‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
These, I now know, were the actual words (frequently misquoted) of the
Spanish-American writer George Santayana. Well, quote or misquote, the message
is clear. Sadly, I see this failure of memory all around me. I read an
interview the other day with a Turkish artist who, talking of recent political
demonstrations in Istanbul and elsewhere, claimed that respect for human
rights, women's rights, freedom of expression and freedom of speech had
declined in this country in the past ten years. As a close observer of events
over the past eighteen years, I was surprised. If he had kept to the issue of the
preservation of a green area in Taksim, I could have understood his anger - but
to make that claim in a country with such a recent history of military coups,
civilian disappearances, torture, suppression of minorities, honour killings,
and corruption in government, civil service and football is beyond laughable.
Still, there it is. The guy said it, the female
interviewer recorded it, the Western media published it, and their public, for
lack of an alternative point of view, or perhaps just because they want to,
probably believe it. What is sadder, however, is I imagine that guy, as an
artist, had a fairly good education, and a lot of other educated young people
in Turkey also seem to believe it.
Well, I have written my last words about the Taksim
protests. What I want to talk about here is music, and its power to bring
people together, if only we can hear its message. I want to talk about a
musical genre whose history and origins, even in its homeland(s), are little
known or else misunderstood. The reason, in fact, is not solely attributable to
the ignorance of the local people. Rather, it is that the history of these
people, over the past two centuries, has been so full of trauma and upheaval
that they have willingly chosen to forget, and their governments have actually
encouraged this process of forgetting, in the interests of building new nations
from the ashes of old. So, first of all, a little historical background.
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| Zorba the Zeybek? - Watch |
The 1964 Hollywood movie, ‘Zorba the Greek’, helped to popularise, at home and abroad, a
genre of folk music and dance accompanied by a stringed instrument commonly
known as bouzouki. Well, Hollywood is Hollywood, of course – and in our heart
of hearts we know we shouldn’t accept as gospel all we see on the silver
screen. Nevertheless, in the absence of personal knowledge or experience, we
may unintentionally incorporate the celluloid tale into our world-view.
A theme I find myself often returning to is the
question of how to define a Turk. I have dealt at some length with the complex
fabric of history in this part of the world, into which the Turkish invaders wove
themselves after their arrival in the 11th century. I have touched
on the intermarriage and intermingling of the Ottoman elite with their
Christian and Jewish fellow citizens over the course of their 600-year empire.
I have discussed the huge influx of refugees
from the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Greek peninsula and the Balkans over a two
hundred and fifty year period as neighbouring states gained independence from
and/or expanded into Ottoman territory, displacing as they did so, their Muslim
neighbours who had lived there for centuries.
Parallel to this theme, I have found myself
criticising the modern state of Greece, and its Western supporters for what
sometimes seems a deliberate distortion of history. Part of the problem, as I
have been at pains to explain, stems from the use in English of one word, ‘Greek’
to refer to three quite distinct historical and even geographical entities:
first, the Ancient Greece of Homer, Socrates, Herodotus and Pythagoras; second,
the medieval Byzantine Eastern Roman-Greek Empire; and finally, the modern
Kingdom/Republic founded, with the help of Great Britain, France and Russia, in
1830.
Our lack of satisfactory English words to distinguish
these three entities, coupled with a sometimes deliberate blurring of the
distinctions for political purposes, has made for serious misunderstandings
that continue to bedevil international affairs, as, for example, in the case of
the Cyprus
issue. What I overlooked, however, in my sympathy for the plight of the
Republic of Turkey, was the fact that, quite understandably, the government and
citizens of modern Greece also experience ongoing problems of identity as a
direct result of their traumatic history.
I read recently a book entitled ‘Greece, the Hidden Centuries’[1]
which described the period from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the
establishment of the Kingdom of Greece in 1830 – a period of nearly four
centuries when Christian Muslim and Jew lived together in an Empire that did
not suppress religious, linguistic or cultural identity. In reality, the period
of cohabitation extends several centuries before the final conquest of the
Byzantine Greek capital. The implications of that time span make nonsense of
most attempts to separate ‘Greek’ and ‘Turkish’ cultures.
Another theme running through these posts is the idea
that the same historical event may be remembered, described and interpreted in
different ways depending on how it impacted on those involved. I have written
elsewhere of my surprise at learning that Turks celebrate 18 March as their
victory day in the campaign we refer to as Gallipoli,
when New Zealanders and Australians remember 25 April as the day we (Anzacs)
arrived on the scene.
