ABSTRACT
To judge by the Greek literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prisons were a major site of production of the arts of poetry and music, where the inmates might at any moment burst into song. Thus in Kostas Pasayiannis’ story ‘Marriage wrecker’ (dated 1894) a group of prisoners waiting for their visitors to appear at the barred window spontaneously break into verse:
Again, in Petros Pikros’ story ‘The sins of the grandfather’ (1922), there seems to be a doleful song waiting at every turn to spring forth ‘right there’ from behind every prison wall, forming a leitmotif throughout the story. Moreover, it seems to be the same plaintive song, however much the words change:
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Greek prisoners seem to have spent some of their hours of enforced idleness playing or manufacturing musical instruments such as the bouzouki, now the national instrument of Greece but once an instrument of poor repute, often associated with prisons and hashish-dens (Gauntlett 1985: 86 f.). Thus a visitor to the prisons of Nafplion in the 1890s might on a good day be rewarded with a virtuoso performance of bouzouki from an inmate, as was Andreas Karkavitsas (1892), and bouzoukia (plural) are listed in an inventory of inmates’ possessions roughly cast outside the cell in a warder’s raid in the story ‘The head warder’ by Kostas Pasayiannis (1898: 16). At least one such instrument survives in the archives of the Gennadeios Library in Athens, emblazoned with the name of the prison in which it was manufactured (see Figure 8.1 and Petropoulos 1979a: 306 f.).
