Cretan Folk Music

Cretan folk music is the traditional music of Crete, dominated by the lyra, a three-stringed bowed instrument of Byzantine descent, played upright on the knee and accompanied by the laouto lute. Its repertory joins fast dance tunes — syrtos, pentozali, sousta, maleviziotis — to the rizitika, slow, heroic table songs of the western mountains, and to the mantinada, the rhymed fifteen-syllable couplet improvised for every social occasion. Shaped by Venetian rule, Ottoman centuries and the island's fierce local patriotism, Cretan music remains a living social institution, its lyra players honored figures at weddings, festivals and political gatherings alike.