Initiatives to compile and publish collections of folk songs were undertaken in the opening decades of the 19th century with the aid of expatriate Greek intellectuals such as Adamantios Koraīs and Theodōros Manousīs (1793–1858). After a first attempt by Simonde de Sismondi, the German Werner von Haxthausen (who had also been involved in the German folk-ballad collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn) compiled a collection of Greek folk songs which, although it remained unpublished, attracted the attention of Goethe and, more importantly, Jacob Grimm. An attempt made by Jean Alexandre Buchon (1791–1849) to translate Greek songs into English and German was also abandoned. The first successful, systematic collection of Greek folk songs was Claude Fauriel’s Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (1824-25). Fauriel was both a Philhellene and a Romantic philologist and saw folk songs as literary rather than merely ethnographical texts.
Fauriel’s collection, soon translated into English, German and Russian, had a Europe-wide impact. In 1842 the Italian Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874), inspired by the same philological and Philhellenic ideals as Fauriel, published his Canti popolari Toscani, Corsi, Illirici, Greci in Venice. Other important folk-song editions published outside Greece in Fauriel’s wake include Theodor Kind’s Neugriechische Volkslieder im Originale und mit deutscher Uebersetzung, nebst Sach- und Worterklärungen (Grimma 1827); J.M. Firmenich’s Neugriechische Volksgesänge (Berlin 1840); Geōrgios Evlampios’s Amarantos: Ītοi ta roda tīs anagenītheissīs Ellados (“The amaranth: The roses of Hellas reborn”, St Petersburg 1843); and A. Passow’s Tragoudia Rōmaika: Popularia carmina Graeciae recentioris (Leipzig 1860).
The first collection of Greek prose tales (Griechische und Albanische Märchen, Leipzig 1864), on the Grimm model, was published by Johann George von Hahn who at the time was Austrian ambassador to Greece. The Danish classical philologist Jean Pio (1833–1884) followed this up with his Contes populaires grecs, publiés d’ après les manuscrits du Dr. J.G. de Hahn (Copenhagen 1879). Such publications proliferated in the later 19th and early 20th century (Bernhard Schmidt, Emile Legrand, Karl Dieterich, Paul Kretschmer).
Romantic Nationalism, European Philhellenism and a Europe-imported interest in popular culture (with the Ionian Islands as a stepping stone between Greece and the rest of Europe) put an end to the indifference with which folk literature had traditionally been treated among Greek intellectuals. Within Greece, the Romantics had shown little interest in oral literature: Alexandros Rizos Rangavis’s folk-style ballad The Traveling Woman (Η Ταξιδεύτρα, 1830, pub. 1837) remained without continuation. After 1853, occasional poems in the style of popular songs, by little-known or anonymous authors, appeared in periodicals, and Spyridōn Vasileiadīs based himself on a popular ballad for his important play Galateia (Γαλάτεια); but none of these isolated instances added up to a recognizable trend or movement. The folk and fairy tales and songs had to wait for the literary turn towards the demotic register before they would constitute a subject of concerted interest and utilization. The only oral genre meeting with interest was that of proverbs; their didacticism was considered educationally useful.
However, following the establishment of independence, new, entirely unexpected problems of identity-articulation arose: first, the recent state politically divided Greek-speaking populations, the minority being within its borders, and the majority without – necessitating a strengthening of cultural ties between them. Second, in the 1830s and 1840s, various national movements emerged in the Balkans, and from 1850s asserted themselves, competing for overlapping territories and populations. And while the Greek movement held the trump card of a prestigious descent from classical antiquity, popular practices – songs, music, dances, traditions – presented a challenge. Finally, and most importantly, the theories of J.Ph. Fallmerayer undermined, from 1830 onwards, the entrenched notion of a descent from ancient Greece, asserting instead that modern Greeks were the Greek-speaking descendants of Slavs and Albanians. This raised the necessity to demonstrate what until then had been considered self-evident: an uninterrupted ethnic (racial and cultural) continuity. Greek historians responded to the challenge, but folklore studies also gained fresh relevance in this light. Folklorists endeavoured to show that the morals, customs and practices of the rural populations had remained unchanged, that classical mythology survived in folk belief, and that the poetic genius of Homer had found successors in the performers of popular songs.
From the mid-19th century onwards, publications increased (in journals such as Pandōra, Chrysalis, Efterpī, Zōgrafīos Agōn) and folk-song editions began to appear. These collections were not local but national in range and scope; their aim was not literary or folkloric, but philological and national. They formed part of the cultural consolidation of the Greek nation-state, which required a common, national language, and which therefore was in the throes of a linguistic debate between a purified literary language and a linguistic standard based on popular, spoken (“demotic”) forms. The language used in folk poetry became an important trump card for the demoticists.
In 1850 the first stand-alone Greek edition of popular songs was published by Antonīs Manousos (from Corfu); two years later a small contribution by the Peloponnesian Michalis Lelekos appeared, and (again in Corfu) a more substantial volume by Spyridōn Zambelios (Popular songs of Greece, which also contained an extensive study on medieval Hellenism). Also, in 1853-55 the Athenian periodical Pandōra carried a series of over one hundred texts (sometimes of doubtful reliability) collected by the Ionian Tertsetīs.
Among these publications, the 1852 collection of Zambelios stands out. To begin with, the extensive introductory essay on medieval Hellenism connects popular culture with a historical interest and traces modern Hellenism back to antiquity by way of Byzantium. Also, the songs (though known from earlier sources, except for some very few songs of questionable authenticity) are republished with modifications: Zambelios has added “poetic” and “patriotic” elements, altering both the structure and the vocabulary. Thirdly, these altered texts correspond to the demands and expectations of the public – the educated Greek reading public became acquainted with popular songs through his collection.
In 1855-56 we see the first sign of active state interest: the Greek parliament discussed a proposal (brought forward by a professor of law, once again an Ionian) for the government-led publication of a corpus of popular songs. Although the proposal was unsuccessful, the Minister of Education in the following year sent a circular to all schools urging teachers to collect “words, phrases, proverbs, songs, historical and mythical tales, and all kinds of traditions”. These sources were referred to as “living monuments of antiquity in the present life of the Greek people”. During these same years, Zambelios presented songs to an international readership in the Spectateur de l’Orient, a periodical published by academics and scholars during the Crimean War to support Greek interests.
From 1880 onwards folklore studies (laografia) became prominent in intellectual life. Νikolaos Politīs (1852–1921), who obtained a chair at Athens University in 1890, inspired the Hellenic Folklore Society in 1908; its magazine Laographia (“Folklore”, 1909) published not just folk songs and folk tales but also other genres of oral literature, such as proverbs, riddles and legends. In 1904 and 1914, respectively, Politīs published his collection of folk traditions Paradoseis and his Eklogai apo ta tragoudia tou ellīnikou laou (“A selection of the songs of the Greek people”) in which he examined the song text in isolation from its performative context (performers, music, dance, function), while at the same time applying a philological method of textual rectification. Politīs’s philological method, which was negatively criticized by later researchers, remained dominant in the study of oral literature throughout most of the 20th century.
