Prominent Greek folk artist Domna Samiou died on Saturday night at the age of 84 following serious health complications. She made it her life's work to preserve and endorse Greek traditional music and promote the legacies of rural Greece, while simultaneously creating new sounds. With her ethnographic fieldwork she systematically recorded Greek cultural activity in its natural context, and with the videos she produced she was able to document the Greece of yesteryear and preserve it forever. Her field notes and other manuscript materials, photographs, videotapes, and ephemera today promoted and maintained the melodic beauty of Greek traditional music, otherwise known as "Dimotika".
In most areas around the world, living “the good life,” revolves around the pursuit of financial/material wealth but in rural Greece, or the Greece of yesteryear, the focus on accumulating financial wealth and “material things” was overshadowed by the need to live life with a purpose. This is what Domna Samiou did. She recorded a time when Greece shared special moments in meaningful engagements; a time when people were able to connect with each other and be in service with others and she did all this by preserving Greek traditional music. With her work, she was able to document a period of time in Greece when there was an authentic commitment to values and goals that truly mattered.She was even able to impress the Greek elite society which for decades belittled this other side of Greece because it did not fit their view of modernization, or insatiable consumption.
For nearly half a century she performed all over the world, appealing not only to the Greek Diaspora, but she was also able to introduce (and appeal to) non-Greek audiences to “Greek music with no Bouzouki”, as one critic in Sweden put it. The result: her records have been produced under Swedish and French labels. Within Greece, she has collaborated with renowned Greek and foreign musicians, musicologists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists and taught traditional folk singing at the Museum of Popular Musical Instruments of Athens; as well as at the same time promoted many young musicians.
In 1981, she founded the "Domna Samiou Greek Folk Music Association" in the framework of preserving and promoting Greek traditional music and with the aim of facilitating the production of traditional songs and musical events that would be conducted with the highest standards to promote Greek folk music, free from the demands of commercial record companies. This library today contains over 2.500 songs from various villages, settlements and towns all across Greece. These recordings, both on analogue tapes and cassettes, were loaned to the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri”, in order to be digitized. Most of the people who participated in these recordings are no longer alive, a fact that gives the recordings a special significance and unique value. Through this archive material, the manners and customs, as well as the music tradition of Greece remain alive.
She was born in the poor district of Kaisariani, Piraeus in 1928. Samiou is the daughter of Greek refugees from the village Bayındır near Smyrna in Asia Minor. Her mother came to Greece in 1922, whilst her father, who was a prisoner of war, arrived slightly later during the exchange of populations. During her childhood years she lived the harsh life of a refugee, but was also surrounded with the humane solidarity of the refugee communities. It was there that she acquired her deep connection with popular culture and her love for folk music. She received her first formal musical training from Simon Karas.
Her commitment to ethnic revival will always be remembered and well respected.
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