To those who have nothing, music comes like a gift from the gods. Like Gershwin’s Porgy, Domna Samiou grew up with plenty of nothing, and she too lived in a shack. Her parents were Greeks who had been expelled from Turkey in 1922, six years before she was born, and the shanty town on the outskirts of Athens where they lived with fellow-refugees, under the disapproving eye of the police, had neither water nor electricity. Music was Samiou’s passion, but there wasn’t much of it around – just a man carrying a gramophone with a flower horn, who would stop on his rounds and play a song for half a drachma; otherwise it was the singing in a nearby church where, every Sunday, she and her father would attend service. ‘Not out of religious zeal,’ she later explained, ‘but for the music. To me it was like going to a concert or the theatre, and I learned all the liturgies by heart.’ Being female, she was not allowed to sing inside the church, but she made up for it back home: ‘My sister, my mother, my father and I would all sit round the brazier, and my father and I would chant – he would be the priest and I would be the deacon, or he would be the left choir and I would be the right. In Easter week I was in my seventh heaven.’

She loved the all-night vigils which women would hold in their shacks, to pray for a sick child or absentee husband. ‘They would borrow an icon of the Virgin Mary from the church, and beside it they would place a tin of sand in which guests could put their candles. And they would tell us children to chant, saying that God would listen to us, because we were young and innocent.’

Life didn’t get easier as time went on. Her father died of malnutrition when she was twelve, and the rich lady in whose house she found employment as a cleaner took her in as a lodger, ‘so that I could eat a plate of food and not starve to death as well’. The German occupation was followed by civil war in the streets, during which the shanty town was burnt to the ground, leaving the remainder of the family homeless.