Rebetiko Thesis

Between Smyrna and Piraeus

Rebetiko (Rebetika), Smyrneika and the Columbia Records Era —

A History of Modern Greek Urban Song, Its Makers and Its Meaning

A Thesis Con Kalamaras Melbourne, September 2026

Abstract

This thesis traces the history of rebetiko (plural rebetika), the urban popular song of the Greek-speaking world, from its roots in the multi-ethnic port cities of the late Ottoman Empire to its canonisation as national heritage and its inscription on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017. It argues that rebetiko cannot be understood as a purely "Greek" or purely "underground" music, nor as a simple story of Anatolian refugees carrying a finished style to Piraeus. Rather, it is the product of three overlapping forces: the cosmopolitan café music of Smyrna and Constantinople (Smyrneika and Politika); the proletarian, bouzouki-driven sound of Piraeus in the 1930s; and the multinational record industry — above all Columbia and its successor EMI — which decided who was recorded, what was pressed and how the music circulated between Athens, New York, Chicago and the wider diaspora.

The thesis sets out the music's historical periods, its modal and rhythmic grammar, and its social world. It examines the Smyrna school and the estudiantina tradition in detail, the impact of the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 and the 1923 population exchange, the censorship of the Metaxas dictatorship, and the post-war transformation led by Vassilis Tsitsanis and Manolis Chiotis. It profiles twenty key composers, and it gives a dedicated account of Columbia Records in both Greece (including the Rizoupoli pressing plant, which produced its first disc on 20 December 1930) and the United States, where Columbia recorded artists such as Kyria Koula, Marika Papagika and Tetos Demetriades a decade and more before the Athens industry matured. It concludes by assessing rebetiko's cultural importance: as a music of displacement and memory, as a contested symbol of Greek identity between East and West, and as a living practice across the diaspora.

1. Introduction

1.1 The problem of rebetiko

Few musical traditions carry as much symbolic weight for as small a body of recordings. The core repertoire of rebetiko — perhaps a few thousand 78 rpm sides cut between the early 1920s and the mid-1950s — has been asked to stand for the suffering of the refugee, the defiance of the urban poor, the "Oriental" soul of Greece, the Greek blues, the voice of resistance under dictatorship, and, more recently, a marketable piece of national heritage. Each of these readings holds some truth; none is sufficient on its own.

This thesis takes a historical and cultural approach. It asks three linked questions:

Where did rebetiko come from, and how did its sound and social meaning change between roughly 1900 and 1960?
What was the relationship between the café music of Smyrna (Smyrneika) and the bouzouki music of Piraeus that is often treated as "classic" rebetiko?
What part did the record industry, and Columbia in particular, play in shaping the genre — in Greece and in the Greek communities of the United States?

1.2 Terms used

Throughout, rebetiko (ρεμπέτικο) is used for the genre and rebetika (ρεμπέτικα) for the songs collectively; the older transliterations rembetiko and rembetika are equally common. A rebetis (ρεμπέτης) is a person associated with the music and its way of life. Other key terms:

Mangas (μάγκας, pl. mangkes): the swaggering urban tough of the working-class districts, with his own dress code, slang and code of honour. Closely related is the older koutsavakis.
Tekés (τεκές, pl. tekédes): a hashish den, one of the early social settings of Piraeus rebetiko; the songs about it are hasiklidika.
Café-aman (καφέ-αμάν): a café with live Eastern-style music, named after the cry aman ("mercy", "alas") that opens the improvised vocal lament known as the amanes.
Dromos (δρόμος, pl. dromoi, "road"): the Greek term for a melodic mode, derived largely from the Ottoman makam system.
Taxim (ταξίμι): an unmetred instrumental improvisation that introduces a song and establishes its dromos.
Smyrneika (Σμυρνέικα): the songs and style of Smyrna (İzmir) and the Ionian coast; Politika (Πολίτικα): those of Constantinople (the Poli).

1.3 Method and sources

The account draws on the established scholarly literature — among others Elias Petropoulos, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Stathis Gauntlett (for many years at the University of Melbourne), Ole Smith, Risto Pekka Pennanen, Panagiotis Kounadis, Kostas Vlisidis, Nikos Ordoulidis, Daniel Koglin and the contributors to Tina Bucuvalas's Greek Music in America (2019) — and on the evidence of the recordings themselves, as documented by collectors and by the Virtual Museum of Rebetiko. Where dates or attributions are disputed in the literature, this is noted. A select bibliography and discography appear at the end.

2. The Word and Its Meanings

2.1 Etymology

No one knows for certain where the word rebetiko comes from, and the question has become something of a sport among scholars. The main proposals are:

A derivation from Turkish rebet or similar forms meaning "rebellious" or "outside the law" — attractive but poorly documented.
Links to various Balkan or Turkish words for a vagrant or dissolute person, proposed at different times but none convincingly established.
A Greek origin in the verb rembo (ρέμβω, "to wander, to be distracted"), supported by the appearance of rembetos (ῥεμπιτός) with the sense of "wanderer" or "vagabond" in a Greek–Latin dictionary printed at Leiden in 1614.

What is certain is that the word was in use by the early twentieth century. Record labels printed "rebetiko" as a genre descriptor from around 1912–13 (on discs recorded in Constantinople), where it seems to have meant something like "popular song in the urban vernacular style" rather than the romanticised underworld music later writers would describe.

2.2 A genre defined after the fact

A central point, emphasised by Gauntlett and Pennanen, is that "rebetiko" as a coherent genre with clear boundaries is partly a construction of the 1950s–1970s. The musicians of the 1930s spoke of laïka (popular songs), mangika, zeibekika or simply of songs "for the bouzouki". Record companies used labels such as laïkon, rebetiko, zeibekiko, hasapiko or amanes according to marketing needs. When the revivalists of the 1960s and 1970s drew a hard line between an "authentic" rebetiko (to about 1953) and a "commercial" laïko thereafter, they were making a critical judgement rather than recording a distinction the musicians themselves had always made. This matters because the Smyrna/Piraeus debate discussed in Chapter 12 is, at root, a debate about where that line should be drawn.

3. Deep Roots: Musical Grammar and Inheritance

3.1 Multiple ancestries

Rebetiko has several ancestors, none of them sole parent:

Ottoman urban music — the light classical and popular repertoire of Constantinople and Smyrna, the makam system, the gazel and gazel-like improvised vocal, and the instrumentarium of oud, kanun, kemençe, violin and santouri.
Greek folk music of the islands and the mainland, including the demotika and the nisiotika, which supplied rhythms, melodic habits and textual formulas.
Byzantine and post-Byzantine chant, whose echoi (modes) overlap with many Ottoman makams and whose melismatic singing shaped the rebetic vocal line.
European popular music — Neapolitan song, the Italian and Spanish mandolin orchestra, operetta, the waltz and the tango — which reached Smyrna and Athens through trade, touring troupes and records.
The music of the prison, the port and the tekés, a homosocial, largely male culture of improvised couplets, often sung with the long-necked baglama, which could be concealed in a coat or made from a gourd in a cell.

