An Epirotic Odyssey
One man’s quest to uncover Europe’s oldest surviving folk music
Imagine there’s a place where music exists as it was first created, thousands and thousands of years ago, a place where song and dance still glued communities together across generations. That place exists: Epirus, a little pocket of northwestern Greece on the border with Albania. There, in scattered mountain villages, people still practice a musical tradition that predates Homer. In his new book, Lament from Epirus, the obsessive record collector—and Grammy-winning producer and musicologist—Christopher King goes on an odyssey to uncover Europe’s oldest surviving folk music, and spins us some rare 78s.
Go beyond the episode:
- Christopher King’s Lament from Epirus
- Buy LPs, CDs, or MP3s of Chris’s Epirotic collections, from Five Days Married and Other Laments to Why the Mountains Are Black
- Read Christopher King’s Paris Review essay, “Talk About Beauties,” about the lost recordings of Alexis Zoumbas
All images below courtesy of W. W. Norton.
Pen and ink portraits of Kitsos Harisiadis and Alexis Zoumbas by R. Crumb
Listen to A Lament for Epirus (1926–1928) by Alexis Zoumbas, mastered and produced by Christopher King
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Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
