Singing The Funeral Song
The mirologia, funeral songs, are an old tradition: songs sung at funerals, the singer often retelling tidbits of the deceased life, in the rhythms of grief. They are acts to let OUT the grief. Death and ritual delegated to women’s realm. Our post on the Death Rituals of Rural Greece is a good introduction. As it seems with everything, it is a tradition dying, or thinning out, in practitioners. The songs are similar to those sung in weddings in lyrics, because it is a loss of someone to something else. Desire and death don’t seem a strange pairing, here. See a recent photographer’s journey documenting the last of the remaining funeral singers in Mani with an artistic narrative: “The Truth is in the Soil by Ioanna Sakellaraki is a 5-year exploration of grief as an elegy to her father and the dying tradition of mourning in Greece.” https://
There are the funeral songs native notably to Epirus, sung by all and with instruments. A wonderful recent outsider’s primer is the book Lament from Epirus by Christopher King. It takes you down this vinyl musicologist’s discovery and journey down the traditions of Northern Greece, the almost mystical call of its meter, that also transformed his life (he moved to Greece soon after this work).
Then, there are the “Greek blues” as some call it, rembetiko. So many books to recommend on that one, but they are songs very informed of the harsh life of 19-20th Century Anatolia and Greece. Marked especially by the Great Catastrophe, the burning of Smyrna and forced population exchanges of Greeks and Turks from their homelands. Instead of a book, I can’t recommend enough a viewing of the movie Rembetiko, by Costa Ferris. When I viewed it the first time, so much of my family’s own history and the place of the funeral song made sense. The forbidden music we were not to listen to. So much of an impact the movie had on me: I organized viewings of the movie as an undergrad at the University of Michigan (Ohio State University would mail us the VHS!) along with a lecture. And here I am writing about it, still.
I think a bit of grounding to what the Great Catastrophe is a nice place to end on the grand cultural-historical themes that are contained in The Funeral Singer, in September. There are more themes in the story, of course… but those are for you to discover on your own (and some can only be seen in the entirety of the novel). Order The Funeral Singer.