3.2 The dromoi (modes)

Rebetiko melody is modal. The musicians used the term dromos ("road") for what Ottoman theory called makam, though the rebetiko dromoi are simplified and adapted to the fretted, equal-tempered bouzouki. The most common include:

Dromos

Ottoman counterpart

Character and typical use

Rast

Bright, "major" feel with a lowered seventh; common in lighter songs

Ousak

Uşşak

Minor, with flattened second; one of the most characteristic rebetic sounds

Hitzaz (Hijaz)

Hicaz

Augmented second between 2nd and 3rd degrees; the sound most associated with "Eastern" Greek music

Hitzaskiar

Hicazkâr

Double augmented seconds; dark, intense

Houzam

Hüzzam

Plaintive, often used for laments and amanedes

Sabah

Saba

Diminished fourth; expresses grief and resignation

Nihavent

Nihâvent

Close to the Western harmonic minor

Kiourdi

Kürdi

Phrygian-like, with flattened second

Kartsigar

Karcığar

Mixed; changes character between lower and upper tetrachord

Segiah

Segâh

Built on a neutral third in Ottoman practice; approximated on the bouzouki

Pireotikos

(none)

A "Piraeus" mode with no exact Ottoman counterpart, reflecting local invention

The Smyrna musicians, trained on violin, oud, kanun and santouri, could inflect microtonal intervals that the fixed frets of the bouzouki could not. One of the quiet revolutions of the 1930s was the translation of this modal world onto an equal-tempered fretboard and the addition of Western chordal accompaniment on guitar — creating a hybrid in which a modal melody is harmonised with major and minor triads.

3.3 The rhythms and dances

Rebetiko is inseparable from dance. The main dance-rhythms are:

Zeibekiko (ζεϊμπέκικο), 9/8 (typically counted 2+2+2+3 or subdivided as 4+5), named after the Zeibeks, irregular warriors of western Anatolia. The mature Piraeus zeibekiko is a solo, improvised, introverted dance, performed by a man (and later by women too) for himself rather than for an audience; interrupting another's zeibekiko was a grave insult. It is the emotional core of the repertoire.
Hasapiko (χασάπικο), 2/4 or 4/4, the "butchers' dance" inherited from Constantinople guilds, danced by two or three people shoulder to shoulder in carefully matched steps; the faster hasaposerviko derives from it. The internationally famous "Zorba's dance" is a modern stylisation of the hasapiko.
Karsilamas (καρσιλαμάς), 9/8 counted 2+2+2+3, a face-to-face couple dance (from Turkish karşılama, "encounter"), very common in the Smyrna repertoire.
Tsifteteli (τσιφτετέλι), 4/4 or 2/4, an Anatolian belly dance, associated with women's performance and with the café-aman.
Aptaliko, a slower, heavier 9/8 related to the zeibekiko, and the syrtos and ballos from the wider Greek folk tradition.
European forms — waltz (vals), tango, rumba and foxtrot — appear frequently in the Smyrna repertoire and again in the post-war period.

3.4 Instruments

The rebetiko instrumentarium shifted over time, and the shift is itself historical evidence:

Instrument

Description

Role and period

Bouzouki

Long-necked fretted lute, three double courses (trichordo) until the 1950s

The emblematic instrument of Piraeus rebetiko from 1932; four-course (tetrachordo) version popularised by Manolis Chiotis in the 1950s

Baglamas

Small, high-pitched relative of the bouzouki

Rhythmic and harmonic support; associated with prison and the tekés

Tzouras

Mid-sized bouzouki-family lute

Used as an intermediate voice

Guitar

Six-string Spanish guitar

Chordal accompaniment; central to the Smyrna ensembles and later to every rebetiko band

Oud (outi)

Fretless short-necked lute

Central to the Smyrna and Constantinople schools

Violin

Western violin played in Eastern style

Lead melodic instrument of the café-aman

Santouri

Hammered dulcimer

Smyrna and Constantinople ensembles

Kanonaki (kanun)

Plucked zither

Smyrna and Constantinople ensembles

Politiki lyra (kemençe)

Pear-shaped bowed fiddle

Constantinople tradition

Mandolin, mandola

Italian-derived plucked instruments

The backbone of the estudiantina

Accordion, piano

European keyboards

Occasional in the 1930s, more common after the war

Zilia, defi, toubeleki

Finger cymbals, frame drum, goblet drum

Percussion, especially in the café-aman

4. Smyrna and Smyrneika

4.1 The city

At the end of the nineteenth century Smyrna (İzmir) was the Ottoman Empire's great Aegean port and one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean. Its population — commonly estimated at a quarter of a million to three hundred thousand by 1900 — included Greek Orthodox, Muslim Turks, Armenians, Sephardic Jews and a substantial "Levantine" community of Italian, French, British and Dutch descent. The Greek community was large, wealthy and confident enough that Turkish speakers sometimes called the city Gavur İzmir, "infidel Smyrna".

The waterfront Kordon (the Quay), the Frankish Street (Frangomachalas), the theatres, clubs and cafés gave Smyrna a musical life that mixed Ottoman makam music, Greek island songs, Neapolitan canzoni, French café-chantant, operetta and the latest European dances. Touring companies from Athens, Italy and France performed there; the Gramophone Company and Odeon recorded there from the first decade of the twentieth century.

4.2 The café-aman and the café-chantant

Two kinds of venue shaped the Smyrna sound. In the café-aman, small ensembles of violin, santouri, oud or kanun accompanied singers — frequently women — in amanedes, karsilamades, tsiftetelia and songs in Greek, Turkish and sometimes Ladino or Armenian. In the café-chantant, the same musicians might play European-style repertoire for a more westernised clientele. Café-amans also flourished in Athens and Piraeus from the 1870s onward, which is an important corrective: "Eastern" urban music was present in the Greek kingdom long before 1922, and the refugees arrived to find audiences already familiar with the style.

4.3 The Estudiantina

The most distinctive Smyrna contribution was the estudiantina — the mandolin and guitar ensemble modelled on the Spanish student bands (estudiantinas) that toured Europe in the late nineteenth century, and on the Italian mandolin orchestra. The Estudiantina Smyrneiki (Σμυρναίικη Εστουδιαντίνα), founded in Smyrna in the late 1890s, became famous across the Greek world. Its members combined Western instruments (mandolins, mandolas, guitars) with Eastern ones (violin, oud, santouri, kanun), and Western part-writing with Eastern modes and rhythms.

Several figures who would later shape the Athens record industry — among them Panagiotis Toundas — played in Smyrna estudiantinas. Groups modelled on it, often called "Estudiantina" or "Tipiki Smyrneiki Estudiantina", recorded in Athens in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the format survived in the diaspora. The estudiantina's lasting legacy is the idea that Eastern melody and Western ensemble could sit together without contradiction — the principle on which much of the Athens recording repertoire of 1922–1935 was built.

4.4 What Smyrneika sounds like

Smyrneika are typically:

Performed by mixed ensembles of violin, oud, santouri or kanun, guitar and mandolin, with light percussion.
Sung in a highly ornamented style, often by women, with long melismatic phrases derived from the amanes.
Built on fully inflected dromoi with microtonal nuances.
Danced as karsilamas, tsifteteli, zeibekiko, syrtos and waltz.
Thematically centred on love, desire, beauty, flirtation, the pleasures of the city and the pain of separation — more cosmopolitan and sensual than the harder Piraeus repertoire, though hashish, prison and poverty appear in both.

4.5 Constantinople (Politika)

Smyrna's sister tradition was that of Constantinople. The Politiko style drew more directly on Ottoman classical music, with the kanun, the politiki lyra and the oud prominent, and with singers trained in the refined vocal technique of the Ottoman court and urban elite. Musicians such as Antonis Diamantidis (Dalgas), Kostas Skarvelis, Kyria Koula, Roza Eskenazi and the Armenian oud player Agapios Tomboulis came from Constantinople. The line between Politika and Smyrneika was blurred by constant movement between the two cities; in Athens after 1922 the two merged into what is usually called the "Smyrna school".

