Walking by the sea and through the neighbourhoods of Eleusis, you feel very strongly the history of the country telling you, at the same time, a part of its pain and a part of its grandeur.

This anarchic coexistence of the archaeological site with the broken, rusting ships and the abandoned factories, combined with a modern life that goes on perfectly normally on top of the various ruins, composes, without meaning to, a self-made work of art. Eleusis looks like a miniature of Greece, where a past of civilisation and prosperity has burned down, but fortunately the scars have not healed; they stand there – iron spikes, listing ships, towers of tyres, enormous industrial buildings, walled yards, old cinemas – to remind us that the past does not fade, fortunately it does not fade, because even the past that hurts is memory, and memory is what we are, what we need in order to create and to exist. When I first walked through the refugee quarter, in this wonderful neighbourhood of Eleusis with its very particular architecture and the vivid memory living on in the well-tended vegetable gardens, the small courtyards, the washing hung out to dry and the faces of its people, I thought there could be no more ideal setting in which to sing rebetiko and popular songs, precisely because we owe part of this music to this very neighbourhood of refugees. Together with their bodies, these people brought their culture and of course their music: their wonderful composers, their performers, the songs, the amanedes and all those elements that gave birth to rebetiko and to our later popular music. There is no greater emotion than singing among people to whom you owe the music you sing. Their personal history is the very history of our music, and on the faces of their children or grandchildren you can still read lines from our songs. So we are setting up a small stage in the heart of this neighbourhood of angels, to sing together with the angels this demonic music of ours, which starts with the Smyrna song, passes through the melodies of Tsitsanis, Papaioannou, Chiotis and many other greats, and reaches Zambetas – up to, in any case, the moment when the musical chapter of an older and perhaps gentler Greece begins slowly to fade.

Lena Kitsopoulou