Klephts of Mani - Epic Greek Music

Arrangement by Farya Faraji, with recordings of traditional Clarinet playing by Greek musicians. Continuing in the series of the Balkan freedom fighters, I wanted to pay homage to some of the most renowned “hajduk” like figures of Greece, called the klephts, and more specifically, those of Mani. I visited the Mani last year and fell in love with the regional culture and the incredible landscape. Mani is a harsh, arid land that was always relatively isolated from the rest of the Peleponnese to the north. Pagans still prayed to the Olympian gods there by the 10th century, and it was de facto mostly independent during much of Ottoman rule. Pirate-like clans ruled the land and the surrounding waters, and their presence can still be seen in the stone tower structures of Maniot families which dot the land to this day. Some of the most renowned klephts, like Petros Mavromichalis, were Maniots, and his statue can still be standing to this day in Areopoli. The Maniots speak their own dialect of Greek which shares similarities with Tsakonian, the modern, living (but unfortunately dying) language descended from Doric Greek in Antiquity, and also some similarities with other southern dialects like Cretan. Some have said of Mani: “As a passerby you need three days to see Mani, as a visitor you need three months, but to see her soul you need three lifetimes. One for her sea, one for her mountains and one for her people.” The instrumentation harkens to a sound much like that of the era of the klephts of the 1800’s: a clarinet, a laouto, and typical Greek drums like the bendhir and the darbuka.