A beautiful song about a school burning down in September 1821 in Galaxidhi. In 1930 listeners must have remembered the recent great fire of Smyrna 1922. But burning schools and burning cities will always be with us it seems. The song was written, played on guitar and sung by Kostas Bezos, the mysterious cartoonist, actor, journalist and musician who recorded under the name A. Kostis. He was born in the same year, 1905, as Markos and wrote an article describing a visit to Votaniko in the thirties where Markos directed the orchestra in 'his own peculiar way'. 'Pianissimo', he wrote, is conveyed by scaring the performers and shouting "morto"' ... 'The bouzouki trembles in his hands ... the curls on his forehead dance madly to the music'.

Tony Klein, a British psychiatrist and bouzouki player has gathered together Bezos' extraordinary 1930 and 1931 recordings on a vinyl record: called ‘A. Kostis, The Jail's a Fine School’. It comes with translations of the songs, a glossary, detailed notes on the tunings and modes of each song and some great detective work on how this mercurial middle class man came to record some of the earliest classic 'hard core' rebetiko songs on his steel guitar some years before the bouzouki was allowed in the recording studio. Since yesterday it's official according to the BBC: digital is old news and vinyl is coming out on top again. The sound quality of this disc makes you believe Kostis is sitting and playing in your own living room.
Tony Klein's collaborators on the 'Jail's a Fine School' were Gordon Ashworth (American musician and instigator of the Olvido Records vinyl label and Dimitris Kourtis, musician and researcher. It's interesting that this particular song is described in the booklet that goes with it as a 'slow tsifteteli'. Markos Vamvakaris, when asked if there was such a thing as 'βαρυ τσιφτετελι' (heavy tsifteteli) said yes there was. This is the kind of song he might perhaps have had in mind. (See 'Addenda' on the Greeklines website for this interview).

'I was born in the capital of the Cyclades, in beautiful Syros in a poor neighborhood of Upper Chora called Skali in 1905 on Wednesday 10th May, third hour of the morning, to very poor parents ... . My father’s name was Dhomenikos, my mother’s Elpidha, born Provelengiou. They fell in love and got married, penniless both’... 

Markos was the first child born to the couple and the one best able to remember his mother as a beguiling young woman before she was ground down by poverty and delinquent children: ‘My mother was pretty and cheerful. She made jokes, sang nicely and was full of life. As for my father, the whole of Upper Chora loved him, the whole of Syros did - he’d never harmed a soul.’  

Here's a song Markos used to illustrate the famous karadouzeni, a charming syrto which shows that even at the end of his life he still had in mind the tunes his father used to play on the bagpipe at carnival time while he beat a drum, and also his childhood chore of fetching water from the well. 'My mother would give me a small pitcher and say ‘Off you go and fetch some water.’ We got our water from Plati where the springs were. For the best water though, we went to Piyi where the church was, Saint Dionysus I think or else the Virgin of the Life-giving Spring'.
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A song about girls getting in on the act. People often associate the rebetiko look with the republica - a round brimmed hat, but that was not the style for Markos who was loading first coal and then heavy merchandize on and off cargo ships in Piraeus from the age of 15. Then he did flaying and slaughtering in the meat market for many more years before he started playing and recording songs on bouzouki and blossomed into the Bohemian life:
'Like all of them, I liked to dress well. I dressed in the mangas style, like a free spirit, you know, not flashy with a tie and a republica and all that. No. Sometimes I even wore the workingman’s cap. What I mean is I always dressed stylishly, especially later when I had money. English suits, yes, but I always looked a tad raffish. I mean, I might be wearing the finest suit that cost a thousand, maybe two thousand drachmas, but I’d still be wearing a flannel undershirt ...'
The word trayiaska apparently is the Roumanian for ‘Hurrah’.
When Roumanian students visited Greece at the beginning of the 20th century they used to throw their caps in the air and shout ‘Hurrah for Greece!’: 'trayiaska Grecia!' and so the cap took its name.

