Oral Tradition 1/1 (1986): 110-133

The Oral Traditions

of Modern Greece:
A Survey

Roderick Beaton

Description

There are several overlapping but distinct traditions whose medium

is the modern Greek language and which can lay claim to consideration
as “oral.”1 The most widely known and studied of these traditions is
undoubtedly that of oral song, conventionally known in Greek as dimotiká
tragoúdia, and variously rendered by outsiders literally as “demotic songs,”
“folk poetry” or “folk song,” “chansons populaires,” “Volkslieder,” and
so forth. This tradition of oral song, which I have elsewhere labeled “the
demotic tradition” (Beaton 1980:2-3), comes closest to fulfilling the Parry/
Lord criteria for oral poetry: it is composed of formulas and a finite range
of themes in variable combination; until collected and published in the
nineteenth century the “texts” of this tradition had no existence outside of
performance; and composition and transmission have so far as one can tell
never been the special prerogative of professional “minstrels.” Although
signs of interaction with literary tradition exist (and are thought by some to
go back to the literature of antiquity), there is no indication of direct literary
interference at any earlier point in the tradition. That is to say, although the
subject matter of books has often enough been assimilated into the corpus of
orally composed material, there is no sign that writing as a technique or the
concept of the fixed text played any part in the development of the tradition
prior to the circulation of printed editions and the spread of education in the
last one hundred and fifty years.
The modern Greek “demotic” tradition differs from the
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 111

Parry/Lord model in two important respects: songs rarely exceed a hundred

lines in length and in consequence elude the definition of “epic narration,”
and the same thematic and formulaic corpus is equally employed in lyrical
and in narrative genres. Modern Greek oral song is in many respects
comparable to the ballad and lyrical traditions of other cultures, but lacks
an epic genre. Narrative songs of the ballad type evoke a heroic milieu,
either specifically that of the social bandits (klefts) of the Ottoman centuries
(kléftika tragoúdia) or more sporadically recalling memories of Byzantine-
Arab conflict in the Middle East between the ninth and eleventh centuries
(akritiká tragoúdia); alternatively they may move in a more domestic world,
in which indications of time and place are absent altogether, to dramatize
conflicts within the family group, often abnormally accentuated by the
involvement of the supernatural (paraloyés). The demarcation between
narrative and lyrical genres is frequently blurred: many songs of the klefts are
in the form of laments, as are all of the small group of songs conventionally
known as “historical” (istoriká tragoúdia) which take the form of laments
for the loss of cities to the Ottomans—and chiefly of course the loss of
Constantinople in 1453. In all of these, it has often been noticed, a dramatic
structure takes the place of a narrative line, with frequent use of stylized
dialogue in order to set a scene, and juxtaposition of highly-drawn tableaux
or vividly depicted episodes taking the place of narrative transition.
Songs whose function is primarily lyrical are devoted to three central
preoccupations—love/sexuality, exile, and death; and one reason for the
surprising homogeneity of a tradition spanning different genres and subjects
is a parallelism and a range of mutual allusion among these three themes
which apparently goes very deep in Greek culture.
A second and generally separate tradition, which like the “demotic”
tradition of oral song seems to have lived until recently exclusively in the
realm of oral performance, is the folktale (paramýthi). Although verse
fragments are frequently worked into these oral narratives, the world of the
Greek folktale is far removed from that of the songs. The human setting is
neither one of warfare nor one of domestic conflict, but belongs rather to
the familiar fairytale world of handsome princes and beautiful princesses,
of magical transformations and encounters with supernatural beings. Some
of these, like the tale of the Cyclops, seem at first sight to emanate directly
from the ancient world, but
112 RODERICK BEATON

closer inspection reveals an interaction with the world of the book (which,
like that encountered in the demotic” tradition of song, does not necessarily
interfere with the oral style or technique of narration).
Closely related to the folktale is the topical, superstitious, or historical
legend (parádosi, pl. paradóseis). As regards the absence of fixed form or
influence of a narrative technique based on writing, the Greek paradóseis do
not differ from the folktales. But there is a clear distinction to be drawn both
in function and in genre. The paramýthi begins with an invitation (often in
verse) to relax and enjoy an amusing story, and ends with a delightful variant
of the “happily ever after” formula: “So they lived happily and [may we]
be even happier; I wasn’t there myself and you shouldn’t believe it either!”
The parádosi, on the other hand, is always much more concise in form,
being limited to a relatively straightforward statement of what is regarded as
fact, stating or explaining a local custom or belief. The following “legend”
explaining the activities of the French archaeological team at Delphi in the
nineteenth century aptly illustrates both the inventive power of this tradition
and its difference from the folktale:

The milords aren’t Christians, because no one’s seen them make the sign
of the Cross [i.e., in the Orthodox manner]. They’re descended from
the old pagan people of Delphi, who kept their treasures in a castle and
called it Adelphi [brothers], after the two princes who built it. When the
Holy Virgin and Christ came to these places, and everyone all around
became Christian, the Adelphians reckoned they would do better to go
away; so they went to the West [Frankiá] and took all their wealth with
them. The milords are their descendants, and have come now to worship
those lumps of stone.
(Politis 1904:no. 108)

We frequently find some overlap in content between the “demotic” tradition

of oral poetry and these legends, but none with the folktales.
The Greek shadow-puppet theater, named after its hero Karagiozis,
must also be mentioned as an oral tradition. This form of humor has probably
not had a very long tradition in Greek—its
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 113

immediate origin is the Turkish puppet-theater of Karagöz, and it is probable

that the Greek plays go back no further than the nineteenth century—but
it has acquired a distinct character and style of is own and was for about
a hundred years enormously popular with audiences. Texts attributed to
famous players (in prose, with some incidental songs) began to be recorded
and published in the early years of this century, but the art of the Karagiozis
performer remains one of extempore oral performance, and written texts
have never served as the basis for performing. In the Karagiozis tradition,
the sly underdog of the Ottoman Empire has become the sly Greek underdog,
who like his Turkish counterpart always manages to win through despite,
or even because of, an outrageous disregard for authority. The Greek
Karagiozis has also developed a large cast of character parts, based on the
idiosyncrasies of regional dialects, styles of dress and even songs; and some
of the plots, like that of “Alexander the Great and the Accursed Snake,”
draw their inspiration from oral paradóseis and a centuries-old tradition of
popular (written) literature.
Each of the traditions described so far can be regarded as “oral” in
the sense that writing and (sub)literary techniques have played no part in its
formation or transmission. That is to say, each tradition already existed fully
formed when it was first committed to writing, and that committal to writing
was entirely extrinsic (in the end even perhaps harmful) to the continued
development of the tradition. With these traditions, however, there coexist
others which possess oral features but do not seem to be wholly independent
of writing or recording in their composition and transmission. These are: the
folk songs of semi-professional itinerant minstrels who were once active in
Crete (rimadóri) and still are in Cyprus (piitárides) which I have elsewhere
described as comprising a “historical” tradition of folksong (Beaton
1980:151-78); the urban folk songs of the Ottoman and later Greek cities
(rebétika); and some of the many partisan songs of the Second World War
and Civil War in Greece (1940-49) which draw on the “demotic” tradition
of oral poetry rather than on contemporary popular song (andártika).
The principal characteristics of the “historical” tradition which
differentiate it from the “demotic” are the evidence for personal composition,
linked to a semi-professional or entrepreneurial status of the composer-
singer, and the use of rhyme, from which is
114 RODERICK BEATON

derived the name by which these songs have been known in Crete: rímes.
We also find the practice, of which the first known instance is in Crete in
1786 and which is still common among the piitárides of Cyprus, whereby
the non-literate poet himself commissions a written transcription of his
work, which today he may sell printed in the form of a broadsheet (fylládio).
These “historical” poems are lengthy narratives on subjects of topical or
local importance, sometimes of important events (such as the Cretan
“Daskaloyannis” which tells in over 1,000 lines the story of the abortive
revolt of the Sfakiots of western Crete against their Ottoman rulers in 1770),
but more often not (such as the lingering death of a young man called
Christofoudis from the village of Lefkara in Cyprus from an accidental
gunshot wound, recorded in 318 lines in a manuscript of 1803). Generally
these texts aim at (or ape) historical precision in the frequently awkward
attempt to versify the precise date of an occurrence, and their narrative style
is quite different from that of the oral songs of the demotic tradition, in
that, in place of dramatic juxtaposition, direct speech, and tersely presented
scenes, it tells “one thing after another,” often interspersed with remarks by
the narrator/singer himself.
The tradition of urban folk song (rebétiko) also places considerable
importance on personal composition. It originates in the cities of the
Ottoman Empire and the community in which it arose can better be defined
as a social stratum than on the basis of race or creed. Doubly disreputable in
Greek eyes for its low social origins and its easy assimilation of vocabulary,
musical styles, and general attitudes assumed to be the distinct prerogative
of Turks, the rebétiko escaped the attention of scholars until quite recently,
and its history can only be retraced through commercial phonograph
recording, which at the same time distorted whatever purely oral tradition
had been in existence before. The themes of the rebétiko are the gangster-
heroism of mánges, whose individualistic code of honor owed much to that
extolled in “demotic” songs of the klefts and other heroes out of a remoter
past like Diyenis and Mikrokostantinos; and the evocation of a variety of
depressed states, their antidote in hashish, and the prison regimen which
forms the final link in this vicious circle (and is presented in terms that little
differentiate it from life in the outside world).
Partisan songs of the Second World War and Civil War (andártika)
do not really represent a distinct category of oral
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 115

