The lyra, violin, laouto, and mandolin have fully and deservedly expressed the pains, inspirations, passions, struggles, desires, and hopes of the Cretan people during their great and long-suffering island’s long and turbulent passage through the last several centuries. All of these musical instruments – as well as the Cretan wind instruments, askomandoura, bandoura, and sfirohabiolo, and the small bass drum or daouli of Lasithi – deserve the same respect that is due to the countless revelers who held them in their calloused hands, did obeisance to them with their pale lips, and whose blessed faces, furrowed by unimaginable hardships like the Byzantine murals in the small monasteries scattered throughout the Cretan countryside, lit up or were saddened by their sounds.

This current study betrays not the slightest discrimination or prejudice against one or the other musical instrument. Quite the contrary: it represents the struggle for mutual respect between the local traditions of the Cretan people, far from senseless egoism and provincialism. The great musicians Harhalis, Harilaos, Skordalos, Kalogeridis, and Foradaris (may their memory be eternal, as our wise grandfathers would have said) stand erect and smiling upon the iconostasis of Cretan music, like the icons of the Twelve Apostles or the twelve great feasts of Orthodoxy on the carved wooden icon-stands of the chapels that remain in our villages to connect our Byzantine roots to the dizzying din of the present. According to the great couplet of the contemporary Amariot Giorgos Lekkas:


It was not my intent or desire to occupy myself with ancient history, but I was harried by some who broached the subject. This text, and I beg your indulgence, is my scientific reply to them, before we sit down before a bottle of Amariot raki and clink our glasses, forgetting the unfilled desires of the past, the petty intentionalities of the present, and the pressing expediencies of an uncertain future. To our health!

A. The lyra in the Greek world

In order to investigate the temporal starting-point of the presence of string instruments in Crete, it is necessary to examine their presence in the wider sphere of the Aegean or, broader still, of the eastern Mediterranean and the Byzantine empire in general.

We know that the lyra, specifically, already existed in Byzantium from the 10th century A.D. Aside from the carved reliefs on the 10th or 11th century Byzantine ivory chest on display in the Florentine Museum and the illustrated manuscripts of the 11th century[1], the report of the Persian Ibn Kurdadhbih to the caliph Al Mutamid, in which he mentions, among other byzantine instruments, the lyra, has weighty significance. He describes the lyra as a wooden instrument with five strings «similar to the Arabic rebab»[2[ . 

This mention of the lyra has special significance for two reasons aside from its antiquity: first, because he uses the Greek name lyra and, second, because he considers the specific instrument to be «similar to the rebab» and not descended from the rebab. While this doesn’t completely rule out the Byzantine lyra having an Arabic origin,  we must investigate its relationship with the bowed instruments of the East (India and, subsequently, the Arab world) as well as with the ancient Greek lyra (or lyre). The name lyra for this specific instrument is not found only in educated Constantinople (where it could have been given by scholars to a newly arrived instrument that reminded them somewhat of the ancient arpa or harp) but in all of the Greek territories with the exception of the region of Serres[3] in Macedonia, where it is called zinga or ginga, probably as a result of foreign influence. (The Turks, at any rate, refer to the Greek lyra as «rüm kemençe», which translates as «Greek lyra»):


It is furthermore necessary, in my opinion, to carefully assess the view of Claude Foriel that the blind Greek folk poets «sing while playing with a bow a stringed instrument that is exactly the lyre of the ancient Greeks, and which has retained both its name and shape. To be complete, the lyra must have five strings, but it usually has no more than two or three, and its tones, as one can easily imagine, are not especially harmonious...»[4] . Foriel writes in 1824 and considers it self-evident that the lyra is a Greek instrument. Although Giorgos Hatzidakis recognizes in his work Cretan Music, in the chapter on the origin of the Cretan lyra, that «the modern and ancient lyres, from the standpoint of construction, present essentially the same technical features», which he describes exhaustively (the shape, the sound-box, the keys or tuning pegs, etc.), he is of the opinion that they must not be the same instrument, primarily because the ancient lyra was a plucked instrument (played with a plectrum or pick), while the newer one is bowed. He considers the bow, not unjustifiably, a product of the East: both the violin and lyra families descend from the Indian subcontinent. Even the Indian lyra on display in the Museum of Natural Sciences in New York accompanies a note that «this instrument was brought from the Indian subcontinent to America» (the indiginous peoples of America are thought to be of remote Asian origin; their ancestors passed over the Bering Strait to the North American continent[5]).

