Vamvakaris was born on 10 May 1905 in
Ano Syros (or Ano Khora),
Syros, Greece. He was the first of six children, while his family belonged to the sizeable
Roman Catholic community of the island. At the age of twelve, in the false belief that he was wanted by the police, Vamvakaris fled Syros for the port of
Piraeus. He worked as a stevedore, a
pit-coal miner, a shoe-polisher, a paperboy, a butcher, and other odd jobs. He heard a
bouzouki player playing, and vowed that if he did not learn to play the instrument in six months, he would chop off his own hand with a cleaver (he was working in the public
abattoirs at the time). He learned bouzouki, becoming an innovative virtuoso player, and began to write songs of his own. At first, he often played in clandestine
hashish-smoking establishments known as
tekés; later, he and his band, which included
Giorgos Batis,
Anestis Delias and
Stratos Pagioumtzis played in more legitimate clubs and taverns. They were extremely popular, and Markos made many recordings. His initial nickname among the rebetes was "
the Frank" (Fragos).
Spyros Peristeris, a well-educated musician and repertory manager and orchestra leader for several
recording companies, persuaded Vamvakaris to record his songs sung with his own voice. In 1932, Vamvakaris recorded his first rebetiko discs, ''Efoumernam' ena vrady'' (Εφουμέρναμ' ένα βράδυ) and '
Taxim Serf (Ταξίμ σερφ). Among other songs in that period, he wrote the classic love song "Frankosyriani" (Φραγκοσυριανή). After the liberation of Greece from the occupation of
Nazi Germany, difficult times persisted, but his kind of music was no longer fashionable. He also suffered badly with
arthritis in his hands, which crippled his bouzouki playing, and from
asthma that hampered his singing. The slump in his fortunes lasted until the early 1960s when, after initiatives by
Vassilis Tsitsanis, many of his old songs were revived and sung by singers including
Grigoris Bithikotsis, and
Stratos Dionysiou. Vamvakaris died on 8 February 1972 at the age of 66. Markos' composing style was utterly simple: minimal orchestration, melodic lines stripped of any embellishment, and lyrics as devoid of ornamentation as possible. His
strophic masterpiece "Your eyelashes shine" is a typical example of his art. It consists of just three short couplets, each sung twice to the same melodic phrase, with clauses reversed for the second time, and with a single instrumental phrase interspersed between them: :Your eyelashes shine ::like the flowers of the meadow. :Your eyes, sister, ::make my little heart crack. :Search till you're blind: ::you won't find another like me. As the years pass, his towering contribution to Greek music emerges. All other Greek composers, of his time and afterwards, revere him as their master teacher, and
Mikis Theodorakis remarked: "We all, we are but branches of a tree. Markos is that tree". ==Discography==