Χασικλίδικα ρεμπέτικα: ανθολογία-ανάλυσις-σχόλια (review)

146 Reviews taboo subjects. Even the Patriarchate is under constant pressure, with its Halki Theological School closed and with interference in the very selection of the Patriarch. It is beyond doubt that these practices, which remain largely unabated, violate not only the Treaty of Lausanne, which contains detailed and extensive protection of minority rights, but also the Turkish Constitution, the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the various charters of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which are included in the appendices of the book. Unless the practices are stopped and some redress provided, Turkey's admission to the European Union will be jeopardized. Incidentally, these practices are of such severity that they appear to outweigh by far the alleged mistreatment of the Moslem minority in Western Thrace, whose numbers have increased over the comparable period . The sorrow one feels reading this book is magnified by the realization that even today minorities continue to be oppressed and victimized as a result of conflicts and civil wars, especially in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Africa. P. John Kozyris The Ohio State University Suzanne Aulin and Peter Vejleskov, Χασικλίδικα ϕεμπÎ-τικα: ανθολογία- ανάλυσις-σχόλια. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. 1991. Pp. 154. dKr 168 (about $22). This carefully prepared anthology of χασικλίδικα ϕεμπÎ-τικα put together by Suzanne Aulin and Peter Vejleskov, two graduate students at the University of Copenhagen, is a modest, cautious book, but it will be an indispensable addition to the library of anyone interested in rebétika. The project began as an exercise in transcription. Aulin and Vejleskov participated in a seminar on rebétika given by Ole Smith in the spring of 1988 and decided to transcribe the lyrics of three reissued recordings of rebétika songs, Ta απ- αγοϕευμÎ-να ϕεμπÎ-τικα (1, REGAL 034-410 121, 181, 641). They then expanded their collection of texts with the aim of presenting a comprehensive, annotated anthology of songs dealing with the subject of hashish smoking and hard drugs. Aulin's and Vejleskov's sources are, with a single exception, songs already available on LP disks, and texts transcribed from original recordings by Stathis Gauntlett in his Rebétika Carmina Graeciae RecentiorL·: A Contribution to the Definition of the Term and the Genre Rebetiko Tragoudi through Detailed AnalysL· of its Verses and of the Evolution of its Performance (Athens: Denise Harvey, 1985). One might well ask what value such a specialized anthology of texts accompanied by notes in Greek could have, but the authors argue Reviews 147 persuasively for the general case of producing any carefully compiled anthology of rebétika texts and only a little less persuasively for the particular case of restricting them to the theme of hashish and other drugs. For most of us who became interested in rebétika before the revival of the 1970s, Elias Petropoulos's ΡεμπÎ-τικα τϕαγοϕδια (Athens, 1968) was the only available source of texts. Like everything Petropoulos produced, it was original, careless, and full of charm. It was Petropoulos who divided rebétika texts into categories according to subject matter and then proceeded to ignore his own divisions, placing songs that had nothing to do with hashish, for example, under the heading of χασικλίδικα. In 1973, the first collection of song-texts by a rebétika musician appeared. Angeliki Vellou-Kail, who assisted Markos Vamvakaris in writing his Αυτοβιογϕαφία (Athens: Papazisis, 1978), provided an appendix of approximately one hundred song-texts that gave us a fairly complete collection of that composer's work. Biographies and autobiographies of other rebétika composers followed in Greek, but none with a comprehensive anthology of texts. Tassos Schorelis's ΡεμπÎ-τικη ανθολογία in three volumes (Athens: Plethron, 1977-1978) attempted to restore to the actual composers of rebétika songs the credit for their composition. Schorelis provided the reader with a brief biography of each songwriter in that musician 's own words, wherever possible, and arranged the texts alphabetically under the composers' names. His stated ambition was to present the original version of the songs he reproduced. Unfortunately, Schorelis's informants were often elderly and forgetful, and many of them had an axe to grind either with other songwriters or with the recording companies that had "stolen " their work. The result was that despite his laudable attempt...