One of Domna Samiou’s main and long-standing collaborators, close friend, and founding member of the Domna Samiou Greek Folk Music Association. With deep knowledge of traditional Greek song, as a permanent researcher at the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre of the Academy of Athens, she worked with Domna Samiou for many years as a scientific consultant and author for publications and concerts.
She was born in Athens. She came to know Greece extensively through years of fieldwork, travelling, researching, and documenting. She has studied and recorded various aspects of folk culture, focusing on traditional music, popular rituals, and oral practices, collaborating with diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities within and beyond Greece. She has created an important archive of rare audiovisual material, resulting from systematic field recordings and filming.
Her main research interests include folk rituals related to female sacred figures and the symbolic universe surrounding women in song and narrative. She also studies music as a structural component of ritual practice and as a means of social communication, symbolic systems, marginalised communities, and issues of identity and exclusion.
She has worked with Roma communities (Christian and Muslim) and authored the educational manual The Roma in Greece. History – Culture (Athens 1996, 2nd ed. 2001, Ministry of Education – General Secretariat for Adult Education). She carried out extensive research on Muslim heterodoxy (alevism, bektashism, sufism) in Thrace and Turkey, presented at the first international conferences on these subjects.
As research team leader, she participated in long-term ethnographic projects, including:
• “Thrace” and “Eastern Macedonia” (Friends of Music Society) for the documentation of musical and dance traditions of Northern Greece
• programme for the documentation of musical events in Northern Greece
• Greek–Turkish programme Discussing Europe on the Banks of Maritza River
• programme for the creation of the Lemnos Cultural Heritage Archive
She has delivered numerous conference papers, lectures, seminars, and courses, and has published extensively. She has contributed to editions of traditional music recordings and has been a regular collaborator-author for the publications of the Domna Samiou Association.
She has contributed to the production of many ethnographic documentaries and worked as a radio producer for the Third Programme of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). She collaborated in the development of digital cultural heritage databases (Lilian Voudouri Music Library, Hellenic Folklore Research Centre, Domna Samiou Association, Lemnos Cultural Heritage Archive).
Member of the Secretariat of the Centre for Research on Minority/Immigrant Groups.
Source: Miranda Terzopoulou
