Καλλιτεχνικός Σύλλογος Δημοτικής Μουσικής Δόμνα Σαμίου

Porphyris song is known chiefly in Cappadocia, the Pontus, Cyprus, Crete, the Dodecanese and the Asia Minor coast, though it can be found less frequently in other areas, including those presented here.

According to earlier generation of researchers, who sought historical events and figures behind the songs' fantastic tales, Porphyris echoes Konstantinos Doukas, the son of Andronikos Doukas, Emperor Leo VI’s general, who plotted to usurp the throne; though he was betrayed and his uprising failed, the people took him into their hearts and immortalized him in a number of epic songs and poems.

However, this most important song narrating the tale of the brave man called Porphyris or Prosfylis or Brosfylis and often Kostantis, has absolutely nothing to do with historical figures or with the Akritic cycle. It is likely considered to be a very old theme and hero detected in late antiquity and Sassanian narratives.
Its interest lies in its engaging, novelistic plot and in the classic symbolisms and poetic formulae that connect songs, heroic epics and folk tales together like an invisible nexus, and which we find gathered together here like nowhere else.

All the many versions of the song have roughly the same content and deal with the same subjects: Porphyris, like almost all heroes in these songs (see Kalomoiris and the Saracen, Andronikos and the princess), is born in some unusual way. His mother - a widow, aged woman, nun, Jewess, Armenian or some other figure unsuited to motherhood and a little exotic, transgressive and transcendental - gifts him with supernatural qualities that manifest themselves immediately in the infant's prodigal appetite and capacity for food, and in his precocious growth.

Like every hero relieved of the repressive paternal presence (see Kalomoiris and the Saracen, Tsamandas), Porphyris is intoxicated with his omnipotence and never misses an opportunity to flaunt it. The king dispatches his men to capture him and make him bow down before the throne. The boastful hero is forced to pit himself against the vast forces sent against him by the king, a symbolic substitute for the father figure, as Guy Saunier, the distinguished neo-Hellenist, so appositely points out in his exceptional study of the song¹.

His enemies bind him and sew his eyelids shut with silken thread, but the hero casts off both with conspicuous ease before routing the enemy forces, simultaneously winning the woman he loves and revealing the king's impotence. The host of features in this section - first and foremost the binding of the body and sewing up of the eyelids (which symbolized death in folk culture), followed by the breaking of the bonds, liberation, vindication, revenge (a resurrection of sorts for the hero) - describe a complete rite of passage for the mythic hero and, by extension, for every adolescent young man. Miranda Terzopoulou (2017)

¹G. Saunier, Ελληνικά Δημοτικά Τραγούδια. Συναγωγή μελετών, G. Andreiomenos (ed.), I. Botouropoulou (trans.), Athens 2001, pp. 177-197.

Domna Samiou taped the song in the village of Kontias on Lemnos, in 1973, sung by Stavros Lantouris, aged 59. The lyrics in square brackets, which are not heard on the CD, are recited by him.