rallying what remained of the Turkish armies and irregulars as Greece gradually lost the backing of its "Big Brothers." The result was a rout, with the Greek army retreating in disarray from Anatolia in 1922; Greek troops headed toward the sea, followed by the non-Turkish, non-Muslim citizens who feared the wrath of Kemal's forces.
Most retreating soldiers and refugees moved towards Smyrna, the main port city of Asia Minor; they began to arrive there on Saturday, September 1, 1922. By September 5, more than 30,000 refugees a day were pouring into a city whose population had previously been only 200,000; by September 9, when the first Turkish forces arrived in Smyrna (the last Greek soldiers had left September 8th), its population had swelled to over 500,000. The killing of Armenian and Greek civilians began on September 10; on September 11, small fires started throughout the city and soon it was engulfed in flames. Refugees and residents moved toward the harbor - hundreds of thousands crammed into an area just under two miles long and a hundred feet wide - in hopes of escaping to any of the 21 Allied warships at anchor in the bay. Little help came. Great Britain, America, Italy and France remained neutral and refused to interfere; the civilians were trapped between the blazing city and the sea. Eventually, 20,000 people were saved by the ships, but in Smyrna alone, at least 30,000 (and possibly up to 100,000) Greeks and Armenians were killed and the city itself destroyed as those "allied" troop ships bobbed in the harbor.
The settlement negotiated after the Greek-Turkish war came to be known as the Treaty of Lausanne. Amongst its conditions was a "population exchange" between Greece and Turkey based solely upon religion, irregardless that these peoples had been settled in their respective homelands for centuries. With few exceptions, the Orthodox minority in Turkey was to be sent to Greece, the Muslim minority of Greece to Turkey.
Thus, in 1923, over one million Anatolian Greeks, many of whom spoke only Turkish, became refugees in Greece. A large percentage of this people entered Greece with few possessions and little money, and had no where to live but the poverty-stricken settlements surrounding Athens and Piraeus. Faced with overcrowding, unemployment and famine, a new Greek underclass was born...
Musical Encounters: 1923-1936
And here is where our two musical styles of rembetika and cafe aman began really rubbing elbows: in the tekedhes and clubs of Piraeus and Athens. The Asia Minor refugees brought along their musical traditions, instruments, vocal and compositional styles to mainland Greece. The displaced musicians began organizing professional unions and opening musical clubs modeled after the cafes aman of their lost homeland.
By the early 1930's, a competition for customers began to arise between the rembetic and cafe aman performers. The underworld rembetiko was fast becoming mainstream as rembetic musicians such as Markos Vamvakaris and Stratos began recording. The bouzouki was losing its underworld links; previously an instrument looked upon with scorn, it became increasingly popular, particularly after "Jack Gregory's" recording in America of Minore tou Teke. The owners of the more respectable clubs began to recognize the popularity of the rembetika recordings and hired the rembetic musicians out of the tekedhes. Guitarists and other musicians were often told by club owners to learn the bouzouki; some made the conversion on their own after recognizing the bouzouki's popularity (e.g. Papaioannou and Peristeris). Cafe aman performers such as Roza Eskenazi, Rita Abatzi, Dalgas and Samiotaki added rembetika songs to their repertoires, and easily switched between smyrna-style (oud, lyra, violin, etc.) and Piraeus-style (bouzouki, baglama) orchestras.
The musicians of this period are generally known as the first generation of rembetika and smyrneika. Markos Vamvakaris, Anestos Delias (Artemis), Andonios Dalgas, Stratos, Papaioannou, Roza Eskenazi, Rita Abatzi, Vidalis, and Semsis to mention only a handful of those performing and recording at the time.
The Metaxas Era and Logokrisia: 1936-1941
Despite laws on the books against the growing, trafficking and use of drugs including hashish, there had been little attempt by authorities to rein in the rembetic songs and their thematic material of drugs and smuggling. This changed in 1936, with General Ioannis Metaxas' rise to power and, on August 4, his suspension (with a nod from King George II) of parts of the Greek Constitution. Within the Ministry of Press and Tourism, a censor was appointed to control sound-recordings. The censor rejected recordings of songs which made reference to any facet of rembetic life, the life of the underworld or any anti-social behavior, including drug use. For a short period of time even the playing of the bouzouki did not receive the censor's approval. Tekedhes were demolished, and rembetika musicians and hash smokers were harassed and exiled (many, practicing self-exile, left Athens/Piraeus for the more comfortable confines of Thessaloniki, where Vassili Mouskoudis, the police chief, was a rembetika fan). The cafe aman musicians were discomforted to discover that not only was their newly adopted use of bouzouki and underworld thematic material suddenly unacceptable, the censorship also extended to any songs which showed a "Turkish" influence: in other words, a good part of the smyrneic repertoire could no longer be recorded.