Oriental Greek style songs, the repertoire of pre war Cafe aman in Athens, Smyrna and Constantinople.
Authentic 78 rpm recordings 1930 - 1954

The songs of Smyrna and Istanbul – considered the first indications of an emerging Greek urban culture in modern history (along with the Ionian Islands which were developing at the same time although in a different direction) – were taken to liberated Greece with the first groups of musicians who toured there during the second half of the 19th century. They made their presence felt in all the provincial capitals and naturally Athens and Piraeus. A large number of music cafes (café-santouri or café-aman) were created to accommodate this new musical idiom that was filling Greece’s urban centers and becoming accepted by the broader masses – although not only – despite the protests of the intellectuals of the time brought up on European traditions, and who feared a revival of a Turkish “occupation”.
In 1873 the first café-santouri opened (renamed the café-aman after 1886). In 1880, Athens was divided between the “lovers of the Asian muse” on the one side and on the other, those who believed that the amanedhes were not at all Greek. There was much debate about Eastern music. By 1886, Athens was flooded with café-aman which prevailed for 10 years. Towards the end of the century, they began to decline as the shadow theater and Athenian theatrical revues grew in popularity.

“Smyrna is a very musical town, I have never seen so many barrel organs anywhere else,” observed Bourgault-Ducoudray, who collected about 30 Smyrna melodies in 1875. In the last two centuries of the Ottoman empire, Smyrna was the largest center of subjugated Hellenism. Despite its multi-ethnic character during all periods of development, Greeks formed the majority of its population, comprising up to 60 pecent if its total population.

From the mid-19th century, the older nuclei of the bourgeoisie had grown so that Smyrna was perhaps the first major city in the East that assumed the characteristics of major urban centers in the West. Its population, together with the surrounding settlements, was almost 300,000 at a time when Athens had no more than 100,000. This urban development altered the way people entertained themselves, as well as the social life of the older farming communities in the area.
In the 18th century the first books appeared with references to urban songs, and the first instrumental and vocal groups formed to play them. That was when the first bands were formed which toured liberated Greece but also spread throughout the Greek-speaking areas of the Ottoman empire.
It was then that the following categories of songs appeared:
- Urban popular songs, forerunners of the later rebetiko that narrated the problems of the working classes in Smyrna. They were influenced by the Byzantine music tradition and were played by ensembles featuring the violin, the santouri or oud, the lyre and the kanonaki. They were played in alleyways and taverns but also in the night clubs of Smyrna. These songs were even included in the repertoire of the city’s more bourgeois night clubs.
- The composers, singers and musicians or Smyrna and Constantinople, apart from those who died in the Asia Minor catastrophe of the early 1920s, popularized Smyrna and rebetiko songs after 1922.
- Urban songs influenced by the European musical tradition, played by small instrumental and vocal ensembles known as estudiantines (sing. estudiantina), in which the mandolin and guitar predominated.
- Songs influenced by the Eastern tradition from the minorities who co-existed with the Greeks and whose origins are unclear. These songs appear in different variations and languages spoken in the region. They were played on the oud, the kanonaki, the lyre, zournas and daouli.
- Another category of songs were those that became known through plays (mainly revues and musicals) and were usually influenced by Western music.

These songs were preserved either in books with music texts or on 78 rpm recordings made between 1900-1920. Research into the history of the Greek recording industry has shown that the first recordings of Greek songs were made in Smyrna, Istanbul and Thessaloniki at the beginning of the 20th century. Those recordings are of songs that had already been well known for decades.
The events that became known as the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922 are considered to be the major dramatic event in the history of the Greek nation, when about 1.5 million of Asia Minor’s Greek inhabitants had to flee the region. The futile Greco-Turkish war and its culmination in the events of 1922 resulted in the Treaty of Lausanne and the compulsory exchange of populations. The criterion for nationality was to be religion – whoever was Orthodox was to be Greek, whoever was Moslem was to be Turkish. The Greek refugees had lived in Turkey for generations, they spoke Turkish and had acquired Turkish ways of thinking and behaving. A flood of homeless and unemployed refugees swelled the population of Greece by about one quarter.
One of the things about the refugees that became popular in the café-aman of Athens was their music. Many musicians came from Constantinople and Smyrna and they were the first to establish new places of entertainment such as beer halls and cafes, the most famous of which was the Mikrasia in Pireos Street that was to become the home ground of the first association of popular (laiko) musicians in Greece, a group of musicians from Athens and Piraeus formed at the initiative of Manolis Chrysafakis, a refugee from Smyrna.
Refugees wanted to have some fun and forget their troubles and in Athens, groups that had played together in Smyrna and Istanbul joined forces once more and eventually established a Smyrna “school” consisting, among others, of the composers Vangelis Papazoglou, Panayiotis Toundas, Stavros Pantelidis, Yiannis Dragatsis (“Ogdontakis”), Dimitris Semsis (“Salonikios”), Spyros Peristeris, the singers Costas Nouros, Giorgos Vidalis, Stellakis Perpiniadis, Lefteris Menemenlis.
There was also the Istanbul “school” comprising the composers Costas Skarvelis, Antonis Diamantidis, Grigoris Asikis, Costas Karipis and the singer Marika Politissa.