Markos Vamvakaris: the underground sound of Greek anarchy and brothel busking
Music and despair are never far apart; one comforts the other like rain to a flower. The grovelling tones of the Greek rebetiko artist Markos Vamvakaris capture this marriage with more fidelity than just about any other artist has managed. With a country in the grips of civil war, his drunken tales of furrowed brows echoed in the hash dens, brothels and broken side streets of port areas like Piraeus in the 1930s.
He would go on to be crowned ‘The Patriarch of Rebetiko’ – a genre that saw tumult meld all the lowest folk music from various regions together to create one unified lowly sound, spun out with drugs and drink in the system of its singers and largely popularised in the heaving prison systems – and he hailed from fittingly humbled beginnings. Born in 1905 on the island of Syros, he fled his picturesque home in the hills aged 12 for the shady coves of Piraeus, where he thought he thought he could evade the police.
It turns out that he wasn’t even wanted by the authorities, but it speaks of the political paranoia of the times that a schoolboy could fear persecution enough to be willing to leave everything behind and embrace the ravaged rung of society that resided in the port area he wound up in. These tough streets taught him to be strong-willed, and while he was working his latest odd job as a skinner in a tannery, he heard the presentment of his future in the far-off strumming of a bouzouki.
Vamvakaris was roughly 19 at the time, and his hardships had primed him to be attracted by the mourning tones of the music breezing in from some unknown location. He instantly figured he would be a natural and made a bet with his co-worker that he would chop his hands off with a cleaver if he hadn’t learned how to play the bouzouki within six months. He won the bet and was quickly good enough to even invent his own unique style with the instrument. In a time of societal reinvention, this punk approach to playing was lapped up by the coterie of folks who stood in opposition to the status quo to such an extent that they even began dressing and speaking differently.
Vamvakaris, however, even turned the heads of those away from the rebetiko community. His time as a champion zeibekiko dancer imbued him with incredible rhythmic sensibilities that added a toe-tapping catchiness to the otherwise poetic despair that he usually crooned out in his crackling tones. And yet hardship would once again curtail the windfall he offered. During the Axis occupation, which began in 1936, rebetiko performers were subject to extreme state censorship and banned from recording.
Thus, much of his music is forever tethered to the clandestine hashish smoking establishments that he played prior to his particular working-class fame. And when society shifted to something ironically closer to the ideals of the rebetiko when the Axis forces were defeated and left Greece, the genre had fallen from favour. When its revival arrived in the 1960s, Vamvakaris was ailed by several health issues that restricted his playing. However, his legacy was revitalised all the same.
His rasping tones now remain a conduit to the dirges that brought comfort to a fascinating off-shoot of culture. With Vamvakaris singing the darkened pages of Greek history into the country’s songbook with bittersweet beauty:
“What a burst of flame I have in my heart,
As if you had cast a spell on me,
Sweet Fragosyriani,
As if you had cast a spell on me
Sweet Frangosyriani.”
