"Mother’s Songs Come Alive"
Against Long Odds, Méglen Brings the Words Back
“Language is the house of being,” the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously wrote. (Or so people say—do you think I’ve read Heidegger?) If so, then the traditionally Slavic-speaking populations of northern Greece have been long homeless, their language suppressed, their collective identity kept on ice.
True, there have been an intermittent thaws, especially after the controversial Prespa Agreement of 2018 between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. You can sometimes hear their Macedonian language sung in public in the region’s villages and towns these days, though, still, public performances may be shut down. Now, a major project, Méglen: Songs with lyrics from the region of Moglena-Karatzova, has created a new public space for a hidden culture. The long-gestated brainchild of dance teacher, researcher, and singer Christos Apsis, it is a thrilling collaborative achievement.
Read more on the people and stories behind Méglen in this review by Sotiris Bekas on Folkradio.gr.By way of background, at the turn of the last century, Macedonia was home to a rich weave of languages and religions, among them Muslim, Christian, and Jewish populations speaking Greek, Slavic dialects, Ladino, Romanes, Aromanian, and more. Since then, with the Balkan Wars and the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the imposing of national borders, “the transfer of populations” in the 1920s, and another century of conflict (the Metaxas era, the Greek Civil War, the Cold War, right up to today’s EU disputes), politicians and their enforcers have worked doggedly to unravel the tapestry in the name of national unity.
This nationalist imperative played out in spades in the southern part of the central region of Méglen (also known as Moglena, or Karadjova in Turkish), which fell to Greece in the aftermath of the Second Balkan War. Within a decade, the Muslim population, many Slavic speaking, were driven to Turkey and replaced by Greek-speaking Christian refugees from Asia Minor, the Pontos, and Eastern Thrace. The remaining Slavic-speaking Christians, a majority in many villages and towns, found themselves caught up in a homogenizing project, forced to embrace Greek language and Greek identity, at least in public, as a bulwark against perceived threats from countries to the north. The local Slavic Macedonian language went indoors and underground.
We learn about all this in “The History,” a short essay by Leonidas Embirikos included in Méglen. And so we appreciate better the boldness of this project, a booklet and two CDs published this year in Thessaloniki in a celebratory step toward reversing a century of erasure.
If you are in the US, contact me directly using the message link below to order your copy of Méglen. Otherwise, you can order here. That purpose is revealed graphically on the title page, where the phrase “with lyrics” appears, defying redaction.
Behind this image is a history of cultural suppression, including the dissemination of “songs without words,” as Embirikos explains:
“In this particular region, this expression [of the local variant of the Macedonian (Slavic) language] fell silent, internalized, self-censored, leading to a point where it was only expressed through instruments, without the song, the lyrics, and the accompanying poetry. Therefore, the expression we know are the so-called ‘Macedonian songs,’ which were incorporated into Greek folklore as a special region of ‘songs without words’ in national Greek folklore. However, these Macedonian songs only gained special visibility after 1981-82 and primarily after 1985 when the album Local Greek Music and Dances from Western and Central Macedonia was released by Giannakis Zlatanis‘ orchestra, produced by Vasilis Dimitropoulos and Dick van der Zwan. It was then,for the first time, that the titles of the songs appeared in the Macedonian language, but without their lyrics.”In Méglen’s booklet, by contrast, Slavic Macedonian lyrics, presented in Greek and Latin transcription and Greek and English translation, make up almost 100 pages. They tell of everyday moments and historical traumas: love stories, teasing courtships, village adventures, the terrors of war and separation. They give voice to another time, one that has been, in the words of the project’s musical supervisor Stamatis Pasopoulos, “entirely filed away in the folder of erased cultural records.” These re-creations of lullabies, Christmas carols, dance tunes, and other songs and sayings collected over three decades, are, he says, an “exploration and reconstruction of our cultural memory.”
That word our is important. To recreate archival material, Pasopoulos told me, the producers recruited performers with their own family connections to the culture, however attenuated:
“We decided that whoever contributed as a musician or as a singer would have some origins in the Slavo-Macedonian tradition of Greece. And through Méglen we participants found a piece of our family roots. People of my generation (I am almost 40 years old) grew up in families where self-censorship and general distancing from the tradition of the Slavophone Macedonians of Greece had already been passed on to our parents. Very rarely did anyone refer to the language, to people whose mother tongue was not Greek.
Méglen provided us an opportunity to see more clearly a side of our past and our ancestors and to challenge stereotypes and phobias. Instrumental music can certainly achieve this, but when language―the poetic text of the songs―is added, things acquire solidity and a deeper essence. It may be that few people of my generation have learned the Macedonian language, but at least contact with it through a song can surface emotions and images that may not be possible in any other way.”But getting the singing right, he explained, was a particular challenge:
“Slavophone Macedonian singing in Greece has never been systematized educationally, so singers today are not familiar with the genre. Added to this are the public bans on the songs to this day, the (almost) zero discography with Macedonian songs, and the fact the language itself is beginning to disappear.”This all makes Méglen even more impressive. Its 38 musical selections offer a wide variety of styles. Some, like the lovely Móma Sade, feature a cappella voice, the long-forbidden language ringing out against the sonic limbo. Others feature the brass band sound so identified with the region. One of these, Zborsko, comes across as particularly stately and assertive, with total command of phrasing in the rhythm and mode in the melody. And then there are songs surprisingly accompanied by tambura or kaval, traditional instruments no longer common in Greece. Apart from their historical significance, these tracks provide future performers with access to older material and provide listeners with ear-opening delights—spirited, fresh, beautifully produced.
Apsis made hundreds of other recording over the years tracking down older singers in the region of Aridaia. We can only hope for more to come.
In the meantime, Pasopoulos has hopes for Méglen’s broader impact within Greece:
“We wanted the album to function as a kind of cultural activation. And I believe the release did create the conditions for further discovery of traditional material and for its integration in concerts or other recording projects in the future. A tiny snowball has just started slowly rolling that may keep growing. This would be Méglen's greatest achievement. Time will tell.”
If you are in the US, contact me directly using the message link below to order your copy of Méglen. Otherwise, you can order here. In history’s crucible, simple stories often drive out complex ones, at least for a time. But then more complex realities re-emerge, rising from the ground up, as new generations, undaunted, nurture the seeds of memory. My friends and I know this process firsthand from the early days of the “klezmer revival.” Sometimes history takes cruel turns, but as one Méglen informant said, “at least our songs will remain.” And those songs, and the lives and languages they contain, hold new possibilities, both for understanding the past and for creating the future.