tradition. Those songs, among a substantial corpus, that reflect the themes
and styles of older kleftic ballads effectively belong with them in the
“demotic” tradition, while the bulk of partisan songs undoubtedly belongs
with popular song, and many were composed on the initiative of political
groups as propaganda, to be sung to well-known military and popular
tunes.
Finally, mention must be made of attempts that have recently been
made to identify the processes of oral tradition at work in late medieval
Greek texts written in the vernacular. The actual oral component in the
composition and/or transmission of these texts is still very uncertain, but it
is highly probable that during the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, when the
modern language was first tentatively being exploited for literary purposes,
the oral traditions of that time exercised a formative influence on writers
who had no other models of poetic composition in the vernacular on which
to draw. Oral tradition may in this way have played a part in creating the
epic/romance Digenes Akrites (twelfth century?), the comic begging poems
attributed to the prolific Byzantine man of letters Theodore Prodromos
(twelfth century), and the Greek version of the Chronicle of the Morea, the
long verse narrative of the Frankish conquest of southern Greece, written by
an ardent opponent of the Byzantines in a language and style relatively free
from their learned influence. More directly linked to the oral tradition of its
time is the heroic “Song of Armouris,” little more than a ballad in length and
style, and recorded in two manuscripts of the fifteenth century, although the
world it depicts had vanished some four centuries earlier.

Collections

1. Oral song. The collecting of Volkslieder or chansons populaires

in Greek goes back to the very beginning of the nineteenth century, with
the abortive collection of Von Haxthausen abandoned in 1820 (=1935), and
that of Claude Fauriel (1824, 1825). Neither of these collectors ever visited
Greece and their informants were educated Greeks who had left the Ottoman
Empire, often permanently, to live abroad. The same seems to be true of
Niccolo Tommaseo’s collection (1842) and the floridly entitled contribution
of a Greek expatriate living in St. Petersburg (Evlampios 1843). The first
collector to engage in any kind of direct field work, and also the first to
publish a collection within
116 RODERICK BEATON

the geographical area of Greece, was Andonios Manousos (1850), a friend

and disciple of Greece’s “national poet” Dionysios Solomos. Landmarks in
the sizeable bibliography of folksong collections in the second half of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth are Passow 1860, in which the
findings of several predecessors are collated (and surreptitiously conflated),
and several regional ones, notably by Sakellarios from Cyprus (1868,
1891), Ioannidis from Pontos (1870), Jeannarakis from Crete (1876), and
Aravantinos from Epiros (1880). In 1883 the Historical and Ethnological
Society was founded in Athens by, among others, the leading folklorist of
his day, Nikolaos Politis, and folksongs as well as other ethnographical
material were published from then onwards in its journal (Deltíon tis
Istorikís kai Ethnologikís Etaireías, 1883-), and later in the periodical
Laografía (1909-), which was founded by Politis alone. The initial phase of
collecting and publishing oral poetry comes to an end with the publication of
Politis’ Selections from the Songs of the Greek People (1914), a meticulous
collation and misguided conflation of the entire recorded corpus up to that
date. This edition is still regarded as authoritative in Greek schools, although
its fundamental shortcomings were pointed out more than fifty years ago
(Apostolakis 1929).
The founding of the journal Laografía a few years before, however,
sets the stage for twentieth-century collecting of oral material. Its volumes
from that time up until the present contain an enormous treasury of regional
material, scrupulously recorded, and for the first time with the features of the
regional dialect intact. Regional collections in this century have followed
this lead, with variable but generally increasing fidelity to the oral “text”
as performed (Kriaris 1920; Michailidis-Nouaros 1928; Baud-Bovy 1935,
1938). Little new material has been added since the Second World War to
that already known, although substantial archives of unpublished material
are housed by the Academy of Athens (Laografikón Archeíon, Leofóros
Syngroú, Athens) and by departments of Folklore (Laografía) at Greek
universities.
Several excellent editions have appeared in recent years, presenting
a sampling either of the whole corpus or of a specific part of it, but without
perpetuating the editorial shortcomings of Politis. The best in quality is
Academy of Athens (1963), but unfortunately the promised second volume,
which is to contain the lyrical songs, has still not appeared (although the
third volume containing a rich body of musical texts, was published as long
ago
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 117

