“We Are All Migrants Somehow”: Musical Communities of the Exchange and the Node of Mytilini

22 de oct. de 2024 · 18m 45s

Descripción

Welcome to the new episode of our podcast series "Crossing the Aegean: A Century of People on the Move," where we continue to dive into the musical cartography of the...

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Welcome to the new episode of our podcast series "Crossing the Aegean: A Century of People on the Move," where we continue to dive into the musical cartography of the Aegean. In this episode, Maria Seitanidou guides us into the musical communities of Northern Greece, Macedonia, Pontus, and Aegean. Maria Seitanidou is a local musician based in Mytilene, Lesvos, and a primary school teacher. She organizes and teaches traditional singing and dancing, and she also orchestrates traditional choirs.

Maria took us into a journey of music that started for her when she was a child in her hometown, Veria, and the influence of the Pontus communities in the region, followed by her arrival to Lesvos and meeting a community of musicians which she describes as “an entry to a dream”. We talked with her about the role of music in the life of mobile communities, how music travels, and the attempt of a network of musicians in recent years to rebuild and rediscover the music of the larger Aegean geography.

Linking it with migration, Maria talked about how multilingual singing enabled her to understand the “other”, allowing her to discover similarities to celebrate between people. As she describes her connection to Turkey as a Greek, she also mentions how often she witnesses similar feelings among people in Turkey towards Greece.

This episode’s interview was conducted in Greek by Christina Karvouni from Community Peacemaker Teams. Ozan Mirkan Balpetek summarized and interpreted Maria’s remarks in English, and Merve Bakdur from Memory Center provided the same in Turkish.

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