Biography
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Born
12 October 1928
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Born In
Attiki, Greece
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Died
10 March 2012 (aged 83)
Domna Samiou (Δόμνα Σαμίου), born in 1928, in Athens, Greece, is a Greek musicologist, educator, and singer.
Samiou’s mother fled to Greece from Turkey in 1922, her husband having been taken prisoner of war; each thought the other dead, but they were reunited after he was released in 1924. Domna Samiou was born in a refugee camp in Kesariani, Athens. Despite their deep poverty, the family used to sing around the stove on winter nights.
Having been brought up with the music known as Smyrneika or Smyrniotika, a cosmopolitan music from Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Smyrna (now Izmir), mixing Eastern and Western influences, she experienced the development of Rembetika as smyrneika met and merged with the urban music of places like Piraeus.
During World War II the family suffered under the Nazi occupation; both her father and her sister died of starvation. Samiou and her mother were saved by the Zannou family for whom her mother worked. It was Mrs Zannou who, recognising Samiou’s passion for music, arranged for her to audition at a music school run by the eminent musicologist Simon Karas.
In the 1930s Karas, with no recording gear available,
had transcribed folk songs by hand, in Byzantine notation, as they were sung by elderly people. In 1937 he had produced a pioneering series of authentic folk music records, and when in that same year he was appointed head of Folk Music for National Greek Radio, he had introduced it into the daily broadcasts.
After hearing her sing, he took Samiou’s musical education education in hand, as well as making her complete her secondary school education.
It was in the 1950s, shich brought a serious decline in Greek traditional music, that Samiou began her personal struggle to save it. In 1954 she got a job at Greek Radio, and started getting traditional songs on to the air. She travelling around Greece, recording thousands of folk songs in the villages, and releasing them on LPs. However, with the military coup in 1967, things changed. Although the new government also championed traditional music, and hired Samiou on a permanent basis, she resigned a few months later, unable to bear the political repression of the Colonels’ regime.
She had decided to open a tourist shop in Parga, but instead ended up performing folk songs; at the age of 43 she started a professional career as a singer. Then, after the fall of the Colonels in 1974, Greek television broadcast a series of documentaries, which has since become rgarded as a modern classic, in which Samiou travelled around Greece to show what remained of Greek regional traditions songs and dances.
Samiou has worked with many young musicians, and is widely recognised as being one of the leading influences on modern Greek music, as well as being in large part responsible for the survival of Greek traditional culture — not as a museum piece but as a living heritage.
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