In any event, we do not know when the Byzantines began to play the lyra. Even if we aren’t dealing with an unbroken tradition which has continuity with antiquity (and the modern lyra, unexpectedly, is not the direct descendant of the ancient lyre[6]) but indeed came from the Arab world, we don’t know how much earlier than the 10th century this cultural «exchange» took place. In the 11th century bowed instruments were spread all throughout medieval Europe and further, as far as the Celts and the British Isles.

In the entire arch from Constantinople to Crete, which includes the islands of the eastern Aegean, the lyra was present until the middle of the 20th century, at which point the lyra was displaced by the violin. We also find the lyra in the village of Agia Eleni in Serres (the «firewalkers’» lyra), where, as we have seen, the name zinga or ginga is prevalent; this lyra differs from the Constantinopolitan (or politiki) lyra, perhaps betraying more Turkish influence.

B. The lyra in Crete

The old-style Cretan lyra, or lyraki, is nearly identical to the Constantinopolitan lyra. We must consider two possible interpretations of its origins:

1.    The lyra was brought by the Arabs, who, having come as conquerers from Spain, maintained a presence in Crete from 823-961 A.D. The instrument has been in continuous use in Crete ever since (this would mean that the Arabic rebab of the same era was morphologically the same as the Byzantine lyra[7]).

2.    The lyra came to Crete from Constantinople, either (more likely) with the army of Nikiforos Phokas and the Byzantines who followed (the «twelve young nobles» or «dhodheka arhontopoula» of Greek folk song); or through the Dodecanese islands, in which case it must have entered on the eastern side of Crete (which is near the islands of Kasos and Karpathos) by the 12th century at the latest, since two centuries for the musical «journey» from Constantinople to Crete is more than enough time. Much more so, in fact, considering that the Cretans were, as is well known, excellent sailors: the French tourist Andre Thevet wrote in 1549 that «The Cretans are outstanding pilots and sea-merchants. They use small boats which they call squiraces. When there is a dead calm on the sea five Turkish skiffs can’t keep up with one of these small Cretan vessels»[8] .

 This second interpretation is supported by the fact that this specific instrument is known in Crete only by the Greek word lyra. There is no record or memory in any local tradition of this instrument being known by the name rebab, rebek, kementzes or any other foreign term.

In both of these interpretations it is evident that the Venetians, who came to Crete in 1211, found the lyra already here, certainly as a folk instrument (as in the Dodecanese)  in its primitive form: lyrakia constructed by the village lyra-players themselves from local wood and bows of horse and/or donkey hair – exactly like the lyrakia that we know from the countless lyra-players of the Cretan villages of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, before the Cretan lyra took its current conventional form as a result of the decisive confluence of the legendary lyra-player Andreas Rodinos and the well-known luthier Manolis Stagakis, both of Rethymno.

The «hawk-bells» on the bow of the Cretan lyra are, in my opinion, yet another exceptionally important piece of evidence supporting the presence of the lyra in Crete during the period of Venetian occupation at the latest, when the landed gentry hunted with hawks on whose feet they tied small bells, if this was not also done during the Byzantine period by analogous hunters. The Turks of Crete never hunted with hawks – only with bloodhounds, like the simple Cretan villagers. The hawk-bells, furthermore, were added to the bow of the Cretan lyra (only the lyra, which was a rural instrument, and not the more urban violin) either during the Byzantine or the Venetian period. In the opposite case, if in other words the bells had come into use on the bow after hawks had ceased to be used for hunting, they could have only been taken from the priestly incense-censer; in this case they would have most probably been named «priest-bells» or another similar term. The censer was always in use, with the possible exception of turbulent eras. The image of the bells of the censer was much closer than that of the hunting hawk to the eyes of the Cretan villagers during the period of Turkish occupation, even to the old men of the first generation, who still remembered the era of the Venetians and Greek lords.

