With their insalubrious social connotations, low-brow content and Ottoman musical features, rebetika songs appear unlikely candidates for connection with the revered culture of ancient Greece. Yet this seemingly sacrilegious nexus has repeatedly been contrived by exponents of the genre and by commentators, unlettered and educated alike. It has also exercised the ingenuity of literati, translators, stage directors and graphic artists. The examples surveyed in this article, whether earnest or whimsical, plausible or manifestly deluded, reflect both evolving perceptions of the genre and broader issues of Greek cultural politics. They further exemplify informal mechanisms for disseminating antiquarian knowledge-and misinformation. One of the more imaginative scenes in Rebetiko (La mauvaise herbe), a graphic novel by David Prudhomme published in 2009, is set at the portico of the Erechtheum on the Acropolis of Athens in October 1936. It features the legendary rebetika-musician Yorgos Batis, who is seen licking the marble lips of a Caryatid and then presenting his artistic credentials to her: 'I had hoped to wake you ... If you could only hear the music I have in my head ... It lives and breathes from here to Poli... It walks Byzantine roads ... Comes back here, leaves again....' 1 Batis soon abandons his attempts to arouse the ancient statue and, dancing away from the ancient temple, offers this prophetic parallel between the art of the rebetes and that of Greek antiquity: 'Like you, we're going to make a sacrifice for these comings and goings. Our records will be our statues ... our sarcophagi... '. This whole scene and its 1 Both extracts quoted here (complete with original ellipses) are from the English translation, D. Prudhomme, Rebetiko, trans. N. Mahony (London 2012). I am obliged to Peter Mackridge for alerting me to it, and to Dimitry Pai'vanas, George Galiatsos, Loukia Gauntlett and Alicia L. Suarez for supplying me with several other publications cited in this article. An earlier version of it was read at the conference on 'Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture' at the University of Birmingham in June 2011.
The wretched underworld. .. does not fail to have its songs and these are-for Greece-the rebetika. 1 Rebetis doesn't mean underworld, nor is the rebetiko its song. 2 Contradictory statements such as the above are characteristic of the controversy which has surrounded the song tradition loosely called 'rebetiko', since it first became a cultural theme dujour in Greece in the late 1940s. 3 To judge from the latest substantial publication on the subject, an enlarged, second edition of Elias Petropoulos' Rebetika Tragoudia (Athens, 1979), thirty years of debate have settled very little by way of criteria for use of the term which forms the title of the book. Indeed, Petropoulos (ibid., p. 11) would have us believe that the decade of discussion following his first edition has achieved nothing worthwhile at all, thereby justifying his unwillingness at this stage to correct even the acknowledged mistakes in the prolegomena to the 1968 edition. Thus Petropoulos' massive, lavishly illustrated second edition remains as deficient as the first in a basic working definition of its title, and in the absence of a clear indication of the criteria used in choosing texts for its patently hybrid anthology of 1,400
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Book Reviews 118 context. The material presented by Panagiotakis gives art historians an opportunity to extend their research into more interdisciplinary directions, by using the historical evidence for a better understanding of the artist's work. These significant contributions to scholarship are particularly well served by this publication because eight of the nine collected essays are translated into English here for the first time, and are thus made accessible to a significantly wider readership.
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