ABSTRACT
Reflecting and reinforcing all this, expatriation has long been a core theme of rebetika. Indeed, the spiritual homeland of rebetes, the mythical heroes of the songs, is to kourbeti, most literally ‘exile’ (cf. the Turkish gurbet), as attested by Markos Vamvakaris’s classic song ‘All the rebetes in the world’.2 This song was recorded in 1937, but its title presciently adumbrates a globalisation of the genre and its mythology which reached its apogee in 2004 in ‘The Diaspora of Rebetika’ a global audio-anthology issued by the World Music publishers Network Medien of Frankfurt, featuring 31 ensembles from 13 countries (Network 27.418).