It is a fact that mention of folk musical instruments in texts from the Venetian occupation consists almost exclusively of wind instruments and percussion[9] . Perhaps the bandoura, askomandoura, and thiaboli or sfirohabiolo were already more widespread than the lyra in the Cretan countryside, since until the beginning of the 20th century their dissemination was exceptional. Describing dances of the inhabitants of Sfakia, tourists such as Pierre Belon (1553), as well as the more recent O. Dapper (1836) don’t mention any musical instruments at all. Hatzidakis, in fact, cites Belon to support his view that the lyra didn’t exist in Crete in the 16th century, forgetting that the inhabitants of Sfakia have never, even up to the present day, used string instruments.

However, there is an often overlooked mention of the lyra by the 14th or 15th century poet Stefanos Sahlikis of Handakas[10], one of the forerunners of the Cretan Renaissance:


In my opinion, the poet is referring neither to the ancient arpa nor to the Italian lira (as the unforgettable Nikolaos Panagiotakis believed[11], but rather to the popular Cretan lyra of his era (the 14th or 15th century), a fact which is proven by the word paigniotis – the idiomatic Cretan word for either a marksman or a musical instrumentalist. The simile used by Sahlikis, though urban, obviously refers to an image of the folklife of the Cretan countryside of his era, of a «paigniotis playing the lyra» and not to an image of an Italian troubadour or ancient Greek harpist.

It is perhaps not unwise to point out here that the well-known reference to the laouto in Vitsentsos Kornaros’epic poem Erotokritos is to the urban European renaissance lute and not to the present-day Cretan laouto, a very recent instrument that joins the neck of the tamboura with the body of the outi (oud or Arabic lute). This is why the Cretan laouto has a larger body than the laouto of mainland Greece as well as that of the islands and of Constantinople (lafta). Spiridon Zabelios (1815-1881), describing in Cretan Weddings[12] how Sofia de Molin played the lute, mentions: «This plucked stringed instrument was called the lute. Its use, which ceased long ago, left but a few memories in the folk poetry of the contemporary Cretan school». Aside from the lute, all of the European instruments of the era could be found in the cities – zithers, violins, various lutes, harps, basses, flutes, trumpets, and bell-trees[13].

If the Byzantines did not have a similar instrument, the violin must have entered the urban centers of Crete during the Venetian occupation. Just how quickly it made its way from the cities to the villages is unknown. Panagiotakis thinks that this happened relatively quickly[14]. At this point, let us bear in mind that:

1.    The violin is always constructed by a professional luthier and never by the amateur musician (as is the lyra); therefore its dissemination into the villages must have been very difficult at the beginning, as all of the violins being played at the time were made in the cities and apparently – and most importantly – quite expensive, another inhibiting factor for the common people of the time.
2.    In the regions where, as we know from more recent sources, the lyra was played, the violin must never have caught on (at the most there must have been an urban or suburban violinist here and there), because it is doubtful that the inhabitants would have abandoned a four-string instrument and adopted a three-string one, as one less string means fewer musical possibilities. As far as I know, there has never been any evidence of the aforementioned five-string lyra in Crete. On the other hand, in the regions in which the violin did establish itself and even at some point dominate, even if this happened during the 13th century (around 1250), it is very possible that the lyra was already present. In this case it either co-existed with the violin for a short or long period of time and either finally receded (as in the region of Kisamos) or still co-exists, as in the prefectures of Iraklion and Lasithi. Let us not forget the great Lasithiot lyra tradition which, in the 19th and 20th centuries, was handed down among famous lyra-players such Foradaris, Ioannis Solidakis (Kirliba) and Mathios Garefallakis.

C. The Turkish occupation

By 1746 we have the first report of the lyra connecting it with Crete and considering it the Cretan musical instrument par excellence. The British tourist M. Porter, traveling in Constantinople, finds that the Greeks «sing and dance unceasingly. One sees Cretan lyres and Pan-pipes, which consist of seven unequal pipes, everywhere...» These instruments were being played only by Greeks. The Turks, on the other hand, «avoid dances and don’t like music; when they are obliged to live among Greek sailors, they see them dancing on their ships or on the land, with or without instruments, and they keep their distance»[15].

What does the author mean by characterizing the lyras he saw in Constantinople as Cretan? Were they really Cretan lyrakia, which he distinguished from the Constantinopolitan lyras by the tying of their strings and probably by the hawk-bells on the bow? Or did he simply connect the lyra exclusively with Crete for some reason and therefore consider it obvious that the lyras he saw were Cretan? This is unknown; and at any rate he doesn’t mention any travels that he may have made in Crete. What is certain is that in his time the lyra existed and was established and widespread in Crete.  