as 1968). Other such “sampling” editions are D. Petropoulos (1958, 1959),

Ioannou (1966), and Mastrodimitris (1984). Excellent editions of particular
types of song are by Ioannou (1970) for the narrative ballads (paraloyés); by
A. Politis (1973) for the songs of the klefts; and by Guy Saunier (1983) for
the songs of exile. Of all these modern editions only those of the Academy
of Athens (1963) and Saunier (1983) collate older published versions with
unpublished archival material.

2. Folktales. Serious interest in folktales seems to have begun later

than in folk poetry, and even today the bibliography of Greek oral prose
is much less substantial. The German expatriate J. G. von Hahn, from
Ermoupolis on the island of Syros, seems to have been the first to make
a systematic collection, which, however, he published only in translation
(1864), as did Schmidt after him (1877). Jean Pio, working from von Hahn’s
posthumous papers, published the first Greek collection in Denmark in
1879, soon to be followed by Marianna Kambouroglou in the first volume
of the journal of the Historical and Ethnological Society in 1883 (=1924),
but the great majority of collected folktales were recorded in periodicals
and regional publications around and after the turn of the century. In many
respects the most remarkable is that of Dawkins (1916), in which Greek
dialect texts from the interior of Asia Minor were recorded and discussed
only a few years before the catastrophic Greek military defeat of 1922
that uprooted the entire Christian population permanently and effectively
annihilated many of the smaller Greek dialect communities. Good modern
collected editions are by Megas (1962) and Ioannou (1973). Folktales have
fared better than their verse counterparts in English translation (Dawkins
1953). The standard collection of legends (paradóseis) remains that of
Politis (1904).

3. Karagiozis. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that

the oral “texts” of the Karagiozis shadow-puppet theater have hardly been
collected at all. No records survive of shadow-puppet plays before 1921. In
that year the French scholar Louis Roussel published two volumes of texts
that he had taken down from the then-veteran player Andonis Mollas, which
he published in Athens with a French introduction and glossary. Three years
later Mollas’ contemporary, the Cretan Karagiozis player Markos Xanthos,
rushed into print with a “broadsheet” version of one of his plays, and in the
next eight years, up to his death in 1932, Xanthos
118 RODERICK BEATON

seems to have published versions of no less than forty-six of his performances.

In this practice he was followed by other players between the wars, so that a
modest archive of these poorly produced texts, clearly conceived by illiterate
or semi-literate players in the hope of selling them at performances, now
exists. But there is no evidence that any of the Karagiozis players have
been fully literate, and with the exception of the texts dictated by Mollas to
Roussel, we have only the work of doubtfully qualified amanuenses, produced
under the cheapest possible conditions. A modern edition of several of these
has been compiled by Ioannou in three volumes (1971), and some of the
same material had earlier been published in German translation by Jensen
(1954). There is a sizeable bibliography on the Turkish Karagöz: a recent
volume of texts (in Turkish) is edited by Kudret (1968-70); and two Turkish
texts in Greek translation are published with a substantial introduction by
Mystakidou (1982). An important archive of Karagiozis performances on
tape is housed in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Widener
Library, Harvard University, and the first scholarly edition of Karagiozis
material, from this collection, is currently being undertaken.

4. The “historical” tradition. In the collections this material is not

strictly segregated from the oral poetry of the “demotic” tradition, and we
find personal compositions on topical and historical themes co-existing with
the shorter ballad and lyrical pieces from the second volume of Fauriel’s
collection (1825) onwards. The oldest, and the longest, Cretan text has been
published in a separate critical edition (Laourdas 1947). The Cretan material
is principally to be found in Jeannaraki (1876) and Fafoutakis (1889),
the Cypriot in Sakellarios (1891) and Farmakidis (1926). More recent
developments of these local “historical” traditions are mainly to be found
in Detorakis (1976) and Kapsomenos (1979), for Crete; and for Cyprus
in Yangoullis (1976). Unpublished material, much of it belonging to this
tradition, was collected on tape by James Notopoulos and D. Petropoulos in
1953, and is housed, along with the Karagiozis archive, in the Milman Parry
Collection at Harvard.

