MODERN GREECE AND FOLK POETRY

Folk songs are not generally prone to abide within the boundaries drawn up by international treaties, and the provenance of many of the songs discussed in this book is often well beyond the political frontiers of Greece today. Outside the Hellenic Republic, the Greek language is spoken in Cyprus, Corsica and parts of southern Italy; before the First World War it was spoken in parts of Bulgaria, and before the 1922 defeat of a Greek invading force in Turkey it was widely spoken throughout western Anatolia and in Pontos (north-eastern Turkey). Since the songs people sing are determined by the language they speak far more than by the political grouping to which they belong, the traditions of Greek folk poetry belong equally to the Greek-speaking populations of all those places and to the refugees who at various times have been displaced from them. ‘Modern Greece’, at least where its folk poetry is concerned, is not geographical. Neither is it only contemporary. Greece (or to be more precise the Greek language) has a long history, conventionally divided into three periods – ancient (including the classical period), Byzantine, and modern. Modern Greece therefore begins with the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, to the Ottoman Sultan on 29 May 1453.