Turks and Greeks have a similar problem with the event
known to historians variously as the Liberation War, the Turkish War of
Independence, the Greco-Turkish War or the Asia Minor Catastrophe. For citizens
of Turkey, victory in that three-year war opened the door for the establishment
of an independent republic. For Greeks, on the other hand, defeat meant the
bitter end of their Great Dream - the reincarnation of the once mighty Eastern
Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire centred on the legendary city of
Constantinople.
But that's not all. Military retreat from Asia Minor
in 1922 was a huge reality check for the Greeks who had begun their campaign
with encouragement from the European powers victorious in the First World War. Subsequently,
seeing the writing of Turkish nationalist victory on the wall, Britain, France
and the others abandoned the Greek cause and left their little neo-classical
brothers to their fate. That fate they still remember as the Asia Minor
Disaster, when up to 1.5 million people identified as Christians were uprooted
from their ancestral homes and shipped across the sea to be resettled in
mainland Greece. Who were these people?
Sea-faring tribes speaking a language we think of as
Ancient Greek spread around the Aegean and Black Seas from the early centuries
of the First Millennium BCE, settling on the islands and the mainland coasts.
Sometimes conquering and sometimes forming neighbourly relations with the local
peoples, they developed cultures classicists know as Hellenic, Aeolian, Ionian
and Dorian, which non-academics tend to unite under the blanket term ‘Greek’. This culture is characterised
by distinctive features of literature, architecture, sculpture, food and music
which, of necessity, incorporated earlier local elements.
Their literature tells us of struggles against their
powerful neighbours, the Persians, and the triumphs of the Great Hellenic hero,
Alexander, in the pre-Christian millennium. Less well-publicised was their
forced incorporation into the classical Roman Empire in 146 BCE. Their history re-emerges
somewhat murkily into European consciousness after the adoption of Christianity
as that empire's state religion, and the subsequent fall of the city of Rome,
leaving Constantinople as capital of a now Christian, largely Greek-speaking
Eastern Roman Empire.
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| Aman aman - click to listen |
It also brings us, after a lengthy but necessary
introduction, to real subject of this post: the musical genre known as rebetika. When the Greek army entered
Anatolia in May 1919, they were welcomed as liberators by the predominantly
Greek Orthodox Christian inhabitants. When, three years later, the Turkish
nationalist forces drove out the invading army, the position of those Christian
citizens of the Ottoman Empire, now perceived as traitors, was clearly
untenable. I have not the time or space here to examine the claims and counter
claims of property destruction and human atrocities that took place in these
years. Suffice it to say that an exchange of populations took place, whereby
Christians from Anatolia (Asia Minor) went to mainland Greece, and vice versa
Muslims from the other side of the Aegean.
Those Christians, numbering, it is generally agreed,
around 1.5 million, arrived in a poor country with a total population of around
seven million. Many of them were educated middle class people with a good
standard of living who know found themselves homeless, jobless and destitute.
They brought with them little besides the cultural identity forged by
twenty-five centuries in Asia, the last six of them, side by side with Muslims
of Turkish ancestry.
The musical genre that flourished in the sub-culture
inhabited by these ‘Asiatic’ Greeks is known as rebetika, and attained its peak of artistic expression in the
1930s. It has been called the ‘Greek Blues’ – not because of any similarity of
sound, but because it was the musical expression of the soul of a dispossessed
people. Performers and audiences were alienated from mainstream society by
their poverty and foreign identity, their association with crime and prisons,
with drug use and alcohol, and with disreputable bars and cafes.
The very word rebetika
is problematic, and has spawned its own academic field of study, rebetology. One problem for the
layperson is the alternative form rembetika.
This has come about in typical English fashion, whereby scholars or other
intellectuals employ peculiar features of spelling in an attempt to represent
the derivation of a word. Words of Greek origin suffer particularly from this
affectation, as in the use of the letter ‘c’ to represent the Greek letter kappa, and ‘ph’ to represent Φ (F). The
Greek letter that looks like a B is actually pronounced as V. The B sound is
represented in Greek by the digraph ‘MP’. Well, scholars love to show off their
knowledge, so in goes the M to the English word. Unfortunately, P is P in both
languages, so with a patronising nod to actual pronunciation, B was
substituted. Stick with rebetika, and
you'll be fine.