4.6 The Catastrophe of 1922 and the exchange of populations

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 ended with the defeat of the Greek army in Anatolia in August 1922. On 9 September Turkish forces entered Smyrna; days later, the Greek and Armenian quarters were destroyed in the Great Fire, amid massacre and mass flight. Tens of thousands were killed or died; hundreds of thousands fled to the quay and to the islands. The Greeks call this the Asia Minor Catastrophe (Μικρασιατική Καταστροφή).

The Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, made the separation permanent. Around 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Anatolia and eastern Thrace were resettled in Greece, and roughly 400,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey. Greece, with a population of around five million, absorbed refugees equal to about a quarter of its people.

The refugees were settled in makeshift quarters around Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki: Kokkinia (now Nikaia), Drapetsona, Kaisariani, Vyronas, Nea Ionia, Nea Smyrni, Nea Filadelfeia, Tabouria. Among them were trained professional musicians who had played in the cafés, theatres and estudiantinas of Smyrna and Constantinople, and who quickly found work in the Athenian café-amans and — crucially — in the recording studios.

4.7 Smyrneika on record, 1922–1935

The decade after 1922 is sometimes called the Smyrna period of rebetiko. The refugees did not create the Athenian market for Eastern-style urban song, but they transformed it with a level of musicianship and a repertoire that the local scene could not match. They also moved into positions of power in the record industry: Toundas became artistic director for Odeon in 1924 and for Columbia in 1931; Spyros Peristeris ran the repertoire of Odeon–Parlophone; Yiannis Dragatsis (Ogdontakis) directed recordings for Columbia; Dimitrios Semsis was a sought-after studio violinist and bandleader.

The stars of this period were singers such as Roza Eskenazi, Rita Abatzi, Antonis Dalgas, Marika Politissa, Stellakis Perpiniadis and Kostas Roukounas, accompanied by violin, oud, santouri, guitar and mandolin. Their recordings — amanedes, karsilamades, tsiftetelia, zeibekika, and songs about hashish, prison, love and the lost homeland — form what collectors now call the "Smyrneiko" repertoire.

5. Piraeus and the Classic Period, 1932–1942

5.1 The port and its underworld

Piraeus in the 1920s and 1930s was Greece's industrial heart: docks, tanneries, factories, coal yards, prisons, brothels and the swelling refugee settlements of Kokkinia and Drapetsona. Its working class included islanders, mainland migrants and Anatolian refugees, and its margins were home to the mangkes, dockworkers, petty criminals and hashish smokers who formed the first audience for a harder, more local music.

In the tekédes of Piraeus, men gathered to smoke the narghile and play the bouzouki and baglama. The songs were short, improvised, often built on a few couplets, and full of the argot of the mangas. Many were never recorded; the ones that were give us a partial window on a world that was already disappearing by the time outsiders began to write about it.

5.2 Markos Vamvakaris and the bouzouki on record

The decisive moment came in 1932, when Markos Vamvakaris — a Catholic from the island of Syros who had run away to Piraeus as a boy and worked as a stevedore and coalman — made his first recordings for Columbia, including Efoumernam' ena vrady and a taxim. The literature commonly describes these sessions as the real beginning of the bouzouki's recorded career in Greece.

The bouzouki had been recorded before, in Greece and especially in the United States (see Chapter 9), but Markos brought to the studio a complete style: a rough, nasal, untrained voice; a driving, percussive bouzouki technique; lyrics in the idiom of the Piraeus street; and a strong sense of the zeibekiko as a dance of personal dignity. His first recordings were followed by songs such as Frangosyriani, O Dervisis and O Harmanis, and he became known as the "patriarch" of rebetiko.

5.3 The Tetrada tou Pirea

Around Markos formed the Tetrada tou Pirea (Τετράς η Ξακουστή του Πειραιώς, "the Famous Piraeus Quartet"): Markos on bouzouki and vocals, Giorgos Batis on baglama, Anestis Delias on bouzouki and Stratos Pagioumtzis as lead singer. The quartet performed and recorded from the mid-1930s and gave the Piraeus sound its classic form: two or three bouzoukia and baglamades, guitar accompaniment, and a lead vocalist backed by a second voice.

5.4 Two streams in the studio

Through the 1930s, the Smyrna school and the Piraeus bouzouki players co-existed in the same studios, often under the same artistic directors. Many Smyrna musicians — Toundas, Peristeris, Chatzichristos, Papazoglou — adapted their writing to the bouzouki; many Piraeus players absorbed Smyrna modes and forms. The distinction between the two was real in sound and social origin but porous in practice: Stratos Pagioumtzis, the voice of the Piraeus Quartet, was himself a refugee from Ayvalık in Asia Minor, and Anestis Delias was born in Smyrna.

5.5 Hasiklidika and the romance of the margin

The songs about hashish (hasiklidika) and about prison (tis fylakis) are a small fraction of the recorded repertoire but a large part of its myth. They were recorded openly until 1936–37, both in Athens and in New York. They depict a world of the narghile, police raids, prison yards and the solidarity of the excluded. Later commentators have sometimes romanticised this world; the musicians themselves were more ambivalent, and many — Markos included — wrote with irony and humour as much as defiance.

6. Censorship and the Metaxas Dictatorship, 1936–1941

On 4 August 1936 General Ioannis Metaxas established a dictatorship modelled in part on contemporary authoritarian regimes. The regime sought to build a "Third Hellenic Civilisation" rooted in classical antiquity and Orthodox Christianity, and it regarded "Oriental" urban music as degenerate and un-Greek.

From 1937 all lyrics had to be submitted to censors before recording. Songs about hashish, crime and the police disappeared from Greek studio output. The amanes was prohibited on records and in public performance in the late 1930s, and the tekédes were closed. Composers practised self-censorship, rewrote lyrics and turned increasingly to love songs and social themes. The censorship legislation introduced under Metaxas was not formally repealed until 1981.

The consequences were significant:

The Smyrna style in its Eastern, amanes-centred form lost ground in Greece and never fully recovered.
The bouzouki style survived by softening its lyrics and broadening its themes.
The United States became a refuge for uncensored rebetiko: Greek-American labels and the US branches of the majors continued to record hashish songs and amanedes (see Chapter 9).

7. Occupation, Civil War and the Post-war Transformation, 1941–1953

7.1 War and famine

The German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation of Greece (1941–1944) brought famine, repression and the near-collapse of the record industry: the Columbia plant at Rizoupoli was requisitioned, masters were melted for their metal and records went unmade. Music continued in tavernas and informal gatherings. Anestis Delias died in Athens in 1944. Songs composed in these years — above all Tsitsanis's Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki (Cloudy Sunday), written during the occupation and recorded in 1948 — became the soundtrack of collective suffering once recording resumed.

7.2 Vassilis Tsitsanis

Vassilis Tsitsanis (1915–1984), born in Trikala in Thessaly, arrived in Athens in the mid-1930s to study law and made his first recording with Odeon around January 1936. By 1940 he had recorded some eighty sides; after the war he became the dominant figure of the genre. He broadened rebetiko's harmonic language, wrote more intricate bouzouki parts, and moved its themes from the tekés to love, loneliness, social injustice and the city. His collaboration with singers such as Sotiria Bellou, Marika Ninou, Prodromos Tsaousakis and Stella Haskil produced some of the most loved records in the Greek language. He is often called the bridge between classic rebetiko and the laïko that followed.

