Καλλιτεχνικός Σύλλογος Δημοτικής Μουσικής Δόμνα Σαμίου

The additional lyrics were taken from M.G. Michailidis Nouaros, Δημοτικά τραγούδια Καρπάθου, Athens 1928, p. 57.

The Byzantine epic ‘Song of Armouris’ is the oldest folk song to have entered the written tradition, and is known to us from a 15th-century St. Petersburg manuscript in a variation of 201 verses. Orally, it has survived in abbreviated versions, which are still sung on Cyprus and Karpathos, where Armouris has become Kalomoiris.

The plot of the written song goes like this: Armouris has been a Saracen prisoner for 12 years. Having proven his manhood on several occasions, Armouris' adolescent son gets his mother's permission to mount his father's tethered steed and, armed with his weapons, to cross the perilous Euphrates and enter into hostile territory where he crushes the Arab hordes. The Emir of Syria has no choice but to release Armouris, telling him that he wants his courageous son to wed his daughter.

Various opinions have been expressed as to the historicity of the characters and events echoed in the song. Older academics linked the name of the captive Armouris to Amorio, a city razed to the ground by the Arabs in 838, interpreting the song as referring to the victorious campaign beyond the Euphrates, waged in revenge by the Byzantines in 859.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the historical context of the song - one of very few which academia deigns to label ‘akritic’ - are clearly the clashes between the Byzantine empire and the Arabs. The vitality with which this reality is rendered had numerous researchers posit that the song of Armouris - in which the war between Byzantines and Arabs is the present reality, and peace (in the form of the marriage proposed at the end of the song) no more than a vision - predates the Epic of Digenis Akritis in which the two peoples are reconciled and live together in peace¹.

Still, the song's interest is not restricted to its historical echoes and their interpretation; its poetic formulas and the nexus of symbols and myths woven around the hero could well mark it out as an archetypal source of inspiration for a number of other narrative heroic songs that have come down to us from the Byzantine period². Miranda Terzopoulou (2017)

¹St. Alexiou, Βασίλειος Διγενής Ακρίτης και τα άσματα του Αρμούρη και του υιού τού Ανδρονίκου, Athens 2008,, p. 161.
²G. Saunier, Ελληνικά Δημοτικά Τραγούδια. Συναγωγή μελετών, G. Andreiomenos (ed.), I. Botouropoulou (trans.), Athens 2001, p. 246. 

Local dance known as ‘pano choros’.

Studio recording, 2004.