By Nicolas Bard

Rizitite songs are the oldest genre of Cretan music and come mainly from western Crete, but they are also widespread in the central and eastern part of the island.

Roots are the slopes of the mountains. One view says that these separate songs were named after the roots of the mountains, and in particular from the White Mountains.

Another view argues that they are the songs of the root, that is, the ancestors of the generation, and so the people called them Rizita. Today, the term Rizita is called all those songs of unknown creators, which have arrived nowadays through the tradition of past centuries.

Rizite songs do not bear names. We refer to them either with their first verse or with another, characteristic verse. Still, they are not danced and divided traditionally into songs of Backgammon and Strata.

Papagrigorakis Idomeneas in his book “The Cretan Rizist Songs”, classified them into 32 melodies, and found 31 songs that have their own, unique melodies, always on major scales. Their music is serious and with distinct pain elements. Typically, a verse is first allowed by a singer and then repeated chorals, but it is not necessary. There is not always rhythm, the verse is not always fifteen syllables although it excels statistics.

A monument to Cretan music tradition and for many epitome of the acrimonious cycle is “Digenis”. His music is epic and the lyrics flawless. The song narrates the supernatural not with accomplishments and labors, but with the feeling of fear.

The man scares the view of the earth ready to welcome him and shudder at the view of the plaque that will cover him. In the case of Digenis, however, they are reversed. In the second part, while dying, he does not ask for the divine help to go to heaven and relieve him of his suffering, but he wishes he could climb on his own, fold and sit down.

“The bishop is psychomatic, and the tone is scared,
And the plate of the Anatrich, how to cover,
Because of the ‘strokes, the words of an infinite he says.
– To be on the ground, and the heavenly Kerkelia,
to the bottom of the footsteps, to ‘go to the bells,
I would be in the sky, to diplomat to sit down,
Let me give heaven. “

Another historical Rizitiko on the Cretan War of 1644 – 1669 testifies to the discord among the Christians during the war, and in short it explains the mass Islamizations that followed the fall of the castle in 1669.

“Castle and what your towers and your bell tales,
And where do you make your fond of the globe?
– But me my fond of, the fond of ladies,
The black earth rejoices in the tanned ‘Hadi.
I do not have a Turki chill, no one of Chau,
Only ‘the dog of the traitor of the traitor to do. “

His camera where there is Greece traveled to the historic Theriso of Chania and met the locals who preserve and sing with excess love the great story of their place, with one and only goal: to transcend it and to bequeathed it to the next.