5. Urban folksong and partisan songs. The principal source for the
study of the rebétiko was until very recently 78 rpm gramophone records,
and these have provided almost exclusively the
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 119

basis for the modern editions. In addition to these editions (I. Petropoulos
1968; Schorelis 1978-82; and Gauntlett 1983, Appendix), a further and often
overlapping source of material has been the copious “autobiographies” of
retired exponents of the tradition, which were in fact dictated, and contain the
texts of many songs as recalled by their “authors” (for example, Vamvakaris
1973).
Several collections of partisan songs (andártika) have appeared
since 1974, when the lifting of a thirty-year ban on Communist Party
membership and activity in Greece for the first time made the publication
of most of them a legal possibility. Adamou (1977) presents a substantial
sampling, with introduction; and a scholarly thesis on the subject by Riki
van Boeschoten (University of Amsterdam) is nearing completion.

6. Medieval vernacular texts. The medieval Greek texts in which

the influence of oral tradition has been suspected scarcely belong in this
section, as they are only known to us in literary form. Suffice it to say that
extracts from all of them, with notes and further bibliography, may be found
in L. Politis (1975), with the exception of the “Song of Armouris,” which is
printed in Kalonaros (1941:vol. 2, pp. 213-17).

Discussions

The history of scholarly interest in Greek oral traditions has been well
covered, from widely differing standpoints, by three recent publications:
Kyriakidou-Nestoros 1978; Herzfeld 1982; A. Politis 1984. Kyriakidou-
Nestoros gives a straightforward and factually full account of the intellectual
interests of the first collectors and students of Greek oral material in the
nineteenth century, which she categorizes as “pre-scientific” and strongly
colored by the then current equation of oral traditional lore with “popular
antiquities”; this was followed by a “proto-scientific” period inaugurated
by the meticulous, if sometimes misdirected, scholarship of Nikolaos
Politis, whose career spans the period from 1870 to his death in 1921. It
is to Politis that we owe the first really systematic collections of a wide
range of ethnographic material, and the first attempt to apply the methods
of comparative mythology to Greek material. He too, as was natural at this
time, sought to define modern Greek culture in terms of continuity with its
ancient past, but to this end he
120 RODERICK BEATON

was assiduous in comparing it with an impressively wide range of

contemporary material from outside Greece. The second half of Kyriakidou-
Nestoros’ book is then devoted to the career of her father, Stilpon Kyriakidis,
who succeeded Politis to the chair of Laografía in Athens. The cornerstone
of Kyriakidis’ achievement, she rightly argues, is to be found in the historical
approach to ethnography. While still not seeking to detach modern Greek
ethnography from its putative forebears in the ancient world, he set out
systematically to discover the historical factors that had determined the
course of such a long transmission. His conclusion was that the direct
origin of modern oral material, particularly songs, was not to be sought in
the classical or even pre-classical world (see, for example, Lawson 1910
as a classic of this approach), but in two well-defined historical epochs:
the time of the late Roman Empire, and the highpoint of Byzantine-Arab
confrontation in the Middle East, between the eighth and eleventh centuries.
(The most important essays in which this position is developed have been
republished as Kyriakidis 1979). Kyriakidou-Nestoros is broadly prepared
to endorse these conclusions, although her own interest clearly lies more in
the synchronic approach of structural anthropology. Kyriakidou-Nestoros
perhaps wisely stops short of assessing the achievements and shortcomings
of her immediate predecessors and contemporaries, but makes the point,
which I believe to be justified, that her father’s work between the wars
represents the last time that Greek ethnologists have turned to the outside
world and endeavored to relate their own findings to wider theoretical
perspectives.
Alexis Politis (1984), dealing with the earliest interest in Greek folk
song by Greeks and especially by foreigners in the period culminating with
the appearance of Fauriel’s Collection (1824, 1825), extends the perspective
backwards in time and places the discovery of Greek folk song, at the turn of
the nineteenth century, in the context of European ideological developments
of the period.
The other work which provides a partial overview of scholarship
on Greek oral material (Herzfeld 1982) has been widely reviewed (e.g.,
Mackridge 1983; Lambropoulos 1983; Beaton 1984; Sanders 1984) and
need not be discussed in detail here. In dealing with the period from about
1800 to 1922, it covers only the ethnographical pursuits of Greeks (who do
not represent a majority of those active in the field for all of the period).
However, the book is a stunning exercise in the “anthropology of
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 121