7.3 Women at the centre

The post-war period brought women to the front of rebetiko in a new way. Where Roza Eskenazi and Rita Abatzi had been stars of the Smyrna school, Sotiria Bellou (1921–1997) and Marika Ninou (1918–1957) became the defining voices of Tsitsanis's era — Bellou with her deep, stark, unadorned voice, Ninou with a warmer, more lyrical one.

7.4 Manos Hadjidakis's lecture (1949)

On 31 January 1949, the young composer Manos Hadjidakis gave a lecture at Karolos Koun's Art Theatre in Athens in which he praised rebetiko — naming Markos and Tsitsanis — as a genuine, living Greek art with roots in Byzantine chant and folk song. The lecture, delivered at a time when the music was still regarded as low-life, marked the beginning of its acceptance by the educated middle class. Hadjidakis followed it with the piano suite Six Popular Pictures (1951), based on rebetiko themes.

7.5 Manolis Chiotis and the four-course bouzouki

Manolis Chiotis (1920–1970), a virtuoso from Thessaloniki, popularised the four-course bouzouki in the 1950s, adding a fourth pair of strings and tuning it like the top four strings of a guitar. This allowed faster, more chordal playing and opened the instrument to Latin, jazz and Western popular idioms. Combined with amplification and larger nightclubs (the bouzoukia), it changed the sound and the social setting of the music. Most historians treat the mid-1950s as the end of the classic rebetiko era and the beginning of laïko.

8. From Laïko to Revival, 1953–Present

8.1 Art music and the "art-popular" song

In 1960 Mikis Theodorakis set Yiannis Ritsos's poem Epitaphios to music in a rebetiko-derived style, with Grigoris Bithikotsis singing and Manolis Chiotis on bouzouki. The recording, controversial at the time, made the bouzouki a vehicle for high poetry and political feeling. Theodorakis and Hadjidakis, in different ways, fused rebetiko with art music and brought the bouzouki to international audiences through film scores such as Never on Sunday (Hadjidakis, 1960) and Zorba the Greek (Theodorakis, 1964).

8.2 The first revival

From around 1960, singers such as Bithikotsis began re-recording songs by Markos Vamvakaris, who returned from obscurity to perform again. In 1968 Elias Petropoulos published Rebetika Tragoudia, a large anthology of lyrics, photographs and ethnography. Petropoulos was prosecuted for his writing during the military junta, and his work helped make rebetiko a symbol of opposition.

8.3 The junta and the second revival

Under the colonels (1967–1974), rebetiko was associated with the anti-authoritarian spirit, and in the United States Greek-American labels again recorded material that could not be issued in Greece. After the fall of the junta in 1974, a second revival sought "authenticity" — reissues of 78s on LP, young groups such as Rebetiki Kompania playing in the 1930s style, and Giorgos Dalaras's influential double album 50 Chronia Rebetiko Tragoudi (1975). Costas Ferris's film Rebetiko (1983) won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 and brought the history to a wider audience.

8.4 Heritage and the present

In 2017 UNESCO inscribed rebetiko on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The music is now taught in conservatories, played in rebetadika (rebetiko venues) in Athens and Thessaloniki, performed by ensembles across Europe, North America and Australia, and studied by a growing field of scholars. Collections such as the Virtual Museum of Rebetiko document its recordings and makers.

9. Columbia Records and Rebetiko

Columbia's place in the history of rebetiko is unusual: the same brand name appears on both sides of the Atlantic, but it belonged, for much of the period, to separate companies with different histories. This chapter treats Columbia in the United States and Columbia in Greece in turn, then the connections between them.

9.1 A note on corporate history

The American Columbia Phonograph Company began recording in the 1880s–1890s. Its British affiliate became independent and, as the Columbia Graphophone Company, under Louis Sterling, bought control of its former American parent in the mid-1920s. In 1931 the British Columbia Graphophone Company merged with the Gramophone Company (His Master's Voice) to form Electric and Musical Industries (EMI). The American Columbia, divested in the process, passed through several owners before becoming part of CBS in 1938. For Greek music this means:

In Greece, "Columbia" from 1930 onward is essentially the British company and then EMI, operating alongside HMV, Odeon and Parlophone.
In the United States, "Columbia" is the American company, recording Greek immigrant artists in New York and elsewhere, and at times reissuing European masters for the US market.

9.2 Before Columbia: the early Greek recording industry

Commercial recording in the Greek world began around 1900, when engineers of the Gramophone Company, Odeon, Favorite and other European labels made field trips to Constantinople, Smyrna, Thessaloniki and Athens. They recorded café-aman singers, Ottoman art musicians, island players and theatre performers, and shipped the masters to Europe for pressing. The Balkan Wars and the First World War interrupted this activity. In the 1920s the multinationals resumed regular sessions in Athens, typically in hotel rooms or halls, still pressing in Germany or Britain. Local agents — notably Minos Matsas, who represented Odeon and Parlophone — organised repertoire and distribution.

9.3 Columbia in Greece: the Rizoupoli factory

In 1930, the Columbia Graphophone Company, in partnership with Greek investors (the Lambropoulos Brothers), established the first industrial record-pressing plant in Greece at Rizoupoli (Perissos), in the northern suburbs of Athens, on Iraklio Avenue. Construction ran from about 1928 to 1930, and the plant pressed its first 78 rpm shellac disc on 20 December 1930.

After the formation of EMI in 1931, the Rizoupoli factory — operated as EMIAL but widely known simply as "Columbia" — pressed records not only for Columbia but also for HMV, Odeon and Parlophone. It became, in effect, the centre of the Greek record industry for the next half-century. EMIAL also built Greece's first proper recording studio; the famous Studio III at the plant opened in 1935 and operated until 1965.

The factory's later history reflects that of Greece itself. In 1941 the occupying forces requisitioned it as a vehicle-repair depot; metal masters were melted down for scrap and documentation was destroyed. It suffered further damage during the Civil War (1946–1949). Rebuilt, it enjoyed a golden age from the 1950s to the 1980s, producing LPs and cassettes for Greece and export markets, including the Middle East. Its studio closed in 1983 and the plant in 1991. In the same year EMI Greece merged with Minos Matsas & Son to form Minos EMI. The site has since stood largely abandoned, and plans for a museum have not been realised.

9.4 The artistic directors

The Greek record business of the 1930s was run, on the creative side, by a handful of artistic directors — most of them musicians from Smyrna and Constantinople — who chose the artists, commissioned songs, assembled the bands and often wrote the material themselves. They were gatekeepers of enormous influence:

Figure

Origin

Role

Panagiotis Toundas (1886–1942)

Smyrna

Head of Odeon's Athens operation from 1924; artistic director for Columbia (and associated EMI labels) 1931–1940

Spyros Peristeris (1900–1966)

Smyrna

Artistic director of Odeon–Parlophone, shaping the recording of the Piraeus bouzouki players

Yiannis Dragatsis "Ogdontakis" (1886–1958)

Smyrna

Violinist, composer and recording director for Columbia in the 1930s

Dimitrios Semsis "Salonikios" (c. 1883–1950)

Strumica (Macedonia)

Violinist, bandleader and studio mainstay for HMV and Columbia

Minos Matsas

Greece

Businessman-musician, agent for Odeon and Parlophone; founder of Minos Matsas & Son

The consequence was that the "Smyrna school" was not only a style but an institution. The refugees who ran the studios decided when and how the Piraeus bouzouki would be recorded; Markos himself was first recorded by Columbia in 1932, and much of the 1930s Piraeus repertoire reached shellac under the supervision of Smyrna-born directors.

