Dimotika

Dimotika are the traditional folk songs of mainland Greece, an orally transmitted repertoire of narrative ballads, wedding and dance songs, laments and historical songs of the klephts. Regional idioms differ sharply: the pentatonic polyphony and slow dances of Epirus, the clarinet-led music of Thessaly and Roumeli, and the songs of Macedonia and Thrace. Ensembles of clarinet, violin, lute and defi frame singing that preserves medieval Greek language and communal memory, and the repertoire remains the core of village festivals, the panigiria.