anthropologists,” and seeks to demonstrate not just that Greek ethnography

in the nineteenth century was crucially dominated by the necessity of the
newly formed Greek state to acquire and buttress a national identity, but
further how any culture in the attempt to define itself must simultaneously
distort the very evidence on which that definition is based.
The academic study of oral traditions in Greece has changed
relatively little since the retirement of Kyriakidis in the early 1960s. None
of the oral traditions described here is the object of a special branch of
study in Greek academic institutions, but all are subsumed together under
the heading of Laografía (roughly “folklore” or “ethnology”). The scope of
this study is well indicated by Loukatos (1978), and is traditionally divided
into “monuments of the word” (a term that rather prejudges the nature of
the oral traditions to which it refers), rituals, customs and beliefs, and what
we would call physical ethnography. The curriculum is very large; but as
outlined by Loukatos it leaves little room for anthropological method or,
with limited exceptions, for comparative study of similar material from
outside Greece. This situation is now rapidly changing in some (but not all)
Greek universities.
Until relatively recently the different oral traditions described here
were either not consistently distinguished or, in some cases, even ignored by
the ethnographers. In the last few years this picture has changed considerably,
so that a sizeable bibliography now exists devoted to each tradition. A brief
guide to that bibliography follows.
1. Oral song (the “demotic” tradition). This has always proved
the most attractive field for scholars and amateurs alike, and most of what
has already been said applies primarily to this tradition. In Greece Kostas
Romaios has published a seminal study of a specific formal property of this
tradition (1963) and has also written, less convincingly, on the historical
and mythological roots of particular types of song (1968), while Georgios
Megas, champion of the Finnish School in Greece, has subjected a single
ballad, “The Bridge of Arta,” to exhaustive examination of more than three
hundred recorded Greek variants, which he then compares with a wide
range of Balkan counterparts (1976). Although this study stands out in
its meticulous attention to detail, the conclusion offered—that the Balkan
ballad originated among Greeks
122 RODERICK BEATON

of Asia Minor in the sixth century A.D.—seems scarcely worthy of the

laborious effort involved.
Outside Greece Michael Herzfeld was the first to apply computer
techniques to analysis of Greek oral songs, and the first to advocate a
specifically structuralist methodology in the field (1972). Beaton (1980)
looks at the whole field of “folk poetry” (including the “historical” tradition
and modern offshoots) in terms of the Parry/Lord oral-formulaic theory and
of the ideas on myth and symbolism of, respectively, Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Dan Sperber; and M. Alexiou (1983) makes a major contribution to the
study of “domestic” ballads (paraloyés) in terms of myth and synchronic
function, to which the description of these songs above is indebted. A
“contextual” approach has been proposed by Herzfeld (1981) and Caraveli
(1982), the latter persuasively arguing that meaning in songs is derived from
performative context, implicit allusions to received tradition, and social and
local determinants, as well as from internal factors. Most recently post-
structuralist perspectives on this tradition have been launched by Herzfeld
and Alexiou (both forthcoming).

2. Folktales. The appropriateness of the Aarne-Thompson

classification was quickly recognized, the more so since all the oral prose
narratives which by their specifically local character are likely to fall outside
of it have been classified, ever since Politis (1904), as paradóseis (legends).
I know of no specific studies of the latter, although they continue to be used
as evidence for many sorts of inquiry. However, the style, performance,
and status of these “factual” statements deserve some consideration in
their own right. On the folktales proper, Dawkins’ commentaries (1916)
and introduction (1953) are of considerable interest, but relatively little
of substance has been published more recently. The principal exception is
Meraklis (1973), which provides a good general introduction to folktale
studies and discusses the style, content, and origins of specific Greek
folktales with scholarly sensitivity. Alexiadis (1982) is not unrepresentative
of the present state of the art, in its scholarly but unimaginative application
of historical-geographical methodology to the Greek versions of a single
tale-type.

3. Karagiozis. Since Roussel’s pioneering publication and discussion

of the Greek shadow-puppet theater (1921), quite a large
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 123

bibliography, mostly of journalistic articles and enthusiastic encomia, has

built up, and the best guide, which links this bibliography to worldwide
studies of shadow-theater, is to be found in Mystakidou (1982). The same
volume offers the most restrained and informed account of the relation
between the Greek Karagiozis and Turkish Karagöz. (In an expensively
produced and enticingly illustrated publication, Fotiadis [1977] had
attempted to claim that the true origin of the Greek shadow-theater lay in
pre-Aristophanic performances in Greece, to which all its near and middle
eastern manifestations are ultimately linked.) Much useful information is
contained in the “Memoirs” of the consummate player Spatharis (1960),
who died in 1974, and analytical accounts of the technique of the Karagiozis
player and the content of the plays from an anthropological perspective are
to be found in, respectively, Myrsiades (1976) and Danforth (1976). There
is as yet no study devoted to the specifically oral techniques of composition
and performance in the Greek shadow-theater (but see Kiourtsakis [1983],
Sifakis [1984], and the exhaustive bibliographies of Puchner [1978, 1982]
in which 435 items have so far been listed).