9.5 Columbia's artists in Greece

Among the performers recorded by Columbia in Athens in the 1930s (many also recorded for HMV, Odeon or Parlophone) were:

Roza Eskenazi (c. 1895–1980) — Constantinople-born Sephardic Jewish singer, discovered by Toundas; first recorded in 1929 and made over 500 recordings in the following decade, becoming Columbia's and HMV's leading female star by the mid-1930s. Columbia records credited her with her regular accompanists, the oud player Agapios Tomboulis and the kemençe player Lambros Leondaridis, sometimes billed collectively as a "Smyrna Trio".
Rita Abatzi (1914–1969) — Smyrna-born singer, Eskenazi's great rival, with a powerful, dark voice.
Markos Vamvakaris — first recordings for Columbia in 1932.
Antonis Diamantidis (Dalgas) — the pre-eminent male amanes singer, with more than 400 recordings to his name by 1933.
Stellakis Perpiniadis and Kostas Roukounas — the leading male singers of the Smyrna school in the 1930s.
Dimitrios Semsis, Agapios Tomboulis and Lambros Leondaridis — the instrumentalists whose playing defines the Smyrna sound on record.
Stratos Pagioumtzis and the Piraeus players, recorded across Columbia and its sister EMI labels.

9.6 Columbia in America

Greek emigration to the United States grew rapidly from the 1890s; by the 1920s there were substantial Greek communities in New York, Chicago, Boston, Lowell, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and elsewhere, many of whose members came not from the Greek kingdom but from Anatolia, Constantinople and the islands. American record companies saw them as a market, recording Greek music from 1896 onwards and developing "foreign" or "ethnic" catalogue series for immigrant communities.

Columbia and Victor were the two dominant companies, joined by Greek-owned or Greek-focused labels such as Panhellenion, Orpheum, and later Metropolitan and Standard. Mass recording of Greek immigrant repertoire took off around 1916–1917, and it captured material — especially the café-aman, amanes and Smyrna repertoire — that in some cases was never recorded in Greece at all.

Key artists associated with Columbia in the United States include:

Kyria Koula (Kyriaki Antonopoulou, b. 1878) — Constantinople-born, the first Greek woman to become a recording star in America. She recorded for Columbia from late 1916 to 1918, then for Orpheum, Panhellenion and Victor; between 1916 and 1950 she made some 420 recordings in Greek and Turkish.
Marika Papagika (1890–1943) — born Marika Katsori on Kos, emigrated in 1915 with her husband, the cimbalom player Gus (Kostas) Papagika. After trial recordings for Victor in July 1918, she recorded for Columbia from 1919; by 1929 she had cut at least 232 sides of café-aman songs, rebetika and folk music. In 1925 the couple opened Marika's, a café-aman on West 34th Street in Manhattan, which closed after the 1929 crash. Her Columbia recordings are among the finest documents of the Smyrna style anywhere.
Tetos (Theodotos) Demetriades (b. 1897) — Constantinople-born singer who moved to the United States in 1921. In 1927 he made the earliest known recording of Misirlou for Columbia. He later became one of the leading producers of the Greek-American record industry.
Other Greek-American performers who recorded for Columbia, Victor and the smaller ethnic labels in the 1920s and 1930s include the singers Achilleas Poulos, Amalia Baka and Georgios Katsaros, and the Smyrna-born singer Andonios Amiralis.
Ioannis Halikias ("Jack Gregory") (1898–1957) — the Greek-American bouzouki virtuoso whose Minore tou teke, recorded in New York in the early 1930s, is often described as the first popular bouzouki recording; its circulation in Greece had a strong effect on Piraeus players.

9.7 Two-way traffic

The relationship between Columbia's Athens and American operations — and more broadly between Greek and Greek-American recording — was a two-way traffic:

Masters crossed the Atlantic. Between about 1930 and 1934, Columbia and its sister label OKeh in the United States re-pressed recordings made in Europe, including Athens sessions, for sale to immigrant audiences.
American records shaped Greek taste. Recordings such as Halikias's Minore tou teke and Papagika's Smyrna songs circulated in Greece and influenced local musicians.
America preserved what Greece censored. After 1937, when Metaxas's censors banned hashish songs and the amanes, Greek-American studios carried on recording them, preserving a repertoire that would otherwise have been lost. The pattern repeated during the junta of 1967–1974.
Artists toured and emigrated. Singers such as Roza Eskenazi toured the United States in the 1950s (from 1952), and many musicians moved permanently between the two worlds.

Artist

Base

Columbia connection

Significance

Kyria Koula

New York

Columbia 1916–1918

First Greek female recording star in America

Marika Papagika

New York

Columbia from 1919

Finest Smyrna-style singer on US record; 232+ sides

Tetos Demetriades

New York

Columbia 1927 (Misirlou)

Singer, later leading Greek-American producer

Markos Vamvakaris

Piraeus

Columbia, first sessions 1932

Start of recorded Piraeus bouzouki style

Roza Eskenazi

Athens

Columbia and HMV from 1929

Leading female voice of the Smyrna school

Rita Abatzi

Athens

Columbia and other EMI labels

Rival to Eskenazi, Smyrna school

Antonis Dalgas

Athens

EMI labels incl. Columbia to 1933

Leading amanes singer

Panagiotis Toundas

Athens

Artistic director 1931–1940

Chief architect of Columbia's Greek catalogue

Yiannis Dragatsis

Athens

Recording director 1930s

Smyrna violinist and composer

10. Twenty Key Composers

The following twenty figures have been chosen to represent the full arc of the tradition: the Smyrna and Constantinople school, the Piraeus classic period, the Greek-American link, and the post-war transformation. Many were also singers and instrumentalists, and attribution of songs in this period is notoriously unreliable — directors, performers and composers often shared or traded credits — so representative works are given only where the attribution is well established.

Composer

Dates

Origin

School / period

Panagiotis Toundas

1886–1942

Smyrna

Smyrna school; Columbia director

Spyros Peristeris

1900–1966

Smyrna

Smyrna school; Odeon–Parlophone director

Vangelis Papazoglou

1895/96–1943

Smyrna

Smyrna school

Yiannis Dragatsis (Ogdontakis)

1886–1958

Smyrna

Smyrna school; Columbia recording director

Dimitrios Semsis (Salonikios)

c. 1883–1950

Strumica

Smyrna school; violinist

Kostas Skarvelis

1880–1942

Constantinople

Politiko / Smyrna school

Antonis Diamantidis (Dalgas)

1892–1945

Constantinople

Politiko; amanes master

Apostolos Chatzichristos

1901–1959

Smyrna

Smyrna school to Piraeus bridge

Ioannis Halikias (Jack Gregory)

1898–1957

Greece / USA

Greek-American bouzouki

Markos Vamvakaris

1905–1972

Syros

Piraeus classic

Giorgos Batis

1885–1967

Methana

Piraeus classic

Anestis Delias (Artemis)

1912–1944

Smyrna

Piraeus classic

Dimitris Gogos (Bayianteras)

1903–1985

Piraeus

Piraeus classic

Yiannis Papaioannou

1913–1972

Kios (Asia Minor)

