The Ministry of Culture announced the registration of four new items of intangible cultural heritage in the National Index of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Greece.

1. Maniatiko Moiroloi

Maniatiko obituaries typically refers to improvised mournful music, part of the Maniatiko mourning ritual (klama), mainly by women, also known as obituaries. With obituaries, women represent their dead and transmit their testimony outside of crying as a collective oral history that endures over time.

2. Evangelize

It is a church hymn dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, which was sung on the morning of the Annunciation, by groups of children and even adults in the streets of Moudania, Poursa and the surrounding villages. The inhabitants were waiting for these groups and when they passed through their neighborhood, they came out of their houses and treated them with sweets, mainly loukumi or homemade liqueur.

3. Thermiotikos Balos

ball

The cornerstone of the living music-dance tradition of the island of Kythnos (Thermia) is the paired ball dance. It stands out from the rest of the island balls for the “walks”, while its intense improvisational character is given meaning by timelessness and within a continuous performative process it updates the bonds of the community in synchronicity.

4. The engineer’s dance

“The Engineer’s Dance” is a mimetic dance and imitates the movements of the semi-disabled “caught”, as it is called, sponge-diver who was struck by “divers’ disease”. Lack of knowledge of decompression rules has resulted in disabilities and deaths. The longing of the trapped “Engineer” for life was transmuted into this dance, which is taught by the Lyceum of the Greek Girls of Kalymnos and is still danced at every event, feast and festival by the Kalymnians of the island and the expatriate Kalymnians everywhere.

“The National Intangible Cultural Heritage Index of Greece is enriched with four more entries, elements of the diverse cultural wealth of our homeland. These are a few more mosaics, in the huge mosaic of our tradition, which is made up of the experience, knowledge, skills, ingenuity, creativity, but also the feeling of our people, as evidence of a culture, with historical depth and variety, of a rich and, to a certain extent, unexplored past” said Culture Minister Lina Mendoni.