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It's hell, this place.

This is hell on earth.

There's nothing natural about it. Nothing really human about it.

I brought you to this place because I hate it.

This kind of shows precisely everything about 21st-century America,

uh, just how everything is kind of artificially thrown up.

There's no regard, whatsoever, for the environment

or for the way humans ought to live, or how they can function properly.

Everything is just wrapped in plastic,

and this is how people are supposed to survive.

I think most Americans, they've kind of lost touch

with the culture that they came from,

and so now, this is what people aspire to,

is just to find a job in the city

and to find a place where they can meet somebody and then spawn,

uh, and then, uh,

you know, make their investments.

Grow to an old age and then wither away and die.

It seems like it's not too much of an existence for me.

At least it's not where I want to be.

What would you say to the people who choose to live in a place like this?

I'm sorry.

Everything is motivated by money.

Everything is the almighty dollar.

Everything is just an incredible race to get more and to make more

and to optimize more and to get better returns,

and the fact is, is that you're gonna die.

What's a good return after you're dead?

When I walk through a place like this, I feel like a caged animal,

uh... not really able to deal with my environment.

I just wanna run away into the woods after I'm in a place like this.

Or maybe into my record room.

My record room represents a sanctuary.

It's the one place where I know everything is predictable.

I know where all my records are, I know where everything is.

I know I'm safe there.

It's pretty pathetic, though.

That's where I find comfort, is locked up in my record room.

There we go.

What is a 78 rpm record?

A 78 rpm record is composed of slowly decaying organic compounds,

tree rosin, bovine bones, hair, clay, cork, shellac.

And it contains within it musical information

passed from one generation to the next for thousands of years.

Those discs stand before me

like the black monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey,

we, the awkward hominid species, and it,

this mysterious source of dark, unimaginable power.

But by the end of World War II, the 78 rpm disc had run its course

and along with it, authentic rural folk music had disappeared.

Anything recorded after 1941 is garbage.

Do you hear that soft tick-tick-ticking?

It's... It's right here. There's this...

If you look really closely at a little indentation that runs about 20 grooves?

When I first got this disc, this was the best pressing

that you could get of the Zoumbas's "Miroloi"

because it's an A pressing,

it came from the first generation stampers.

But it had a little warp in it, so I couldn't play it.

So I took the record and I took two pieces of plate glass

and I laid this record on top of a piece of plate glass

and put another piece of glass on top of it

and then I put it in the sunlight on the sidewalk and let it sit for 15 minutes

until the whole disc relaxed and became perfectly flat.

But what I didn't realize was I had scratched my mustache

and one of my mustache hairs fell and landed right there,

and then when I put the piece of glass over top of it,

it merged my mustache hair with the surface of the disc

so that Zoumbas and I became one.

Can you hear me, Paul? You can hear me perfectly?

I hate you.

This is worse than, like, masturbation.

- What brings you here today? - They're filming me.

- Nice. Why are they filming you? - I don't know. Uh...

Hopefully it's for good reasons?

- No, I wrote about music in rural Greece. - Awesome. Nice.

And, uh, I live here, I live in the county,

and so they wanted to see

what it was like for me to live here in the United States.

What kind of music did they play in Greece, back in the day?

- It's being played right now. - Okay.

It's, uh...

- It's clarinet and violin based. - Interesting, okay.

Yeah, and it's very... it's very hypnotic.

Nice.

A lot of it's instrumentals with really short scales.

- Yeah. - It's meant for dancing.

Understood.

Like, big dancing. 300, 400 people in a circle.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, yeah. That's awesome.

- Do you play any instruments? - Yeah.

What do you play?

Uh, violin, guitar, laouto, accordion, banjo.

- Nice. What's the laouka? - Laouto. It's a Greek instrument.

- It's like a Greek guitar. - Nice.

- They call it a lute. It's like a lute. - Okay. Gotcha.

- Round body and everything. - Yeah, big-ass round body.

I gotcha. Sounds like the woman of my dreams.

Uh, for some men, yes. If you're into that kind of thing.

- It's a little too big for me. - I gotcha, I appreciate that.

That sounds cool.

Never got a chance to make it to Greece yet.

It's not the tourist area.

You know, like when you think of Greece, what do you think of?

- The movie with John Travolta. - Right.

- It was very nice talking to you. Patrick. - Nice talking to you, man. Patrick.

When I was a little kid, my dad would always take me along junking with him,

looking at old houses.

He would always put me in through a window

so I could find a way to open a door

so he could come in and look around and see what was left.

I fell through the floor one time.

I got into collecting because of my dad. It was some sort of strange impulse.

Just watching him collect made me want to collect.

He was a collector of everything, much better collector than I am.

I had just turned 15 and I was working at my grandparents' farm

and my grandfather asked me to help him clear out his shed

before he burned it to the ground.

It was an old sharecropper's shed where people that worked on the farm would live.

And I pried open the door

and sitting in the middle of the room was this old phonograph player

starting to rot and to fall in upon itself.

But sitting right next to the phonograph player,

an old wind-up Victrola player, was a steel box,

and I walked over and I picked it up and I pried the lid off of it.

And sitting inside of it were 15 or 20 old 78s.

These were the kind of 78s that I had never heard before,

but I knew that I had to listen to, or that...

I had no idea what they were,

but it would turn out that the records in this box

were the records that would change my life

and make me become obsessive about collecting old records.

Can you remember the names?

Yeah, there was Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground."

And Washington Phillips' "Denomination Blues"

and "Teach Your Children."

There was Edward Clayborn.