Piraeus classic to post-war

Michalis Genitsaris

1917–2005

Piraeus

Piraeus / post-war

Vassilis Tsitsanis

1915–1984

Trikala

Post-war master

Manolis Chiotis

1920–1970

Thessaloniki

Post-war; four-course bouzouki

Apostolos Kaldaras

1922–1990

Greece

Post-war rebetiko / laïko

Giorgos Mitsakis

1921–1993

Greece

Post-war rebetiko / laïko

Stratos Pagioumtzis

1904–1971

Ayvalık (Asia Minor)

Piraeus voice and songwriter

10.1 Panagiotis Toundas (1886–1942)

Born in Smyrna, Toundas learned the mandolin as a boy and played in the Estudiantina Smyrneiki before travelling widely through the Greek diaspora, including Egypt. After 1922 he settled in Piraeus and Athens, where in 1924 he became head of Odeon's local operation. From 1931 to 1940 he was artistic director for Columbia and its sister EMI labels, the most powerful creative position in the Greek record industry. He discovered Roza Eskenazi, arranged her first recordings in 1929, and wrote hundreds of songs across the Smyrna repertoire: karsilamades, tsiftetelia, zeibekika, tangos, waltzes and topical songs. His works were sung by Eskenazi, Abatzi, Perpiniadis and Roukounas; Eskenazi later called him "the greatest composer of them all". His early Smyrnia (1924) announced the arrival of the refugee sound in Athens. He died in Athens in 1942 during the occupation. Significance: the chief architect of the Columbia Greek catalogue and the central figure of the Smyrna school.

10.2 Spyros Peristeris (1900–1966)

Born in Smyrna to a musical family, Peristeris moved to Constantinople around 1914 and to Athens after 1922. A multi-instrumentalist (mandolin, guitar, bouzouki, piano), he became artistic director of Odeon–Parlophone and, like Toundas, combined composition with production. He was among the first Smyrna musicians to write for the bouzouki and to bring Piraeus players into the studio. Scholars such as Nikos Ordoulidis have presented him as a model "cosmopolitan musician" whose career disproves any clean division between the Smyrna and Piraeus schools. Significance: a key bridge between refugee professionalism and the bouzouki tradition.

10.3 Vangelis Papazoglou (1895/96–1943)

Born in Smyrna, Papazoglou was a singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist who, after the Catastrophe, lived in the Athens refugee districts. His songs — for Eskenazi, Abatzi and others — are among the most admired of the Smyrna school, combining sophisticated modal writing with sharp portraits of refugee and working-class life. He died in 1943, during the occupation famine. Significance: perhaps the purest songwriting voice of the Smyrna school in Athens.

10.4 Yiannis Dragatsis, "Ogdontakis" (1886–1958)

A Smyrna-born violinist and composer, Dragatsis served as a recording director for Columbia in the 1930s. His songs include Manolis Hasiklis, Mera Nychta Methysmenos and Elenitsa. Significance: a representative of the generation of Smyrna professionals who shaped Columbia's output from behind the scenes.

10.5 Dimitrios Semsis, "Salonikios" (c. 1883–1950)

Born in Strumica in Ottoman Macedonia, Semsis was the most celebrated violinist of the era, known for an expressive technique grounded in both Balkan folk and Ottoman urban styles. He recorded extensively for HMV and Columbia as soloist, accompanist and bandleader, and composed instrumental pieces and songs; he played regularly with Eskenazi and Tomboulis. Significance: the instrumental voice of the Smyrna school on record.

10.6 Kostas Skarvelis (1880–1942)

Born in Constantinople, Skarvelis was a guitarist and prolific composer who wrote for the leading singers of the 1930s, including Perpiniadis, Roukounas and Eskenazi. His songs span the Politiko idiom and the newer Athenian popular style, and he is credited with helping establish the guitar as the standard accompanying instrument. He died in Athens in 1942. Significance: a Constantinopolitan craftsman of the 1930s song.

10.7 Antonis Diamantidis, "Dalgas" (1892–1945)

Born in Constantinople, Dalgas ("the wave", after the undulating quality of his voice) was the greatest male amanes singer of the 1920s and early 1930s, accompanying himself on oud and later guitar. Among some 427 recordings made before 1933 were around 78 of his own compositions. The Metaxas ban on the amanes effectively ended his style's commercial life. Significance: the embodiment of the Ottoman-Greek vocal art that censorship suppressed.

10.8 Apostolos Chatzichristos (1901–1959)

A Smyrna-born composer, singer and bouzouki player, Chatzichristos moved easily between the Smyrna idiom and the Piraeus bouzouki style, and continued writing into the post-war years, when his songs were recorded by leading singers of the Tsitsanis era. Significance: an example of the continuity between the two schools.

10.9 Ioannis Halikias, "Jack Gregory" (1898–1957)

A Greek-born bouzouki virtuoso who made his career in the United States, Halikias recorded Minore tou teke in New York in the early 1930s — widely described as the first popular bouzouki recording. Its circulation in Greece showed Piraeus musicians what the instrument could do on record. Significance: the transatlantic link in the bouzouki's rise.

10.10 Markos Vamvakaris (1905–1972)

Born in Ano Syros, Markos fled to Piraeus at the age of about twelve and worked as a docker, coalman and butcher. He learned the bouzouki in the tekédes and made his first recordings for Columbia in 1932. With the Piraeus Quartet he defined the sound of classic rebetiko. His songs, including Frangosyriani, O Dervisis, O Harmanis and Efoumernam' ena vrady, marry a minimalist compositional style to a voice of rough authority. Neglected after the war, he was rediscovered in the 1960s; his autobiography was published in 1978. Significance: the "patriarch" of rebetiko and the founder of its recorded bouzouki style.

10.11 Giorgos Batis (1885–1967)

Born in Methana, Batis was the baglama player of the Piraeus Quartet and ran a well-known musicians' café in Piraeus. His songs and recordings capture the idiom of the tekés with humour and colour. Significance: the living link to the pre-recording tekés culture.

10.12 Anestis Delias, "Artemis" (1912–1944)

Born in Smyrna, Delias came to Piraeus as a refugee child and became one of the most gifted bouzouki players and songwriters of the Piraeus Quartet. His short life, which ended in Athens in 1944 during the occupation, became emblematic of the destructive side of the underworld he sang about. Significance: the refugee inside the Piraeus school.

10.13 Dimitris Gogos, "Bayianteras" (1903–1985)

Born in Piraeus, Bayianteras lost most of his sight in adulthood but remained a prolific bouzouki player, composer and lyricist, noted for his poetic texts and his long career from the 1930s into the post-war period. Significance: a poet among the Piraeus composers.

10.14 Yiannis Papaioannou (1913–1972)

Born in Kios on the Sea of Marmara, Papaioannou came to Greece as a refugee child. A bouzouki player and composer, he worked with Markos and later with the post-war generation. His songs include Pente Ellines ston Adi and O Boufetzis. Significance: one of the most successful composers bridging pre-war and post-war rebetiko.

10.15 Michalis Genitsaris (1917–2005)

Born in Piraeus, Genitsaris was a bouzouki player, singer and composer whose Ego mangas fainomouna is one of the classic portraits of the mangas. His long life made him an important witness for later researchers. Significance: the voice of the second Piraeus generation.

