Rebetiko*. Resistance. Tears for a packet of cigarettes (which didn't offer the last)

Hard-headed and obstinate, a real mule, passion and faith. “Daddy you will take me to see Vembo”. From then on no release – only song. An uncompromising life. Marriage, beatings, vitriol in the face, prison. Return to the ‘clean’ urban life. Beatings again, the vitriol has run out, a place on a coach, a chance breakfast where the calendar show the date 28^th October 1940. Capital city. The Occupation. The search for a respectable family. Seven years later the search ends at a tavern table, “O Tzimis o Hondros” in Acharnon. No going back.

During those seven years sleep was taken in coaches, in parks, wherever it could be found. Working at whatever there was just to survive. Washing dishes. Organization National Freedom Front. A life of rebellion, like a biological imperative. One war ends, the civil war begins. Bowed over a plate of food in a tavern in Athens, a guitar hanging on the wall, the passion, misery and longing bigger than the hunger. “Ti exis ki olo klais?”; “Antilaloun i filakes t’anapli k’ o Gendi Koules”!

Someone is watching with great interest.

The next day he is there again with a group of friends.

“O Tzimis o Hondros” arrives, along with Tsitsani. The civil war still rages; prison, beatings from fascist sects. The streets are now strewn, but not with rose petals.

Song

Career

Passion

Coarse cigarettes

No compromise

Rembetiko

Big partnerships for her unique voice and unconquerable spirit; apart from Tsitsani there was Papaioannou, Mitsakis, Kaldaras. And Moutsis, Savvopoulos, Andriopoulos, Lagios. Greece changes faster than it can be built; boîtes in Plaka, concerts and the new fruit of cultural concerts. She is there.

In 1993 the battle that nobody wins, begins. Cancer of the lungs.

Towards the end she had no voice at all.

In August 1997 she turns her back on us.

Comments which accompany the video from the user ArikkadoGR ten months ago

She died alone in a hospital in Athens. At the end she couldn’t speak at all. Someone approached her, realising who she was and she signed to him: “Do you smoke?”

*Rebetiko is the urban Greek music, the poor's musik. The womb of rebetika was the jail and the hash den. It was there that the early rebetes created their songs. They sang in quiet, hoarse voices, unforced, one after the other, each singer adding a verse which often bore no relation to the previous verse, and a song often went on for hours.

He showed her his cigarette, and she burst into tears.