Καλλιτεχνικός Σύλλογος Δημοτικής Μουσικής Δόμνα Σαμίου

Many fables deal with young, ill-fated love, a subject which is often linked to arbitrariness and violence within the family. As the song form most likely turns listener’s thoughts to social conditions and human nature through their constantly vacillating treatment of good and evil, long fables encourage a critical engagement on numerous levels with the social mores they highlight. The cruel tales they relate, which reiterate hymn-like a society’s strict unwritten laws, were certainly intended to serve as an example while every act of violence –even by way of punishment– is condemned as illogical and groundless, and the singer identifies with the victim.

The song As long as the shore falls into this same category. In both, an unjust death is followed by suicide. And in both cases, the mother is ultimately to blame for the death as the upholder of an inflexible moral code and, as we now know, the victim of various psychological syndromes. The young people are buried side by side and the trees which grow above their adjacent tombs blow in the wind, allowing the star-crossed lovers tenderly to embrace in death. Miranda Terzopoulou (2008)

Lambros Goumenos, who sings, a teacher from Kerasovo, Preveza, in the 1980s, taped songs from his native area and gave them to Domna Samiou for inclusion in her archive.