Bouzouki

HANDMADE  GREEK BOUZOUKI with a rewindable mechanism with music.

The Instrument

The Traditional Greek bouzouki is a plucked musical instrument of the lute family, called the thabouras or tambouras family. The tambouras existed in ancient Greece as the pandoura.  And can be found in various sizes, shapes, depths of body, lengths of neck and number of strings. The bouzouki and the baglamas are the direct descendants. The Greek marble relief, known as the Mantineia Base (now exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens), dating from 330–320 BC.  It shows a muse playing a variant of the pandoura.  From Byzantine times it was called first pandoura and then tambouras. On display in the National Historical Museum of Greece is the tambouras of a hero of the Greek revolution of 1821, General Makriyiannis.

THE JOURNEY

The bouzouki arrived in Greece following the 1919–1922 war in Asia Minor .  And the subsequent exchange of Orthodox and Muslim populations between Greece and Turkey .  When the Orthodox Ottoman citizens (both Greek- and non-Greek-speaking) fled to Greece. The early traditional greek  bouzouki mostly had three courses (six strings in three pairs, known as trichordo) .  And were tuned in different ways, according to the scale one wanted to play.  At the end of the 1950s, four-course (tetrachordo) bouzoukia started to gain popularity.

THE SONG’S BACKAGROUND

“Never on Sunday” was written by Manos Hadjidakis as “Ta Pedia tou Pirea” (The Children of Piraeus). His original Greek lyrics, along with the foreign translations in German, French, Italian and Spanish do not mention “Never on Sunday” .  But rather tell the story of the main female character of the film, Illya (Mercouri). Illya is a jolly woman who sings of her joyful life in her port town of Piraeus .  “If I search the world over/I’ll find no other port/Which has the magic/Of my Port Piraeus”.   Although she earns her money as a prostitute, she longs to meet a man someday who is just as full of joie de vivre as she is herself.

In 1960, the song was nominated and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, a first for a foreign-language picture since the Academy began to recognize achievements in this category in 1934.