Chronicles of Greek migration

Song Remains

Before the ubiquity of air travel, before the internet, before globalization, the migrant’s separation from his homeland was drastic and his ability to remain connected to his former homeland limited.

Today, via apps, video, and other technologies, the loss is tempered, and absence and angst are allayed. But pre-1980s, separation from home and family was accompanied by nostos – an ancient concept meaning the call of home. Migration created an enormous body of song chronicling the migrant’s love and memories of what he left behind but also the difficulties he encountered in the new land. Migrants straddled two worlds, and for many, the journey from one to the other became the defining event of their life.

Greece has been a land of wanderers far back into the fog of ancient times. Jason and the Argonauts were inquisitive explorers but also an organized venture to assess the opportunities that lay beyond the rocky terrain of their homeland. The Trojan War was a campaign to benefit materially from a wealthy and vibrant neighbor. It’s no mistake that the greatest story ever told—and the only one universally acknowledged to encompass the entirety of a man’s life—is a story of going home. In his quest to return, Odysseus willingly risks his entire existence and those of his companions. And in the end – in an undeniable universal truth — he is alone, he has lost everything but has succeeded. The desire to go home is that powerful.

In the twentieth century, the forced migration of Greeks from Turkey and the subsequent departure of a third of the Greek population to Germany, Canada, the U.S., Australia, and other lands led to the creation of literary and musical gems both at home and abroad. In many songs, the songwriter is a witness, a conscience, a chronicler of the emptying of villages and of departing friends. Ξενιτιά, the word and the cultural phenomenon, is central to the Greek psyche. The far-off land, the locale beyond that of home, is often a vague ‘other place’ and contains the word ‘ξένος’ meaning ‘stranger,’ ‘outsider,’ or ‘foreigner.’ Few descriptions or specifics are ever provided since foreign places were amorphous, mysterious, and other-worldly to most. Perhaps the closest linguistic counterpart in English might be ‘foreign-land’ as in, “I’m leaving for foreign-land.”

In the destination country, the immigrant’s life centered around the coffee shop, the record shop that offered a tune from home, the store that carried a Greek newspaper or a delicacy that soothed the chasm remaining in the soul and connected to home. The immigrant’s assimilation to new circumstances was often a tortuous process filled with mourning for what he no longer had. The final vestiges of home remaining in his heart were songs which served as a salve, a paean, a dirge. Often nostalgic and heart-wrenching, song testified to nostos, loss, and the fraying of heart and of memory.

Song

Στοίχοι – Greek Lyrics

English Translation

Οδύσσεια – 750 B.C.

Nostos, the call of home, appears at the very beginning of The Odyssey.

Οδύσσεια – 750 B.C.

Ancient and Modern Greek text

The Odyssey – 750 B.C.

English Text

“Όλαις οι Mάνναις Tα Παιδιά” – 1500s?

“Όλαις οι Mάνναις τα Παιδιά” – 1500s?

One modern rendition here – YouTube