City of Traditions (INATEL, Lisbon).

Amélia and Michales’ latest project, ARCHiPELAGOS / Passages (2017), was premiered at the Sãο Luiz Theatre, Lisbon, in November 2017, with excellent reviews in the press. In Greece, it was presented at Ianos, Athens, in May 2018, with equal reception. Special guests in this venture were the poetess H. Correia again, the composer G. Andreou, the singers Teresa Campos, A. Karakotas, Catarina Moura and Rita Maria, the women’s traditional vocal ensemble Cramol of the Workers’ Library in Oeiras, and the Plucked Strings Orchestra Thanasis Tsipinakis of the Municipality of Patras.

The voyage goes on…

● With Friedrich Hölderlin’s Archipelago (i.e. the Aegean) as a starting point, and deeply moved with Euripides’ tragedy Orestes (408 BCE), we voyage to Syria to listen to an ancient hymn (1400 BCE) as a lullaby of… awakening, or as a lament on the Sorceress Sea and the refugees’ drama. Crossing the Mediterranean and the Pillars of Heracles, we sail around Macaronesia (Macárōn nẽsoe, or Elysium: the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde) in search of Cesária Évora.

We sail back to Greece, with Sappho singing about love (Eros) and loneliness, or to Portugal, with Fernando Pessoa’s weariness of being. From a harbour’s tavern, where João de Deus, Giorgos Mitsakis and Vasilis Tsitsanis sing of voyages with no return, we fly to imaginary islands: Utopia, Ithaca of Penelope, and Neverland, where lost kids dance a… Thracian traditional dance!

Hélia Correia “takes us down to earth” in times of indigence, without gods or Argonauts, polis or agora, with Pan dead on the Aegean islands, in the ruin of Hellas, or in Alexandria engulfed in flames, in the antipode of Pericles’ democracy, to the accompaniment of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Marcia funebre.

In the songs of nostalgia, Tsitsanis meets Rosalía de Castro, José Niza, Armando Soares, and Violeta Parra, as Greece, Galicia, Portugal, Cape Verde, and Chile are joined together. Joys and dances of nostos follow, with José Saramago and Giorgos Andreou. Another meeting, on the sea waves, is that between the medieval minstrel Martín Codax and the rebetiko composer Panagiotis Tountas, concluding the voyage in a feast with a peculiar Greco-Portuguese and Afro-Andalusian bulería: o come, all ye faithful (to art) – you are all welcome!

●

Some concerts and festivals

• February 2012: Centro Cultural Vila Flor (Guimarães, Portugal).
• February 2012: Culturgest (Lisbon, Portugal).
• July 2012: Festival Músicas do Mundo (Sines, Portugal).
• October 2012: Womex (Thessalonica, Hellas).
• October 2012: Ianos (Athens, PERiPLUS).
• May 2013: Festival Tão Longe, Tão Perto (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
• October 2013: Demetria Festival (Thessaloniki, Hellas).
• November 2017: Teatro Sãο Luiz (Lisbon, ARCHiPELAGOS).
• May 2018: Ianos (Athens, ARCHiPELAGOS).

Periplus in Guimarães with: Manos Achalinotopoulos (folk clarinet, voice), Kyriakos Gouventas (5-string violin, mandolin), Harris Lambrakis (ney, blockflute), Ricardo Parreira (guitarra portuguesa), António Quintino (double bass), Filipe Raposo (piano), José Salgueiro (percussion), and the choir Outra Voz participating en masse.

Periplus distinctions

• The Society of Portuguese Authors (SPA) selected the disc among the three best albums of 2012.
• The jury of the Sopa da Pedra blogspot elected it as the best album of the year.
• The Expresso newspaper as the 2nd best disc.
• Crónicas da Terra of Terra Pura radio as the 2nd best folk album in Europe.
• Mundofonias of RTVE selected it among the best discs of 2012 in the world.
• Periplus was also nominated for the British fRoots charter with the ten best albums of the year.

●

Discography

Lullaby’s Intro from The Gold in the Sky

• 2002: Radio… com+positions, 9.58 fm music producers
• 2003: Alexandria – Athens, Paris Paraschopoulos, Actis Aeliou theatrical company
• 2008: The Gold in the Sky, Michales Loukovikas, Ares Alexandrou
• 2009: Uma Autora, 202 Canções, Amélia Muge
• 2011: O Ouro do Céu / Ares Alexandrou por Michales Loukovikas
• 2012: Periplus / deambulações luso-gregas, Amélia Muge, Michales Loukovikas
• 2012: Periplus / Luso-Hellenic Wanderings (international edition)
• 2014: Amélia com Versos de Amália, Amélia Muge, Amália Rodrigues
• 2017: ARCHiPELAGOS / Passagens, Amélia Muge, Michales Loukovikas

Periplus at Sines Músicas do Mundo with: Catarina Anacleto (cello), Manuel Maio (violin, mandolin), Nikos Paraoulakis (ney, blockflute), António Quintino (double bass), José Salgueiro (percussion), Miguel Tapadas (piano).

>> AMÉLIA MUGE – bio