Then there is the Greekness of the music, which,
according to Hollywood's Zorba, is
essential and fundamental. However, in the light of the history outlined above,
we will be not at all surprised to find the same songs being sung on the
eastern coast of the Aegean, and clearly not because they were imported from
Greece. Again, unsurprisingly, Zorba's famous dance and some key vocabulary
associated with Rebetika music,
reflect the genre's Anatolian origins - though the use of Greek or English
versions of Ottoman place names in the literature tends to mask this. The folk
dance known as hasapiko is said to
have originated in Constantinople (Istanbul); zeybekiko and tsifteteli
are clearly derived from Turkish words. The zeybeks
were irregular militia of nomadic yörük
origins with a kind of Robin Hood reputation for protecting poor villagers from
rapacious landlords. Their charactistic male dance is well known in Turkey, as
is the çiftetelli, a chain of
dancers, often performed at weddings and other social celebrations.
One source I read claimed that the bouzouki was
unknown in Asia Minor - but a more credible writer gave the origin of the word
as the Turkish bozuk, which was
apparently applied to a kind of tuning. Certainly the bağlama is everywhere seen and heard in Turkey, and its origin has
been traced to ancient Mesopotamia. A feature of Rebetika is the taksim, a
kind of improvised solo often introducing the song and setting the mood, as
well as demonstrating the virtuosity of the musician. That source above stated
that the word comes from Arabic, which it may well do - but it is nevertheless
used in Turkish, and undoubtedly came to Greece with those Anatolian refugees.
Well, this is not a competition. It doesn't really
matter whether you call those small cups of strong coffee with the annoying
centimetre of sediment, Turkish or Greek. Gyros
or döner kebap, they both taste good
in a sandwich. The simple fact is that people who live as neighbours and
intermarry for centuries will inevitably share aspects of their separate
cultures, taking and giving until whose is what and what is whose will be lost
in the mists of time.
Unfortunately for the majority who just want to live
their lives, raise their children and wash down their gyros with a Turkish coffee, history, like religion, can become a
political football. Politicians and other seekers after power love using ‘-isms’ to divide and rule, to unite
their supporters and manufacture an enemy.
The concept of nationalism that blossomed in Europe
from the romantic movement of the late 18th century began as a
search for cultural roots lost in the modernisation and urbanisation of the agrarian
and industrial revolutions. It was quickly seized on, however, by political
leaders, to unite and divide. The Ottoman Empire, consisting as it did, of
diverse religious and cultural groups, and occupying territory coveted by rival
empires, was particularly vulnerable.
It's hard to lose an empire. Ask the Brits. When
you've once ruled an empire on which the sun never set, it's not easy to adjust
to being the world's sixth largest economy and a relatively minor player on the
stage of international affairs. You can't help hoping the good times will come
again. For the Greeks, the loss of their imperial capital Constantinople and
their subservience to the Ottomans were wounds that never healed. As Ottoman
power declined and powerful 'friends' in Europe encouraged them to imagine that
their former lands could be recovered, it was all too easy to believe.
The Asia Minor Disaster was brought about by the manipulation
of European powers for their own political and economic ends. Greeks were
encouraged in a highly questionable enterprise, and left in the lurch when the
project went sour. Sadly, albeit understandably, the Greeks subsequently focused
their anger and frustration on their Turkish neighbours rather than on the
foreign powers who should by rights shoulder the blame. If you want to read
more about rebetika music, I can
recommend two articles, Rebetika:
An Historical Introduction and Rebetika,
A Brief History. They do, however, contain certain statements that
contribute to misunderstanding about the historical background. Muslims were
expelled from Greece, the first writer says, ‘mainly because the Greek government needed
land and homes in which to settle the refugees’, suggesting that the process was begun by the Turks. The
second writer goes a stage further. ‘Greek-speaking Turks from the present entity of Greece were shipped en masse to
Turkey, and Greeks from what is now Turkey were shipped to Greece (many of them
in the face of murder, rape and torture at the hands of the Turks, intent on
repeating their massacre of the Armenians).’ The Greeks, we are to
understand, were innocent angels in the business. Are we also to assume that
the atrocities they committed against each other in their own civil war of the
late 1940s they had learnt from Turks?
History
and music have lessons to teach us, if we approach both with an open mind. Name-calling
and finger-pointing, on the other hand, produce little but misunderstanding and
hatred. Listen to the sad voices of rebetika.
Try to bridge the gulf and heal the wounds.
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