10.16 Vassilis Tsitsanis (1915–1984)

Born in Trikala, Tsitsanis first recorded for Odeon in 1936, recorded about eighty sides before 1940 and, after resuming in 1946, worked almost without pause until December 1983. He composed hundreds of songs, among them Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki, Bakse tsifliki and Archontissa, broadening the genre's harmony, melody and themes. He brought Sotiria Bellou and Marika Ninou to prominence. Significance: the most important composer of post-war rebetiko and the bridge to laïko.

10.17 Manolis Chiotis (1920–1970)

Born in Thessaloniki, Chiotis was a virtuoso on bouzouki, guitar and violin who popularised the four-course bouzouki in the 1950s and introduced Latin and jazz elements. With his wife, the singer Mary Linda, he toured widely, including in the United States. He played on Theodorakis's Epitaphios (1960). Significance: the architect of the transition from rebetiko to modern laïko.

10.18 Apostolos Kaldaras (1922–1990)

A composer of the post-war generation, Kaldaras wrote songs such as Nychtose choris fengari (1947) that are among the best loved of the late rebetiko period. In 1972 he composed the song cycle Mikra Asia (Asia Minor), with lyrics by Pythagoras, a landmark evocation of the lost homeland sung by Giorgos Dalaras and Haris Alexiou. Significance: a composer who carried the memory of Asia Minor into the modern era.

10.19 Giorgos Mitsakis (1921–1993)

A bouzouki player, singer and composer of the post-war generation, Mitsakis wrote many songs of the late 1940s and 1950s for the leading singers of the day and was a respected instrumentalist. Significance: a craftsman of the late rebetiko and early laïko repertoire.

10.20 Stratos Pagioumtzis (1904–1971)

Born in Ayvalık in Asia Minor, Pagioumtzis was the lead singer of the Piraeus Quartet and one of the most recorded male voices of the 1930s, with songwriting credits of his own. His voice — clear, controlled, unmistakable — carried the songs of Markos, Batis and Delias. His death in New York in 1971 is another reminder of the transatlantic life of the music. (Some sources give his birth year as 1902.) Significance: the refugee voice of Piraeus rebetiko.

11. Cultural Importance

11.1 A music of displacement

Rebetiko is, above all, a music of people who did not belong: refugees from Anatolia, migrants from the islands and villages, workers in an industrialising port, prisoners and outcasts. Its great themes — xenitia (exile, being in a foreign land), poverty, love and betrayal, the mother, prison, illness, death, hashish and the consolations of the tavern — speak to the experience of dislocation. For the Asia Minor refugees in particular, it preserved a sound-world that was otherwise lost with the homeland.

11.2 A music of the city

Rebetiko is Greece's first truly urban popular music. It records the growth of Athens and Piraeus, the working districts, the slang, the dress, the codes of honour and the cafés of a new urban population. Its lyrics are an important source for the social history of the interwar years.

11.3 A contested symbol of Greek identity

Rebetiko sits on the fault line between Greece's "Western" and "Eastern" self-images. For the Metaxas regime and some later critics it was Oriental, Turkish and degenerate; for Hadjidakis, Theodorakis and the revivalists it was the true voice of the Greek people, heir to Byzantium and folk song. Both views flattened a more complex reality: rebetiko is Greek and Ottoman and European, the product of a shared eastern Mediterranean culture in which Greek, Turkish, Armenian and Jewish musicians worked side by side — as Roza Eskenazi and Agapios Tomboulis did every night at the Taygetos club.

11.4 The "Greek blues" and its limits

Rebetiko is often called the Greek blues. The comparison captures real parallels — music of marginal urban communities, personal suffering, drugs and prison, a stigmatised music later embraced as national treasure, a history shaped by record companies. But it can obscure rebetiko's distinctive sources in modal Ottoman music, its dance-forms, its refugee history and its specific politics. The comparison is best used as a starting point, not a conclusion.

11.5 Dance, the body and dignity

The zeibekiko, danced alone and inward-facing, is one of the most powerful expressions of personal dignity in Greek culture. Watching a zeibekiko is not entertainment but witness; throwing plates or flowers, or respectful silence, are ways the community honours the dancer. The dance gives physical form to the music's ethic of individual feeling within a shared code.

11.6 Gender

Although the image of the rebetis is masculine, women were central to the music from the start: as café-aman singers in Smyrna and Constantinople, as recording stars (Eskenazi, Abatzi, Papagika, Kyria Koula), and as the great voices of the post-war period (Bellou, Ninou, Haskil). Their lives — often defying the conventions of respectability — are part of the music's social meaning.

11.7 Resistance and memory

During the Metaxas dictatorship, the occupation and the junta, rebetiko acquired political meaning as a music of the people against authority. After 1974 it became a site of memory: of the refugee experience, of the working-class neighbourhood, of an older Greece.

11.8 Diaspora

From New York and Chicago to Melbourne and Sydney, the Greek diaspora has been a second home for rebetiko. The American recordings of 1916–1950 preserved repertoire lost in Greece; post-war migration carried the music to Australia, where it has been sustained by community venues, radio, festivals and ensembles, including those that continue the estudiantina tradition. The diaspora is not a footnote to rebetiko's history but one of its main stages.

11.9 Literature, film and scholarship

Rebetiko has inspired poets (the lyrics of Eftichia Papagianopoulou and Nikos Gatsos for later composers, the Ritsos–Theodorakis Epitaphios), novelists, painters and filmmakers — from Rebetiko (1983) to documentaries on Markos, Tsitsanis and Eskenazi. It has become a serious field of scholarship in Greece and abroad.

12. Smyrneika and Rebetiko: Continuity or Rupture?

12.1 The two-school model

A long-standing way of telling the story divides rebetiko into two schools: the Smyrna school (Smyrneiko), refined, Eastern, violin-and-oud based, often female-voiced; and the Piraeus school (Pireotiko), rough, local, bouzouki-based, male-voiced. In this story, the Smyrna musicians arrive in 1922, dominate the records of the 1920s, and are then displaced by the Piraeus bouzouki players after 1932, whose style becomes "true" rebetiko.

12.2 Problems with the model

Recent scholarship has complicated this picture in several ways:

Eastern urban music existed in Athens before 1922. Café-amans flourished in Athens and Piraeus from the late nineteenth century, and Greek-language songs in the Smyrna style were recorded in Constantinople and Smyrna before the refugees came.
The Piraeus school was full of refugees. Delias, Pagioumtzis, Papaioannou and many others were Asia Minor refugees; Piraeus itself was transformed by the refugee settlements.
The Smyrna musicians ran the studios. Toundas, Peristeris and Dragatsis recorded the Piraeus bouzouki players and wrote for the bouzouki themselves. The "rise of Piraeus" was partly an initiative of the Smyrna professionals.
The same singers sang both. Pagioumtzis, Perpiniadis, Roukounas and others performed in both idioms.
Censorship shaped the outcome. The decline of the amanes-centred Smyrna style after 1937 was not only a matter of taste but of state policy.

12.3 A synthesis

The most persuasive reading is that rebetiko emerged from a synthesis between the cosmopolitan professional musicianship of Smyrna and Constantinople and the vernacular bouzouki culture of Piraeus, mediated by the record industry and shaped by politics. Smyrneika provided the modal language, the rhythmic repertoire (karsilamas, tsifteteli, zeibekiko), the ensemble principle of the estudiantina, a body of professional composers and — through Toundas, Peristeris and Dragatsis — the institutional power to record. Piraeus provided the bouzouki, a vernacular poetic voice, the mangas ethic and a new urban audience. Columbia and the other EMI labels provided the means of production and distribution, while America offered a second market and a refuge from censorship.