4. The “historical” tradition. This designation, like that of the

“demotic” tradition, is proposed and explained in Beaton (1980). As such
the term “historical tradition” can therefore only have provisional standing,
but the recognition that the material described under that heading forms a
distinct body is already present in folk terminology, which refers to rímes
(rhymes/rhymed poems) in Crete and piímata (poems) in Cyprus, while
the oral poems of the “demotic” tradition are always known simply as
tragoúdia (songs). Nikolaos Politis devoted a lengthy article to this tradition
(1915), in which he contrasted it with the anonymous products of what we
should today call the oral tradition, and thereafter commentators are (not
without justice) inclined to be scathing about the artistic merits of these
poems. It was Farmakidis (1926) who first introduced the notion that these
longer, semi-professional compositions constituted an epic tradition, and
this possibility was embraced with enthusiasm by the American scholar and
pupil of A. B. Lord, James Notopoulos. The Notopoulos archive at Harvard
is said to contain about a thousand items collected on tape in the 1950s, and
it was songs of this tradition that Notopoulos was particularly anxious to
collect (1959).
124 RODERICK BEATON

Notopoulos’ untimely death prevented his completing a book-length study

of what he regarded as an oral epic tradition, on the lines of that studied
by Parry and Lord in Yugoslavia, in modern Greek. Subsequent work
has shown this position to be untenable, at least in the manner in which
Notopoulos formulated it in his published articles (Yangoullis 1976, 1978;
Beaton 1980; Papadopoullos 1976, 1977, 1980), but it remains true that
Notopoulos’s proposal first revived interest in an undervalued area of Greek
oral tradition. And although it now seems impossible to see, in the Cretan
and Cypriot itinerant minstrels, analogs of pre-Homeric epic versifiers,
recent studies nonetheless suggest that they might have useful things to tell
us about the vexed theoretical questions of the “transitional” text, in that
oral and written features seem to coexist in this tradition (Eideneier 1984;
Beaton forthcoming).

5. Urban folksong (rebétiko). Until the end of the 1960s almost a

taboo subject, on account of its association with anti-social behavior and its
shared features with its counterpart in Turkish culture, the rebétiko became
the object of a vigorous revival in the 1970s. At one level this may have
been prompted by the initiative, and unparalleled success, a decade earlier
of the popular composers Hadzidakis and Theodorakis, who transplanted
someting of its musical style into a distinctive form of popular art-music;
but the serious craze for rebétiko really begins with Ilias Petropoulos
(1968). Petropoulos seems to have conceived this publication as itself an
anti-social act, in the spirit of many of the songs, and took care to include
some obscenities in his introduction which the military censors of that time
could not ignore. In this way the rebetic revival can be seen as a child of the
Greek junta of 1967-74.
Petropoulos’ book was followed, after 1974, by a spate of publications
and gramophone records, and various claims were put forward about the
nature and history of this tradition, with little scholarly basis. Against this
background Damianakos (1976) stands out as a serious attempt to treat the
song texts as sociological evidence, and Gauntlett (1983) provides the first
exhaustive analysis of them, in relation to theories of oral tradition and in
their historical development from the beginning of the twentieth century
when they are first attested. Gauntlett (1982-83) makes a concise attempt
to define rebétiko in terms of genre, and Conway Morris (1980) couples
important historical background with a properly
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 125

compiled contribution to discography.

