Ledio Cakaj relates how the “romantic longing” of Laïko sustained him as an undocumented Albanian teenager, living and working in Patras and Athens in the mid-90s
Laïko (meaning ‘of the people’) is the popular music that has nursed Greek heartbreak since the middle of the 20th century. It grew out of rebetiko, the raw, syncopated music of Greeks displaced by the catastrophic population exchange with Turkey in the 1920s. The bouzouki, that pear-shaped long-necked lute, carried the music alongside its smaller cousin the baglama. By the 50s, composers like Vasilis Tsitsanis began pulling the genre toward the mainstream, and it emerged over the following decades into various strains: the heavy, lamenting style of Stelios Kazantzidis, the orchestral grandeur of Dimitris Mitropanos and Haris Alexiou, and the radio-friendly pop sheen of artists like Vasilis Karras. What unified all of it was the tendency to sit with the heartache, whether from physical displacement or romantic longing. For people like me – an undocumented Albanian teen in Greece in the mid-1990s – laïko provided relief. And normalcy of sorts.
Marinella was the first Greek singer I knew. The Albanian communist regime allowed her to perform in Tirana in September 1977. I wasn’t born until six months later. RTSH, the Albanian national television channel, would show clips from her concert for years afterward. People speculated she was of Albanian origin, in part because she had released an album titled Albania, with songs about the Greco-Italian war. Others said she was a plant from the Greek secret police. Sent to sow chaos, the rumour went, but the dictator Enver Hoxha loved her voice too much to care.
I only knew her well enough to tease my friend Enea with a line from her songs – “Σ’αγαπώ,” I would yell at him, not knowing it meant “I love you.” Enea’s great-grandmother, Jaja, was Greek, brought over during the war, marooned when the communists sealed the country. It wasn’t until I was in Greece that I understood: Jaja – γιαγιά – is the Greek word for grandmother.
When Communism fell and the country began to teeter on the brink, Enea’s family moved to Greece, Jaja’s old papers coming in handy for a Greek visa. I wasn’t that lucky. I tried twice to cross on foot. Once aged 15,when I was turned back by the swollen Vjosa river. Less than a year later I tried again with my cousin and a friend. We stole two doors from our elementary school and sold them to fund the trip to the port town of Igoumenitsa, planning to sneak into a lorry bound for Italy. Policemen caught us shivering under a bridge and sent us home.
With the help of a smuggler, I made it to Patras in the spring of 1995, before turning 17. Enea happened to be there. He introduced me to Notis Sfakianakis. ‘Ο Αετός’ had just come out, and some of the first Greek lyrics I still remember were from that song: “the eagle dies in the air, free and strong”. Sfakianakis went on to become a vocal Golden Dawn supporter, anti-migrant and anti-Albanian. Except perhaps for the opening bouzouki riff in ‘Ο Στράτος’ I didn’t care much about his songs anyway.
Before Sfakianakis there was Christos Kyriazis and ‘Στο Ημεροβίγλι’ which I’d learned working at my dad’s café. Albanian men who had been to Greece and returned – often forcefully – would tell stories of their time there. I would beg them to teach me Greek words between Turkish coffees and glasses of raki. Some were helpful, others made fun of me. I went around for a while believing σκατά (sh…
