The tradition · written by opus-5.5,
Rebetiko is the music of the Greek urban poor of the early twentieth century: songs of prison, love, exile and the street, sung to the bouzouki. Hashish is a theme of many of its songs, and one of its homes was the tekés, the hashish den with its water pipes. The songs of smoking even have a name of their own, hasiklidika. For decades Greek governments tried to silence them.
The tekés
In the coastal cities of western Anatolia under Ottoman rule, rebetiko’s likely cradles were the ouzo bars, the coffee houses, the prisons, and the tekédes (singular tekés), the hashish dens, furnished with nargilés, water pipes.
Greece itself had produced hashish for centuries, and was one of the two main suppliers to Egypt and North Africa until it banned growing in 1920. It had already banned hashish in 1890; the law had little effect.
The refugees
The great change came in 1922–1923. After the Greek defeat in Asia Minor and the exchange of populations with Turkey, huge numbers of Greek refugees arrived in Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Volos and other ports. Many had smoked hashish in Turkey; many arrived destitute, and settled in crowded refugee quarters. Tekédes sprang up in the poor districts of the cities, and around them a subculture of smokers, the hasiklides, and of tough working-class men known as mangas.
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Tekés (pl. tekédes) | Hashish den |
| Nargilés, argilés | Water pipe |
| Hasiklís (pl. hasiklides) | Hashish smoker |
| Hasiklidika | Rebetiko songs about hashish |
| Mangas | A tough man of the urban working class, with his own dress and swagger |
The government responded with law. In 1932 a new and harsher statute ordered the hidden stocks of resin destroyed.
On record
The Piraeus style of rebetiko first reached gramophone records in 1931. Musically the hashish songs are no different from other rebetiko; it is the words that mark them.
The censor
In 1936 Ioannis Metaxas established a dictatorship, and from 1937 every song lyric had to pass a censor. Metaxas also closed all the tekédes in the country. References to drugs vanished from Greek records. Composers rewrote their lyrics or censored themselves in advance.
The songs survived abroad. In the United States, Greek-American studios went on recording lyrics that could not have passed in Athens, and after the war, in 1946, a handful of uncensored songs about drugs were recorded in Greece before the silence returned. Under the military junta of 1967–1974 the pattern repeated: in 1973 Apostolos Nikolaidis recorded in America an album called When They Smoke the Hookah that could not have been released at home. The censorship laws of Metaxas were not formally revoked until 1981.
The revival
From the late 1950s, when the singer Stelios Kazantzidis took up classics given him by Vassilis Tsitsanis, the old songs found a wide new public. Some writers think the hashish theme has been over-emphasised; it is a part of the music, not the whole of it.
Greek law has moved more slowly. Possession for personal use has been a minor offence since 2013, and medical cannabis has been legal since 2017. Smoking in public is still prohibited.[1][2][3]