AMANES

Article by Panagiotis Kounadis

One of the most important musical-poetic creations of the Greeks was established on a decapentasyllabic (literally 15-syllable, also known as political) couplet: the (a)manes. Apart from researchers-ethnomusicologists investigating if its origin dates back to Greek antiquity, as claimed by Georgios K. Faidros (and not only him) in the monograph “Peri tou Smyrnaikou mane” (“On the Smyrnaean manes”, 1881), it is certain that this genre, which can be included in the wider corpus of rebetiko, constituted for a long time an important means of expression of broad social strata, initially in the cities of the Ottoman Empire with Greek populations (where it first appeared) and then in all the regions where the Greeks prospered.

... The amanedes (plural form of amanes) are usually a cry of despair, agony, despond, an expression of some unfulfilled longing or insurmountable passion. Musically, the vast majority thereof were composed based on the Arabic-Persian makams, familiar to the Greeks due to their affinity with the musical “dromoi” (echoi) of byzantine ecclesiastical music.
The recording of a large number of amanedes by the most famous singers of the period 1900-1937 began at the turn of the 20th century with the appearance of discography; in 1937, Metaxas’ censorship prohibited their recording and public performance under the pretext of originating from Turkey. Shortly before, in 1934, “pro-European” Kemal Atatürk had also banned the amanes (probably as a remnant of the Greek presence in Asia Minor).
In this tragicomic ambiance, the amanes faded away.
Although it was severely attacked by a portion of Europe-bred musicians and scholars who spearheaded rebetiko, a search in discography reveals that the (a)manedes were particularly popular and widely accepted, since, even before the censorship (1900- 1937), more than 500 of them had been recorded. The testimony of the singer Christos Tsangarakis (Intzeveis) is an example of how the doors of the industry of discography opened up for those who had the ability to correctly interpret a manes.
The most famous manes, “Smyrnaiiko minore” or “Minore manes” or “Minore tis avgis” (“Smyrnaean minor” or “Minor manes” or “Minor of the dawn”), has over 50 covers, with different couplets in each version.
Angela Papazoglou’s testimony gives another dimension to the interpretation of the spread of the manes in Asia Minor: “Everybody requested their own manes and everybody listened to them with yearning, because all of us were talking about that pain of ours, about being enslaved in Turkey. We didn’t forget that with the manes we all wanted to remember that pain, to light a candle inside us, to have hope, to feel warmth.”