The earliest recorded Cretan lyra-player known by name is thought to be Thodoromanolis (1778-181) from Epanohori of Selinos in the prefecture of Hania, who was roughly a contemporary of the legendary Kisamiot violinist Stefanos Triantafillakis or Kioros (1740-1790). Thodoromanolis, according to Athanasios Deiktakis, «played on his lyra the many desires and few joys of Crete... he found in its rhythms ways of illusive escape, and his couplets were full of rebellious innuendos. The melodies brought to mind the uprising of the subjugated, and the syrta (Cretan dance tunes) heroic visions.» Thodoromanolis killed the wild janissary of Epanohori Emin Vergeri, after he ordered him to come to his home with his lyra and to bring along his female cousins and his widowed aunt, for them to «enjoy themselves». The distressing and dishonorable results of such «invitations» for Christian women were well known. After his deed, Thodoromanolis fled and was finally apprehended in Omalos. He was executed and his corpse was dragged through the streets of Hania for three days as an example[16]. He was barely 40 years old.

During roughly the same era, in the poetry of Giorgis Skatovergas (which was recorded by Foriel[17]), we find the lyra in the hands of the Irakliot bard:


Foriel, as we have seen, published his book in 1824. The events described by the poem (the murder of the bloodthirsty agas of Mohoglos by Skatoverga in Mohos in Irakleio and the hero’s adventures until his death) occured, as he himself writes, in 1806. Poems of this specific length (104 verses) were and are written by the folk poets (rimadoroi) of Crete immediately after the events they describe. This specific poem must have been written by 1816 at the latest, otherwise «the subject would have been too far in the past» to be relevant.

In 1817 the Austrian tourist F. W. Sieber recorded his meeting in Karidi of Siteia with a young lyra-player who played, as he reports, a four-string lyra[18]. Sieber wasn’t particularly pleased by his playing, but he generally doesn’t express much liking for the music and dances of Crete (ibid., pp. 61-62, 74).

Though the tourist M. Hourmouzis Vizantios in 1842 found lyra-players in every Cretan village, and even in the rebel camps,  he didn’t seem to come across a single instance of a Turkish lyra-player: «The chief musical instrument of the Cretans, which they play beautifully, is the lyra, and it is rare to find a village without one or two lyra-players». And in a footnote: «The Cretans love dancing to excess; even in their rebel encampments they are never without a lyra» (M. Hourmouzis Vizantios, Kritika, Athens 1842, pp. 30-31).

Finally, in confirmation of the above,  let us simply mention this except, added by Psilakis[19], from the work of the «young tourist Liheras» (a German tourist of the end of the 19th century), which describes with liveliness Cretan archers dancing the pidihtos or «leaping dance» around 1790: «And down to the end of the previous century the Cretans still performed the primordial warrior-dance of their race... to the striking, rough, and joyful sounds of the forminx». (Forminx is a word for the ancient lyra, which he connects with the contemporary one).

In my opinion, these accounts advocate the viewpoint that the Turks who came to Crete in 1642 did not bring the lyra with them, but found it here already, in the hands of the Christians, and adopted it in a limited fashion only as a result of mutual influence with their subjects, in situations where they themselves were Islamicised Christians or their descendants. Otherwise we would have to hypothesize that they abandoned it over time, leaving it solely in the hands of the Christians, since we are acquainted with extremely few cases of Turko-Cretan lyra-players – just as the known cases of Turko-Cretan violinists, dancers, and folk-poets are extremely rare.

D. The authors of the 19th century
       
In the 19th century, when writers began to take an interest in the goings-on of the countryside and villages, we begin to see successive mentions of the lyra as the characteristic Cretan  instrument (these mentions apply only to the Christian population of the island, the only segment regarded as Greek), while, strangely, other instruments are almost ignored. In my opinion, this is due to the tremendously widespread nature of the lyra on the island, as is shown by Hourmouzis Byzantios’ Kritika (a lyra-player in every village and perhaps in every neighborhood, as we know from the Cretan villages of the 19th century with the exception of Kisamos). Indeed, the lyra had already supplanted the wind-instruments as well (bandoura, askomantoura and sfirohabiolo), while the violin was limited to certain localities and the laouto and mandolin had perhaps not even yet appeared in the Cretan countryside.