.'Mother they stuck a knife into me’. Here is an invitation from a son to his mother, to come weep on Sunday at his tomb. The final verse is steeped in the culture of knife-crime and honour killing, the violent ambience in which Markos lived his life. His brother was imprisoned for murder, his sister in law was stabbed to death. It’s the very opposite of the Christian message, but the opening verses call up the powerful image of the Mater Dolorosa – the eternal mother weeping over the sufferings of her son. Markos’ Catholic upbringing, the hymns, the confessionals, the processions, made a strong impact on his imagination. Here he describes the Good Friday procession:
'On Good Friday they got out the Epitaphios. It’s a big thing for us, this Epitaphios. It pulls together all the spiritual stuff and all the symbols of Christ’s passion like the ladders they hung him up on, the ropes they dragged him with, the gall they gave him to drink and the bloodstained robes they stripped off him. Every Christian who follows behind the Epitaphios carries the weight on his back. All the sufferings of Christ are paid up and done with. Clean slate. Then everyone sings psalms. All the Epitaphios tunes were sad. We kids went and listened to the church service with lanterns and candles and waited for the Epitaphios to come out. It was decorated with the first flowers of the year. All the housewives in Syra picked flowers and brought them to the church for the Epitaphios.'
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In the summer of 1925 Markos was fed up with military service and desperate for a discharge but with 2 years’ worth of detentions stacked up for absences without leave there was no end in sight. A music-loving adjutant was on his side and cooked up a plan: ‘ “Some day soon the garrison commander’s fiancée is going to come here. Since you’re such a cool customer, barge your way into his office. When he sees you he’ll be struck dumb.”
I did as he said. I burst in and saluted in faultless military style. As soon as he saw me the garrison commander began to twitch. His fiancée turned to him and said:
“Christos, who is this?”
“You see this man? He's the worst soldier in the whole outfit.”
“Is he a thief?”
“No.”
“What is he Christos?”
“A regular absconder - a disgrace to my regiment.”
Then I got started on my rules and regulations:
“The honourable garrison commander finds fault with me for being absent but I’ve read my soldier’s handbook. I happen to be married. When a regiment is stationed in the same area as a soldier’s home, the soldier has leave to go sleep at his own place - and I’ve got two kids.’ (I didn’t even have cats!)
Says the garrison commander: “Oh yeah! so you’re the kind of guy we can allow to go home and you’ll be back next day? Like hell you are! You’ll go and start a rumpus in the slaughterhouse! Didn’t I tell you to sit tight and behave yourself if you wanted your discharge? I’ve reached the point where I’ve a good mind to pack you off to the ‘Grannies’ (Yiayiadhes) in Samos!”’…(Autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris p. 85).

This was clearly a dire threat and a great puzzle to the translator. Could grannies be that bad? These ‘Grannies’ in Samos, who came with a capital letter and the masculine article, must be a formidable bunch of viragos - but to a translator whose ‘cultural baggage’ included the Giles Granny cartoons  it was, ever so briefly, imaginable.

 Translator's mental picture of a formidable Samian Granny ....

With a little more digging however, the extraordinary story of the Yiayas brothers’revolt of June 1925 came to light. It should be explained that Yiayias, their family surname, if you put it in the plural, means Grannies - an incongrous name for a bunch of dashing rebels whose exploits became the subject of two wonderful songs by Kostas Roukounas as well as a Karaghiozi play. The earlier Roukounas song refers to a savage battle that took place in 1917 between the Yiayias brothers (Royalists) and Venizelist troops in the village of Kosmadhaioi. It was the time of the national schism and Samos had declared for the Venizelist government in Thessaloniki. The Venizelists burst into the village, killed Georgios one of the brothers and burnt their mother and sister alive. The other brothers escaped. Iannis Yiayias who later wrote his memoirs went into exile with his brothers; he was imprisoned for a while in Syros but later had an amnesty.
The revolt in June 1925, celebrated in the second Rounas song, started as a raiding party in three stolen cars. The brothers returned from exile and arrived by boat at Marathokambos. They drove to Karlobasi where they took the Police station by surprise, released and armed the prisoners. Then they robbed a bank and captured all the key positions on the island, without a fight since everyone was fast asleep. Astonished by their own success they declared Samian Independence the next day, lowered the Greek flag, raised the flag of the Entente (French, Italian and British), and demanded the resignation of the Greek government in Athens. Kondylis, then minister for the interior, (later, one of the prime-ministers Markos mentions in his famous song: ‘Markos O Prothypourgos’) immediately sent 1000 troops with a naval flotilla to retake the island. Since the native Samians weren’t too keen on revolution this was easily done. The rebel brothers fled to Asia Minor with sack loads of money. The escapade comes across more heroical and less farcical in the songs, naturally. 