6. Medieval vernacular texts. It has generally been supposed since the

late nineteenth century that the epic ballad, the “Song of Armouris,” which
deals with conflict between Greeks and Saracens such as existed during the
eighth to eleventh centuries, and which is preserved in two manuscripts
of the fifteenth century, is a product of oral tradition. The same has often
been claimed for the epic or romance Digenes Akrites, which undoubtedly
draws on popular (and at this date one may assume therefore oral) tradition,
although today it seems most probable that the texts we possess derive from
a consciously literary type of composition, in the eleventh or twelfth century.
The relation of both these texts to oral tradition is discussed in L. Politis
(1970), Beck (1971), and Beaton (1980, 1981a, and 1981b), where relevant
bibliography can also be found. A. B. Lord published some quantitative
results of formula analysis of different versions of Digenes in the Appendix
to The Singer of Tales, and has returned to the subject more recently (1977),
but avoids the categorical conclusion that any of the versions represents a
recording from oral tradition as he has defined it.
It was Constantine Trypanis, in a brief and rather sweeping article
(1963), who first made the suggestion that the vernacular literature of the
last centuries of Byzantium as a whole constituted the remnants of a once
thriving oral tradition. Then Michael and Elizabeth Jeffreys (1971) proposed
that the wide variations in the manuscript tradition of a vernacular romance
text could be explained in terms of oral performance and the operation of
memory. In a series of articles since then, they have elaborated a proposal,
initiated by a quantitative formula analysis of a 12,000-line text using
computer techniques, that the style of all this “popular” (or vernacular)
literature derives from the conditions of oral composition and transmission,
although they leave open the question of how the text as we possess it in
each case came to be created, or re-created, in writing (M. Jeffreys 1973, E.
Jeffreys 1979, E. and M. Jeffreys 1979).2
In a parallel endeavor, Hans Eideneier (1982, 1983, 1984) has
proposed criteria for distinguishing between written and oral transmission
in the manuscript tradition of these texts, and concludes that all of them
circulated in a form of oral transmission much more restricted than the
Parry/Lord model (followed by the
126 RODERICK BEATON

Jeffreys), and only came to be collected in written form when the oral
tradition began to decline. He too leaves open the question of an “original”
form behind these orally circulated poems, although he hints that they may
have been popular paraphrases of texts conceived in the learned language.

Prospects

It is not by any means assumed by all commentators that the

emergence of Greece as a modern nation alongside its partners in the
European Economic Community necessarily spells the end of its once
thriving oral traditions. Profound changes have of course occurred. And it is
probably a general truth, wherever oral traditions are recorded and studied
and their productions published as texts, that the traditions themselves will be
radically affected. In Greece the “demotic” tradition of oral poetry scarcely
functions any longer as a process of re-composition in performance, and
the length and coherence of recorded variants indicate a real deterioration.
On the other hand, the function of preservation once performed by the
techniques of formulaic composition and the acuter memory of the non-
literate performer is now fulfilled by published anthologies, by tapes and
records. The urge to sing the songs remains, although the special creative
property of performance without reference to a fixed text has transferred
itself to other media—to literature in one direction, and to the thriving art of
extemporizing rhymed distichs in the other. The same can broadly be said of
the other traditions mentioned; and one should not forget the continuing debt
of modern Greek literature and music at all levels to these oral traditions.
The prospects for future scholarship are more open still. There is
probably little “traditional” material that has not yet been transcribed in
some form, but the probablity of oral traditions developing their own futures
implies a need for continued recording. Almost all the recorded material
so far is deficient in indications of context and the non-verbal aspects of
performance, and there is room for work in this direction. Judiciously
selective use could undoubtedly also be made of the many texts in archives
still unpublished, and a major contribution in the future should be the
publication, in some form, of the sound archives of an earlier period, such
as the Melpo Merlier Collection in the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in
Athens (recorded in 1930) and the Notopoulos
 ORAL TRADITIONS OF MODERN GREECE 127

Collection at Harvard (recorded in 1953), on which a start is only now being

made.
Otherwise, it would be foolhardy to predict, and presumptuous
to attempt to prescribe, the directions which future studies of Greek oral
culture might take. Closer integration of ethnographic studies in Greece
with the aims and methods of scholars in other countries is an obvious
desideratum, and there are signs of increased momentum in this direction
in Greece today. It is now perhaps for those of us whom Greek scholars
have in the past mistrusted or found indifferent, to demonstrate how highly
we value the oral material and the intellectual insights which they are in a
position to contribute to the understanding of a phenomenon which is truly
universal, namely oral tradition.

King’s College London

Notes
1
“Modern Greek” is assumed to mean not just “belonging to the Greek state,” whose birth
was heralded by the revolution against the Ottomans of 1821, but to include everything that pertains
to speakers of the modern languages wherever they may live or have lived, and going back to the
period from which that language is first continuously attested in written records, that is, to the twelfth
century.
2
For a thorough discussion of this work and its background, see the Jeffreys’ “The Oral
Background of Byzantine Popular Poetry,” to appear in a future issue of Oral Tradition.

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