Accordingly, in his epic Kritiis[20] (1867) Antonios Antoniadis describes in an especially lively fashion and with clear references to our culture’s ancient roots, a gathering of Cretan rebels around the Sfakian revolutionary Drakos during the struggle against the Venetian occupation. Once he has described their food and how they ate, the wine, and drinking etiquette etc., he concludes:

«So the tones of the lyra ring out merrily; the melody incites the feet to the warrior dance, where some look on and others dance, or sing ancient songs which are immediately of much import...»

In his Istorika Skinografimata Spiridon Zabelios (1815-1881), speaking of the «Passions of Cretans and Venetians», mentions: «The Cretans, a fiery, lively race, who love to dance and sing, the marvelous improvising Cretan poets and fairy tale-tellers, made the lyra during the days of the Dukes a weapon more dangerous to the tyrant than the bow...»

And further on, describing the funeral of Leondas Kallergis: «...and the white-haired, blind bard dolefully sang with his lyra the lament for Leondas:


Naturally, we cannot know for sure that these fiery non-Cretan writers had direct evidence of the existence of the lyra in Crete during the Venetain occupation; perhaps they assumed its presence, since they considered it the Cretan musical instrument par excellence. What we can be sure of with certainty is that, in their era, the lyra was considered the chief musical instrument of the Cretans, apparently because it was the most widespread.

However, we must say that Hatzidakis considers Zabelios’ information to be accurate, and, apparently not acquainted with the above excerpts, comes to the conclusion that the author doesn’t mention the lyra when speaking of the Cretans of the Venetian occupation. «We have learned from a relevant Venetian historical commentary, used by Zabelios in Cretan Weddings» , writes Hatzidakis, «that during the grand wedding celebration of the son of G. Kandanoleon (1570) only percussion and bagpipes were noted. This constitutes notable evidence that the lyra did not exist in Crete at that time...» (ibid., p. 177). But this is not the case. Hatzidakis did not notice that Zabelios, who in reality is extremely careful in his information and descriptions of the life of the Cretans and Venetians (in Cretan Weddings, where he describes the tragic end of the great Cretan resistance fighter against the Venetians Giorgios Kandanoleon), mentions, aside from the reeds and pipes (to which he often refers), that «the mountain-folk of Ierolakko played the pipe, sang, and played the kithara...»[22]  The latter does not mean the highland shepherds played the kithara or guitar but rather the lyra, which was at the time commonly referred to as kithara.

The equation of the lyra with the guitar, widely known in urban areas, is more general in the older era: «A sailor incessantly played the violin or lyra. This lyra has the shape of the guitar but with three strings and a shorter neck» writes the English Richard Chandler, who traveled in the Aegean during the years 1764-1766, about the lyra of Hydra .[23]

Cf. Vasileios Psilakis, History of Crete: the Dorians «were making use of the Greek kithara or as it was and still is known the lyra, as well as the Phrygian reed-pipe...» - «Then and now the indigenous lyra dominated and still dominates, proof of the continuity of the Doric nature of the Cretan lyra»[24](Psilakis apparently considers the modern Cretan lyra to be the descendant of the ancient one).

Ioannis Kondilakis (1862-1920), though he comes from Viannos (which during the 20th century developed a primarily violin-centered tradition – see also the excellent compact disc «Fengarovradies stin Vianno» with the participation of local violinists and mandolinists), seems in his work to ignore the violin, while mentioning only the lyra. He describes with emphasis the Dionysian revelry of the Viannites to the sounds of the lyra of the blind lyra-player Alexandris; some hot-blooded young Turkish Cretans attempted to force their way into the party and were expelled from Patouhas (I. Kontilakis, Patouhas, ch. 9). He also mentions in his dramatization The Janissary’s Gift a party of Turkish Cretans with the lyra, but without clarifying if the lyra-player was a Turk or, most likely, since he was accompanying the forced Christian women of the village, a coerced Christian.