Smyrneika is therefore not simply the "prehistory" of rebetiko. It is one of its two parents, and it continued to shape the music long after 1932 — in Tsitsanis's modal writing, in the karsilamas and tsifteteli of post-war laïko, in Kaldaras's Mikra Asia, and in the contemporary revival of Smyrna repertoire by ensembles in Greece, Turkey and the diaspora.

13. Conclusion

Rebetiko is a small body of songs with a very large history. It grew from the multi-ethnic port cities of the late Ottoman Empire, was transformed by the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the population exchange, found its classic voice in the Piraeus of the 1930s, survived censorship, war and famine, and passed through Tsitsanis and Chiotis into the modern Greek popular song. At every stage, it was shaped by the record industry — above all by Columbia, whose Rizoupoli factory made the modern Greek record business possible and whose American counterpart preserved the Smyrna style in New York a decade before Athens.

Its cultural importance lies not in any single meaning but in its capacity to hold many: the grief of the refugee, the pride of the working man and woman, the Eastern and Western faces of Greece, and the continuity of a diaspora that stretches from Smyrna to Piraeus to New York to Melbourne. To study rebetiko is to study how a people remembered what it lost and made something new from it.

Appendix A: Chronology

Year

Event

1614

Rembetos ("wanderer") recorded in a Greek–Latin dictionary printed at Leiden

1870s–1890s

Café-amans flourish in Smyrna, Constantinople, Athens and Piraeus

Late 1890s

Estudiantina Smyrneiki founded in Smyrna

c. 1900

First commercial recordings in Constantinople, Smyrna and Athens

c. 1912–13

"Rebetiko" appears as a genre label on records

1916–1917

Mass recording of Greek immigrant music begins in the USA; Kyria Koula records for Columbia

1919

Marika Papagika begins recording for Columbia in New York

1922

Asia Minor Catastrophe; burning of Smyrna (September)

1923

Lausanne Convention on the exchange of populations (30 January)

1924

Panagiotis Toundas heads Odeon's Athens operation

1927

Tetos Demetriades records Misirlou for Columbia in New York

1929

Roza Eskenazi's first recordings

1930

Columbia's Rizoupoli factory presses its first disc (20 December)

1931

Formation of EMI; Toundas artistic director for Columbia (to 1940)

1932

Markos Vamvakaris's first recordings for Columbia

Mid-1930s

Tetrada tou Pirea (Piraeus Quartet) at its height

1935

Studio III opens at Rizoupoli

1936

Metaxas dictatorship (4 August); Tsitsanis's first recordings

1937

Pre-recording censorship of lyrics begins

Late 1930s

Ban on the amanes; closure of tekédes

1941–1944

Occupation; Rizoupoli requisitioned; recording halts

1946–1949

Civil War; recording resumes (Tsitsanis from 1946)

1948

Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki recorded

1949

Hadjidakis's lecture on rebetiko (31 January)

1950s

Chiotis popularises the four-course bouzouki; rise of laïko

1952

Roza Eskenazi's first US tour

1960

Theodorakis's Epitaphios; first revival begins

1968

Petropoulos publishes Rebetika Tragoudia

1967–1974

Military junta

1975

Dalaras's 50 Chronia Rebetiko Tragoudi

1978

Markos Vamvakaris's autobiography published

1981

Metaxas-era censorship laws formally repealed

1983–1984

Ferris's film Rebetiko; Silver Bear, Berlin 1984

1991

Rizoupoli plant closes; Minos EMI formed

2017

Rebetiko inscribed by UNESCO

Appendix B: Glossary

Term

Meaning

Amanes

Improvised vocal lament in free rhythm, opening with the cry "aman"

Baglamas

Small, high-pitched bouzouki-family instrument

Bouzoukia

Large post-war nightclubs featuring bouzouki bands

Café-aman

Café with live Eastern-style music

Dromos

Melodic mode (pl. dromoi), derived from the Ottoman makam

Estudiantina

Mandolin-and-guitar ensemble with Eastern instruments; Smyrna speciality

Hasapiko

Constantinopolitan "butchers' dance" in 2/4

Hasiklidika

Songs about hashish

Karsilamas

Face-to-face couple dance in 9/8

Laïko

Post-1950s Greek popular song, descended from rebetiko

Mangas

Urban tough with his own code of honour

Politika

Music of Constantinople

Rebetis

A person of the rebetiko world

Smyrneika

Music of Smyrna and the Ionian coast

Taxim

Unmetred instrumental improvisation

Tekés

Hashish den

Tsifteteli

Anatolian belly dance in 4/4

Xenitia

Exile, life in a foreign land

Zeibekiko

Solo improvised dance in 9/8

Appendix C: Select Bibliography

Bucuvalas, Tina (ed.). Greek Music in America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019.
Gauntlett, Stathis. Rebetika: Carmina Graeciae Recentioris. Athens: Denise Harvey, 1985 (rev. edns).
Gauntlett, Stathis. Ρεμπέτικο τραγούδι: Συμβολή στην επιστημονική του προσέγγιση. Athens: Eikostou Protou, 2001.
Holst, Gail. Road to Rembetika: Music of a Greek Sub-culture. Athens: Denise Harvey, 1975 (later edns).
Holst-Warhaft, Gail. "Rebetika: The Double-Descended Deep Songs of Greece". In W. Washabaugh (ed.), The Passion of Music and Dance. Oxford: Berg, 1998.
Koglin, Daniel. Marginalität und Modernität: Der Rebetiko. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008.
Kounadis, Panagiotis. Εις ανάμνησιν στιγμών ελκυστικών. Athens: Katarti, 2000–2003.
Ordoulidis, Nikos. "The Recording Career of Vassilis Tsitsanis (1936–1983)". PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2012.
Pennanen, Risto Pekka. "The Nationalization of Ottoman Popular Music in Greece". Ethnomusicology 48/1 (2004): 1–25.
Petropoulos, Elias. Ρεμπέτικα τραγούδια. Athens, 1968 (and later edns).
Petropoulos, Elias. Songs of the Greek Underground: The Rebetika Tradition. Trans. Ed Emery. London: Saqi, 1992.
Smith, Ole L. "Research on Rebetika: Some Methodological Problems and Issues". Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 18/2 (1992).
Vamvakaris, Markos. Αυτοβιογραφία. Ed. Angeliki Vellou-Kail. Athens: Papazisis, 1978.
Virtual Museum of Rebetiko: vmrebetiko.gr.

Bibliographic details, particularly editions and years, should be checked against library records before formal citation.

Appendix D: Suggested Listening

Marika Papagika: Greek Popular and Rebetic Music in New York 1918–1929 (Alma Criolla).
Roza Eskenazi: Rembetissa (Rounder).
Rembetika: Songs of the Greek Underground 1925–1947 (Trikont).
Greek Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances in the Asia Minor Style (Arhoolie/Folklyric).
Smyrneiko Minore: Rare Greek Recordings from Asia Minor (Rounder / Heritage).
Markos Vamvakaris: Bouzouki Pioneer 1932–1940 (Rounder).
Vassilis Tsitsanis — his early recordings, and later compilations from EMI/Minos.
Giorgos Dalaras, 50 Chronia Rebetiko Tragoudi (1975).
Apostolos Kaldaras, Mikra Asia (1972).

Titles and labels are given as commonly listed; release details vary between editions.