Piraeus Rembetika: the beginnings
Today, the term rembetika is often used interchangeably for either of two distinct musics dating back to before the turn of the 20th century: the rembetika of mainland Greece and the music of the cafe-aman (also called smyrneika) of Asia Minor. Within this century, these musics have been shaped by several major historical events: the expulsion of the Christians from Asia Minor, the Metaxas dictatorship, and finally World War II and the ensuing Greek Civil War.
The Piraeus rembetika of the early 1900’s was the music of the urban underworld, the outcasts, the hash-addicts, the people living outside the law, struggling on the fringes of society. During these early years rembetika lyrics were often about drug use, smuggling, gambling, hard life, prison, repression, persecution and social ostracism; lyrics also related personal experiences and hardships, or recounted a particular incident such as a crime, murder or brawl.
Rembetika was originally a man’s music, an expression of his ostracism (enforced or self-imposed) from mainstream society and was improvised, sung and danced amongst friends. As d’Allones (p.151) reemphasizes, “the tekes were without doubt, along with the prison and cafe aman, the cradle of rembetika.” The rembetika (song, music and dance) was certainly an important part of the ambiance surrounding the smoking of the narghile either in a teke, on a secluded beach, or in a cave: places where the rembetes could go for peace and quiet, to get stoned on hashish, and to forget the world outside. Not surprisingly, the early rembetika thrived amongst the displaced populations in the prisons of Greece. Stathis Gauntlett refers to this early rembetika as music of a “non-commercial, oral tradition,” and many of the songs of this period cannot be attributed to particular composers.
Cafe Aman: the beginnings
The music of the cafe aman (a kind of musical cabaret) in Smyrna and Constantinople differed from rembetika in many ways. The music was much more complex, very emotive and ornamental, with the lyrics being less often about drugs and prison, more about erotic love, heartbreak and, after the forced migration, loss of homeland and happiness. The cafe aman musicians of Asia Minor were often professional performers rather than amateurs (a poor choice of words, but it expresses the difference not in talent but in vocation). Women were very active as performers in the cafe aman, and the lyrics were more socially acceptable since the musicians were catering to a wider audience.
The Catastrophe
Although cafes aman were present in Athens from the late 19th century – and “low-life” rembetika had been recorded by cafe aman musicians outside of Greece before 1920 – a significant event caused these two schools of music to come into abrupt contact: the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey (read “ethnic cleansing”), a result of what is known to the Greeks as the Catastrophe. It’s difficult to give a brief summary of what is an extremely complex and entangled history; what follows is a historical distillation.
Modern day Asia Minor (the western edge of Turkey) had always had a very substantial Greek Orthodox population which, along with other non-Muslim ethnic groups such as Armenians and Sephardic Jews, lived amongst the Turks for centuries in varying degrees of subjugation and freedom, war and peace. The early 20th century was no different: the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars (in which Greece gained Ioannina, Thessaloniki, Chios, Mytilini, Crete and Samos) were followed by World War I, wherein Greece eventually allied with the Entente powers as the Ottoman Empire chose to back the Germans.
In 1919, with the Ottoman Empire weakened from its participation in the First World War, the Greek Army moved into Asia Minor as the Allies’ occupying force in Smyrna and its environs. Much to the chagrin of Greece, the Italians, for their support of the Allies during the war, had actually been promised much the same land as the Greeks, and had therefore landed troops a bit south with the goal of occupying Smyrna. (Also during this post-war period Italy and a few other governments looking out for their business interests were supporting, albeit surreptitiously, Mustafa Kemal, the rebel leader of the Turkish Nationalists). Not long after the Greek occupation of Smryna, warfare began between the Greeks and Kemal’s Turkish forces. Egged on with promises of support from Britain, France and America, Greece continued a push through Asia Minor, toward Ankara. But after three years of fighting, treaty negotiations, as well as domestic strife and political upheaval at home and changing alliances and interests abroad, the tide turned against the Greeks. Kemal succeeded in rallying what remained of the Turkish armies and irregulars as Greece gradually lost the backing of its “Big Brothers.” The result was a rout, with the Greek army retreating in disarray from Anatolia in 1922; Greek troops headed toward the sea, followed by the non-Turkish, non-Muslim citizens who feared the wrath of Kemal’s forces.
Most retreating soldiers and refugees moved towards Smyrna, the main port city of Asia Minor; they began to arrive there on Saturday, September 1, 1922. By September 5, more than 30,000 refugees a day were pouring into a city whose population had previously been only 200,000; by September 9, when the first Turkish forces arrived in Smyrna (the last Greek soldiers had left September 8th), its population had swelled to over 500,000. The killing of Armenian and Greek civilians began on September 10; on September 11, small fires started throughout the city and soon it was engulfed in flames. Refugees and residents moved toward the harbor – hundreds of thousands crammed into an area just under two miles long and a hundred feet wide – in hopes of escaping to any of the 21 Allied warships at anchor in the bay. Little help came. Great Britain, America, Italy and France remained neutral and refused to interfere; the civilians were trapped between the blazing city and the sea. Eventually, 20,000 people were saved by the ships, but in Smyrna alone, at least 30,000 (and possibly up to 100,000) Greeks and Armenians were killed and the city itself destroyed as those “allied” troop ships bobbed in the harbor.
The settlement negotiated after the Greek-Turkish war came to be known as the Treaty of Lausanne. Amongst its conditions was a “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey based solely upon religion, irregardless that these peoples had been settled in their respective homelands for centuries. With few exceptions, the Orthodox minority in Turkey was to be sent to Greece, the Muslim minority of Greece to Turkey.
Thus, in 1923, over one million Anatolian Greeks, many of whom spoke only Turkish, became refugees in Greece. A large percentage of this people entered Greece with few possessions and little money, and had no where to live but the poverty-stricken settlements surrounding Athens and Piraeus. Faced with overcrowding, unemployment and famine, a new Greek underclass was born…