The somewhat more recent Nikos Kazantsakis (1883-1957), who hails from Irakleio, in his novels (Freedom or Death, Zorba the Greek, and parts of Report to Greco) mentions only the lyra and lyra-players, who he considers expressions of the struggle of enslaved Crete and the dream of freedom, like Ventouzos and the schoolteacher in Freedom or Death («with the old lyra on his shoulder, like a bandolier»). The lyra is seen as the soul of Crete – Greek and only Greek: «The three of them enthroned themselves, took their stools, filled their plates; the schoolteacher took the lyra from his shoulder, leaned it upright on his knees; he reached out his hand, grabbed a bit of meat to eat and take some strength, before playing the lyra...» (Freedom or Death, ch. 13).

E. The Cretan Turks and the Greek musical instruments.

1. The origin of the Cretan Turks

It is already known, I believe, that the great majority of the Muslim population of Crete during the Turkish occupation (but not all; hence the large number of Turkish words in the Cretan dialect[25]25) was of Greek descent – in other words, Islamicized Christians, many of whom began as crypto-Christians and in a few generations became Muslims in actuality. These people neither knew the Turkish language nor changed their way of life from what it had been before they were Islamicized, except for two points: they were no longer persecuted slaves but now absolute masters, and, as Turks (the words “Turk” and “Greek” had a religious rather than ethnic or racial meaning), they were obliged to observe the stipulations and restrictions of Islam (which they did rather inadequately). For this reason the “Oriental Turks” referred to them disparagingly as “bourmades” or apostates – a curse which was eventually used by the Christians of the island when referring to the Turkish Cretans.

Many Turkish Cretans, then, played the lyra, violin, and other musical instruments, composed mantinades and rhymes, and danced Cretan dances just as they reaped, plowed, and milked like their Christian neighbors. Still, during the Cretan occupation, Ioannis Kondilakis writes the following in the newspaper “Estia” on June 15-16, 1896 (see Ioannis Kondilakis, Ta Apanta, Aidon Editions, Athens 1961, pp. 372-385):

“…complete misrule and anarchy for the Turks, unprecedented terrorism for the Christians. The murder of a Christian went unpunished, as they Turks always killed feisty Christians for the pleasure of it as target practice; but the murder of a Turk was punished with the destruction of an entire Greek village.

Those Christians who escaped death were subject to torture and inhuman humiliations. Often Turkish village leaders, coming into the churches in the midst of the liturgy, would compel the churchgoers to perform unpaid labor. Some would seize the brides shortly after their wedding, killing the grooms, and forcing the girls and women in attendance to dance half-naked for their enjoyment…

Then… the Muslim population doubled due to the large number of converts. The weary inhabitants of many villages trekked en masse with their priest in the lead to adopt the teachings of the Koran. Indeed, it is said that so many people went to Monofatsi at once to be converted, and since there were so many men that it would have been extremely difficult to perform the necessary circumcision ritual, that the imam of Irakleio simply read a benediction and then said to the new converts:

“Get along, Turks!”

So yesterday’s bondsmen put on an aga’s turban, and breathed a sigh of relief.

And so, nearly the entire population of this rural area was Islamicized, and today only a few crumbling churches remain in the villages as a reminder that these fanatical Turks were once Christians. The Muslim populations of Selinos and Ampadia were undoubtedly created in a similar fashion. And were it not for the War of Independence in 1821 Crete might have been completely Islamicized, her Christian population exterminated. This uprising, however, emboldened the Christians; from then on the Muslim population decreased rather than increasing, and many of the apostates returned to the religion of their homeland.”

Certainly, most of the coerced converts changed their religion only in appearance, while they secretly practiced their Christian faith. For this reason, the phenomenon of the cryto-Christians was intensely present in Crete. Some of them played an active role in the uprisings against the Turkish hegemony, such as the Kourmoulides, and some were even martyred for the cause (such as the Four Martyrs of Rethymno, who came from the village of Melampes of Agios Vasileios).

But most, over time, lost their courage and hope; they and their descendants became real Muslims, and indeed the most fanatic: “The kinship between Christians was forgotten, ignorance darkened mind and logic, the poison of Islam hardened their souls, they became drunk with the power of their preferential position as despots and they discriminated fiercely against their former brethren… How could these haughty and men have anything in common with their humble, scorned, and wretched serfs?” (Kondilakis, ibid.)