​A song for Mother's Day - about the boys just old enough to be shot but still young enough to think about their mothers. Markos wrote it after the Germans left in October 1944. This is a recording by Markos' son Stelios who, like Dalaras, leaves out the last two verses which Markos gave in the Autobiography: 'One that went down very well was a zebekiko called Chaidhari. Chaidhari was a prison camp where they assembled the prisoners. They took them there from Merlin Street and that’s where they killed them. We sang this a lot but I didn’t record it' (p.188)

​Alexander Clapp who reviewed Markos’ Autobiography in last week’s TLS writes that ‘Rebetiko is the beloved music of working-class Greeks. Turkish in origin, it is tied to Communism, hashish and the anti-establishment. It is accompanied by a six-stringed bouzouki and sung by a figure called a manghas, an untranslatable term conjuring up something between a pimp and a bohemian’. Clapp obviously likes to live dangerously. Shooting people down for such broad bold definitions is the favourite sport of rebetiko devotees around the globe. Here is fuel for several posts. But for starters let’s just take a closer look at that very plausible looking package of ‘communism, hashish and the anti-establishment’.
Post war generations tend to figure that a proletarian with hashish coming out of his ears and a stringed instrument is sure to be a lefty - probably a Communist. But this is to forget the puritanical flavour of Communism in Athens at the end of the Occupation and the start of the civil war. If history is divided between cavaliers and roundheads, the Communists were roundheads and the rebetes were cavaliers. Libertinism and Opium for the people was decidedly not on the Communist program of reform. Here’s how Markos remembers the Communists at the end of 1944 when he was working at a dive called the Kare tou Assou:
'There were communists who came there too and they were always on the look out for their enemies the Chites (the infamous security battalions) so once again we had some ugly bust-ups, pretty much every night. The communists used to come to me and say "Hey you’ve got to stop singing these songs about hashish." Chaos, death and destruction all around us and these guys wanted me to stop singing my hashish songs! They were dead set against them. "We’ll send you into exile, we’ll drive you out. Don’t sing these songs!" They were squeezing me on both sides. The Chites would come along: ‘Go on Markos, sing them. Don’t you mind anybody, we’ll protect you.’ The Chites and the communists, boy, that was one hell of a business. No picnic. The antartes (communist partisans) wanted me to play my stuff but not the hashish songs. The people mustn’t get to know about this kind of thing. These guys were serious. They wanted me to be serious too and sing serious. But the chites used to say "Play whatever you like. Nobody can stop you."
They were hunting each other down, killing each other. They had battles in the street, right outside our joint. It was a savage struggle. I had to try and keep on terms with everyone. Of course I wasn’t going to show whose side I was on. And I wasn’t on anybody’s side either. Neither the antartes nor the Chites. I was a Greek through and through. I loved my country and I was just waiting for the time when we’d be set free from this anguish, from these guys on the one hand and those guys on the other. I minded my own business. I worked day and night at the Kare tou Assou, I got paid, I did my job.
Like I said, the Germans had left and Greece was on the brink of falling into the hands of these communist guys. The others, the Chites I mean, did at least help to stop that from happening. There I was in the middle of it all, keeping my cards close to my chest because I didn’t want either side to kill me. So many times they beat people up, even at our joint, and I’d get in there:
"Hey guys, it won’t do. It’s a sin. We’re all brothers!"
"Keep out of it Markos!" they’d say to me - whether they were Chites or antartes, "Don’t you get mixed up in these things." So I sat tight because there was nothing else I could do. I had to do what they said. That’s how things were at that time, until we got shot of this misery and the whole damn lot of them went away.'
There’s something ever so faintly reproachful in the way Clapp points out that Markos, had a ‘studiously detached’ existence, ‘had little time for politics and never identified with the Left, even during the Occupation’. Mark Mazower’s brilliant book: ‘Inside Hitler’s Greece’ makes it easy to understand why people like Markos were not over enthused by politics. Athens was a battle zone. Markos exhibited the dogged pragmatism of the kosmakis, the poor man on the street, a man with a family depending on him, at a time when people dropped dead from hunger and there were daily blockades and mass executions. If you didn’t keep history out of your hair you were likely to end up swinging from a lamppost.
As for being anti-Establishment’, it would be truer to say the rebetiko world was simply a parallel universe with its own language conventions and codes. It was anarchic and there was no way a free-spirited mangas was ever going to tow anybody’s party line. Disobedience, yes but opposition, no, not really. Relations with figures of authority were rather more subtle than that of underdog and oppressor. Just as Robin Hood needs his Sheriff of Nottingham, so, in the self-mythologizing world of the mangas a fearsome scourge of a police chief was a respected enemy someone you could write a song about. What’s more, rebetiko had passionate enthusiasts even among the so-called ‘Establishment’. When Markos was doing his military service in 1925 the regimental Adjutant used to summon him to his office, give him coffee and hashish in return for baglama and songs. In Thessalonica in the thirties, Markos, Papaioannou and Stratos became very fond of the police chief Mouschountis who was, needless to say, a ‘ferocious scourge of criminals’ but he couldn’t get enough bouzouki - inviting Markos and the boys to play for him in discreet spots around the city. He kept hashish in his drawer to pay them with. 

