Rembetika

Rembetika is the urban folk song of the Greek underworld that flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s in Piraeus, Athens and Thessaloniki. Sung in a rough demotic Greek and accompanied by bouzouki, baglamas, guitar and accordion, its songs treat hashish dens, prison, poverty, unrequited love and the figure of the manges, the streetwise tough. Two schools are distinguished: the Piraeus style of *Markos Vamvakaris*, built on the bouzouki and the taxim improvisation, and the Smyrna school of the Asia Minor refugees, orientally inflected and led by singers such as *Roza Eskenazi*. Absorbed into mainstream Greek song after the war, it remains the reference point of Greek popular music.