As for the Turkish Cretans’ general way of life, they neither changed their language nor the scope of their usual daily activities, as we have seen. In Yiannis Tsivis’ book Hania 1252-1940 (Gnosis, Athens 1993, p. 111 on), we read about the Cretan Turks of Hania:

“The Turkish Cretans had roughly the same customs and ethos as the Greek Christian inhabitants of the island. In wartime they were brave, they kept their word, and they behaved generously toward the sick and helpless.” (According to tradition the Turks of Hania were known to be trustworthy men who were good to their word; unfortunately this was not the case for the Cretan Turks in general). “The vast majority of the Cretan Turks kept only one wife. Since most of them were Islamicized Greek or Venetian Christians, they retained the tradition of monogamy as well as many other of the ways and manners of their Christian countrymen.”

---

1. See Foivos Anogeianakis, Greek Popular Musical Instruments, «Melissa», Athens 1991, pp. 270 and 373 footnotes 428 and 429.
2.  See H.G. Farmer, Byzantine Musical Instruments in the Ninth Century, London 1925, pp. 3-7. The report by Foibos Anogeianakis, ibid., pp. 270 and 372 footnote 426.
3.  Ibid., p.372 footnote 426.
4.  See Claude Fauriel, Greek Folk Songs, University of Crete Press, Irakleio 1999, vol. 1, pp. 57-59.
5.  Georgios I. Hatzidakis, Cretan Music, prologue by Manolis Kalomoiris, Athens, pp. 173-175.
6.  C.f. the appraisal of the historian Vassilis Psilakis (History of Crete, 1909), which is mentioned below.
7.  This opinion is expressed by the musician and scholar Ilias G. Oikonomakis in his book Tracking the Paths of Musical Tradition – Eastern Crete, Athens 2003, pp. 55-56.
8.  The report by Kyriakos Simopoulos, Foreign Travellers in Greece, vol. I (333 A.D. – 1700), Athens 2003, pp. 55-56.
9.  See N. M. Panagiotakis, «Music in Crete During the Venetian Occupation», in Crete, History and Culture, Local Union of Cretan Municipalities and Communities, Crete 1988, p. 16.
10.  See S. Papadimitriou, Stefanos Sahlikis and his poem «A Strange Narration», Odessa 1896, p. 16.
11.  N. M. Panagiotakis, «Education and Music in Crete During the Venetian Occupation», Local Union of Cretan Municipalities and Communities, Crete 1990, p. 20.
12.  S. Zabelios, Cretan Weddings, reprinting by Makris, Athens 1963, part II, chapter II, p. 387.
13.  From the «Fallidos»,  a poem of the era. See N. M. Panagiotakis, ibid., p. 311.
14.  Ibid., p. 313.
15.  The reports to Kyriakos Simopoulos, ibid., vol. 2 (1700-1800), Athens 1973, pp. 213-214 and footnote 2 on p. 213.
16.  See Athanasios P. Deiktakis, Bygone Musicians of Hania, Kasteli Kisamou 1999, pp. 40-43.
17.  Claude Fauriel, ibid., p. 342. 
18.  F. w. Sieber, Traveling on the island of Crete in 1817, translated by D. Moustris, introduction and commentary by Giannis Grintakis, Istoritis, Athens 1994, p. 232.
19.  History of Crete, ibid., vol. I, ch. HIST. (footnotes on pages 471-472 in the reissue of «Minotaur»). I thank the Rethymniot scholar Mr. Georgios Ekkekakis for the material he gave me about Liheras.
20.  See Antonios I. Antoniadou, Summary of the Kritiis, publisher E. D. Frantzeskakis, Hania 1899, pp. 109-110.
21.  S. Zabelios, Istorika Skinografimata – the Epic of Cretan Independence, translated into modern Greek by T. Louloudakis, Hania 1977, pp. 87-88 and 92.
22.  S. Zabelios, Cretan Weddings, ibid., part II, ch. 3, p. 404.
23.  See Kyriakos Simopoulos, ibid., p. 289.
24. Vassilis Psilakis, «History of Crete, from the Ancients Until Our Own Time», first edition 1909, reissued by Minotaur, part I, p. 488 and footnotes.
25. C.f. “1/3 of the Muslims of Crete are Islamicized Christians”, estimate of the French tourist Ferieres-Sauvedoeuf in 1872. In K. Simopoulos, ibid., p. 448.