At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe is living in peace and prosperity. The “Belle Époque” is an outgrowth of previous important historical events and developments. The networks that are created and which evolve funnel both people and their products, tangible and intangible. It is within this multi-layered world that sound recording and sound reproduction is invented. Early record labels send mobile crews literally all over the world to record local musicians. The range of the repertoire is endless. Cosmopolitanism in large urban centers favors polystylisms and polymorphisms. Colonialism, revolutions, conflicts, refugee flows; the theater, cinema, radio, photography, orchestras’ tours, but also circulations in all kinds of commercial channels in a world that evolves dynamically and anisotropically, form a complex network of “centers” and “peripheries” in alternating roles setting musical idioms in motion, both literally and figuratively. The network in which the Greek-speaking urban popular song participates, constantly conversing with its co-tenants, is magnificent. Discography has already provided important tools in understanding the relationships that developed between “national” repertoires. The result of this ongoing research is “Cosmopolitanism in Greek Historical Discography”.

This is an instrumental tune, quite popular even nowadays in the modern folk-popular repertoire, which, based on the data so far, seems to have been recorded in America. Many "national" repertoires share the tune; however, it seems that its main conductors were Jewish and Greek musicians. We found the following information in the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR):

On August 15 1927, Kostas Papagkika’s orchestra recorded in New York the instrumental piece "I laterna tis Polis" (The barrel piano of Poli, [i.e. Constantinople]) (Okeh W 81229 – 82507). This is a version of the song that we are examining.

About a month later, on September 29 1927, Dimitry Kornienko's orchestra recorded the instrumental song "Katerinke" (Victor BE 40254). Kornienko's story is an interesting one: born in 1888 in Kiev, Ukraine, he immigrated to America in late 1923. In his registration on the ship Byron, which he took from Constantinople (Istanbul), he declared his nationality as Russian, and Batumi, a city of present-day Georgia on the border of Turkey in the Black Sea, as his previous place of residence. The information coming from Martin Schwartz that in the Yiddish language the word "Katerinke" means "barrel piano" (because of the way St. Catherine died, i.e. on a wheel of torture) seems to be even more interesting.

In terms of its title, this recording was issued in various versions:

- I laterna tis polis (VΙ 80212)
- Katerinka (VΙ 80213)
- I laterna tis Polis (VI 26 8037)
- Besarabia (VI 19023)

As one can read in the DAHR, each re-issue of the recording was intended for a different market of America: the Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Polish, Jewish and Greek one.

Syncretism, which is observed in the musical actualizations of the areas where Greeks lived and recorded, mainly in the area of folk-popular traditions, is monumental. It only takes one to listen to historical discography, which begins in New York, Smyrna (Izmir), Constantinople (Istanbul), Athens and Thessaloniki since 1900. An essential part of this syncretism concerns the Jews, who constitute one of the main conduits in the uniquely diverse cultural heritage of the Greek-speaking world. They borrow and lend, but they also carry more distant traditions from the places where they have previously lived and the places they have traveled to. They are the central interlocutors in the Greek and Ottoman ecumene, together with Turkish-speaking Muslims, Orthodox but also Catholic Greek-speaking and Armenians, Levantine Protestants, Europeans and Americans, and compose a rich musical mosaic which consists of heterogeneous but co-existent palimpsests: a reservoir to which everyone contributes but from which also everyone receives.

The sources show the timeless existence of a Jewish element, at least since the Hellenistic period, in areas that millennia later formed the modern Greek state. After the “Edict of Milan” in 313 AD and the gradual Christianization of the Eastern Empire, the Jewish element found itself in a difficult position. The Jewish populations that have since been established in these lands became known as Romaniote Jews (or “Romaniotes”’ Rome – Romios). Their historical geographical center of reference was the city of Ioannina, and they speak Greek with various linguistic mixtures. After 1492 and the “Alhambra Decree” by the joint Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, those Jews who did not accept to embrace Christianity were expelled from the Iberian peninsula. They became known as the Sepharadi Jews (or “Sepharadim”), one of the largest Jewish ethno-cultural categorizations (Sepharad in Jewish texts is referred to as the region of present-day Spain). Thessaloniki was one of the main destination points of this displacement, as the ties with the city were older and already close. Apart from the role played by the Greek Jews in the musical developments on the Greek peninsula, there were also important mutual influences between the Greek-speaking Orthodox and the Jews in various other areas where the two communities lived together. As, for example, in Odessa, with the Eastern Ashkenazi Jews, who mainly speak Yiddish, a sui generis Semitic-Slavic language (in Jewish texts, the Kingdom of Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah, is connected with north-eastern European territories). Their orchestral repertoire is often called klezmer. In other words, apart from the geographical limits of the modern Greek state, the cultural conversations between the Greek Orthodox and the Jews also concern other parts of the world, both in Europe and America, where they met as immigrants.

Research and text: Nikos Ordoulidis