Traditions and ways of life die hard on the island of Crete, even in 2025. But one woman is doing her part to change the way things have been done on her ancestral island, hoping in the process to pave a way for young women.
That woman is Erini, a New York–based vocalist whose career has already taken her from Cirque du Soleil’s global stages to Carnegie Hall, from a master’s degree at Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute to teaching her craft at Harvard, Princeton– and thousands of Greek American kids at the annual Greek Orthodox Folk Dance Festival (FDF).
She has sung more than a thousand shows and has shared stages with Grammy winners, earned recognition from cultural councils, and has been honored among the Greek America Foundation’s “40 Under 40.” In short—she is no stranger to breaking barriers and carrying Greek culture into new spaces.
But her latest move is something altogether bolder. Erini has entered the Grammy Awards competition with a song called “Se Psilo Vouno” (On a High Mountain,” a type of song called “rizitiko”— Crete’s most ancient song form, a raw, unaccompanied chant that for centuries has been performed exclusively by men.
Rizitika are not entertainment pieces. They are memory, identity, and resistance distilled into melody. Sung on mountainsides and in villages, they belong to the land and to history.
Until now, they have never belonged to women.
Erini dared to change that. She not only sang and recorded a rizitiko, but also “dared” to wear the traditional dark wool Cretan cape in her promotional photos— another symbol tightly guarded as masculine property. The backlash was immediate, albeit a tiny minority. Commenters on social media scolded her for putting on something “reserved for men” and for singing a song that supposedly “does not belong” to her or other women.
But who gets to decide what belongs to whom?
If anything, Erini is more faithful to the spirit of the rizitiko than her critics. These are songs of defiance, of staking one’s place against the odds. What could be more authentic than a woman standing in that circle, cape on her shoulders, voice rising against centuries of exclusion? The irony is that the very people shouting about “protecting tradition” are the ones strangling it.
Tradition that does not evolve is not tradition— it is a fossil, that stays stagnant in the craggy mountaintops.
Erini isn’t desecrating Crete’s heritage. She is ensuring its survival. She is proving that these songs, born in the foothills of the White Mountains of Crete, can live in the global soundscape without losing their soul. And she is proving that women, too, are heirs to that legacy.
This is not a gimmick. It’s not a stunt. It is the culmination of a career built on discipline, artistry, and respect for her roots. By bringing the rizitiko to the Grammys, Erini is telling the world that Crete’s voice is not limited to the past or to men. It is alive, it is evolving, and it is fearless.
So let the critics grumble. While they mutter about capes and propriety, Erini is singing traditional Greek music and heritage into the future. And in doing so, she’s not just making history— she’s making tradition relevant to young generations and making it matter again in the process.
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