Markos wrote this song for a mystery woman who came every night to Votanikos just before the war broke out. ‘There were loads of other women who came just to hear me and see me. They really fancied me, you know what I mean? I was a pretty fit guy back then ... I could see her sitting there but I wasn’t going to tell her "I wrote it for you". I fancied her. I saw she was beautiful and I sang this whenever she came. Of course she would have guessed I’d written it for her. For sure that’s why she came, but she never even invited me to go sit at her table so she could offer me a drink. Maybe that’s because she didn’t come alone. She always had company but she came sure as clockwork ... '
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It's 44 years to the day since Markos died, 8th Feb 1972. He always said the bouzouki would reach the moon. The pages of the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) where his Autobiography has been reviewed this week, would have seemed to him even more remote than the moon. '"Markos", says the reviewer, 'is to street culture what Kazantzakis is to its fiction ... though outside the country he remains virtually unknown.' Well, the comments we see on the book’s Facebook page from Alaska, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, not to mention England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Baltic states might seem to indicate otherwise.  
At any rate, here's a fine song from 1949 that celebrates the two things Markos loved most in life: women and bouzouki.  But what he said about this song reveals the pragmatism of an older, wiser hard-working man who had responsibilities:
'The ‘road’ is hidjaskiar. The bohemian life is the rackety life, you know, dancing, partying, all that sort of thing. But of course a guy has to work first and then he’ll do the bohemian life, because if he doesn’t work, how’s it going to happen? With work there’ll be the money and everything he needs to lead this kind of life ....' 

Although Markos and his fellow Catholics ie Frankosyrans might be addressed as ‘Frangos’ in the same derogatory way that an Irish navvy would be called ‘Mick’, he was proud of being, like most of the peasant class in Syros, an ‘original’ Frankosyran – or in other words, a ‘Frank’. This was a term loosely applied to Syrans who’d converted to Catholicism under the Venetians in the 13th century. To Markos’ mind this meant he was one of the ‘native’ Syrans - unlike the ‘Johnny-come- lately’ Orthodox down in the port of Ermoupoli who had arrived as refugees from the Turks in the early19th century and by the middle of that century had turned Ermoupoli into the most important port and hub of Greece.  There was solidarity among Frankosyrans. They stuck together even in Piraeus, and if Markos saw a beautiful girl he lusted after at the back of a crowded café in Syros, why then, clearly she had to be a Frank. But the most important thing about this song is not so much the mystery girl as the magic of those place names in conjuring up a childhood idyll:
'In the summer people went back to their villages ... down to Kini, Della Grazia, Parakopi, or Finika. There was a place called Pateli too, which I put in that Frangosyriani song ... I used to play with the kids of all the other families. We ran about all over the place filching figs and cutting grapes on the sly.... I remember summer when I was a child. In front of the village the river Platis ran between us and the field. There was a threshing floor there. Oh boy, it was happy days at threshing time! The river came out of Piyi further on up and we used to go and play there, me, Petros and Dimitrios Delasoudhas, ... a whole bunch of kids from the neighbourhood of Skali. There were hollows in the rock where the water got deeper and we made little toy boats out of paper or tin. This little river back then always had water even in the summer.' 
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​Makriyiannis was a hero of the Greek war of independence who later joined in the revolt against King Otto in 1843 and spent the next ten years in prison. Like Markos – who also spent some time in prison - he had minimal schooling and had to earn his bread from the age of 7. Alexakis was enthused by his 'Απομνημονεύματα' (Memoirs) because of their 'κέφι, το νεύρο, και η γκρίνια'– their ‘spirit, their nerve and plaintiveness’. They are, says, Alexakis, more than anything else, like a 'long drawn-out love letter ....'

​POST SCRIPT: The writer Christos Chomenidhis also compared Markos with Makriyiannis  in his selection of 5 books that show the ‘real Greece’. - See home page Greeklines.