There was Joe and Cleoma Falcon, a Cajun group.

Lots of Black blues and lots of Black gospel.

Real raw music.

I remember playing for the first time "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,"

and realizing that this is it.

This is the kind of music I was meant to listen to.

I started working for a record label,

and that record label put out old music from the 1920s and 1930s,

and they knew I could write good notes

and I could get good sound out of the recordings

and I could sort of midwife and see the production along

of a CD of old music from the 1920s and '30s.

It was at that point I realized I had found my calling.

I love early Cajun music from southwest Louisiana,

and I love Ukrainian-American string band music

and Polish-American string band music,

both of which were very vibrant and alive in New York City in the 1920s and '30s.

And I love old-time Appalachian music

and old-time fiddle music and old blues from Mississippi.

And all of those things once existed

and once were very vibrant and alive,

and over the course of decades after the 1940s,

the music has just disappeared, it doesn't exist.

What exists is what's on the 78.

There's no correspondence between what people call old-time Appalachian music now

and what it was back in the 1920s and earlier.

When I discovered the music of Epirus,

it turned the tables on that notion that what, uh...

has died in America has, oddly enough, stayed alive in Greece.

Uh, I think I was probably traumatized.

I was in a sense of shock when I first heard the music being played there

and realized that yeah, it actually is the same, it's unchanged.

I mean, I guess I felt extraordinarily disoriented, confused,

when I first heard it.

Just transformed that there was something

that had survived that long unchanged.

Uh, that pure, with all that meaning.

I... I guess the best way to express it was

that I was in a state of shock, disbelief, until I saw it.

The deepest emotion that I had when I heard that

and realized that what I was listening to was living continuity

between the distant past and the present

was, I almost felt like I had discovered my own home music,

that I had come home, if that makes any sense.

I had found something that I wanted to experience and inhabit,

and I didn't wanna leave

because it was exactly what I'd been searching for all my life.

BETTER TO LIVE IN FREEDOM FOR ONE HOUR

THAN TO BE DOCILE CITIZENS FOR 40 YEARS

Geographically, Epirus is in the region

of southern Albania and northwestern Greece.

It contains one of the largest mountain ranges in Europe

and also the deepest gorge, the Vikos Gorge.

The Pindus Mountain Range has protected the area from outside influences.

And here, the music reaches far back into its pagan pre-history.

It's almost as if I've discovered, uh...

a land that time forgot.

An area where music has not changed, or changed very, very little.

A panigiri is a celebration

with intense dancing and drinking and feasting,

communing with one another,

that may originally have progressed out of a pagan ritual, seasonal rites,

but then were absorbed into the Christian thought

and then assigned to a particular day of a saint in a given village.

Some say that the panigiri is related to the god Pan.

And, of course, others say there is no relationship

between the god Pan and the panigiri.

I'd like to think that there is a relationship between the two.

Pan was reported to have passed away

off of an island of Paxos.

Uh, his death was conveyed to a sailor who was on his way to Rome.

When Pan's death was announced,

that would have coincided within a few years

of the actual crucifixion of Christ,

so, Pan died, Christ was resurrected.

What we have now is Christ.

The Zagorian panigiri are held on the feast day

of the patron saint of the village.

The village church is dedicated to a saint,

and here in Vitsa we celebrate the Virgin Mary.

So the panigiri is held on 15th August.

In Kapesovo they celebrate Saint Elijah on 20th July.

In Monodendri on the feast of Saint Paraskevi.

In Tespelovo on the feast of the Sleeping of the Virgin Mary.

In Elati, Bultsi as it was known, on the feast of the Holy Trinity.

In Ano Pedina on 24th August, the feast day of Saint Kosmas.

In Kato Pedina on 29th August, the second feast day of John the Baptist.

Every village has a celebration for its own patron saint

and the last panigiri is held in Vradeto

on 8th September celebrating the birth of the blessed Virgin Mary.

According to the Orthodox calendar.

Yes, as it was then. In the old days, there were no cars.

People went to the panigiri on foot or by riding a mule.

Do you remember?

In the morning, we would leave to go to Asprageli on foot.

- There were no cars in those days. - People would go on their animals.

Even as young children we would go

spend the evening there and go home at daybreak.

After the panigiri was over.

We were afraid to travel at night

so we would set out for our village in the morning.

- Where are the sheep? - Come. I can't bring them up.

We're coming in a minute.

Come further down, that's where they stop.

- We will. Where are they? - They're heading this way right now.

I've turned them around and they're heading this way.

Why don't you get a walking stick like mine?

I have a walking stick.

You should have a proper one. I'll get you one.

- I'm happy with this one! - A shepherd should get one of these!

My father has one like that.

Does he? You should use it. I'll bring you an iron one.

I have an iron one, but I didn't bring it today.

Are there any bears here? Have you seen any?

- No bears, but I've seen a wolf. - What happened to the wolf?

- The dogs chased the wolf. - The dogs caught him?

- Yes, and he was savaged. - No kidding!

- Savaged by the dogs! - They finished him.

They killed him. He tried to eat the sheep and the dogs got him.

Yes, the sheep were resting in the shade.

No kidding, and there he is.

- I have it on video, but-- - They killed him?

- They savaged him, right there. - Well done.

Without the dogs, would the wolf have hurt the sheep?

- For sure. - How many dogs do you have?

I had nine, but now I only have seven.

What do you feed them?

Dog food, bread...

What can we do?

They're good guard dogs.

They protect the flock.

How many sheep have you got?

- Between 250 to 270 sheep... - Well done.

...and about 30 goats.

- Do you still milk them? - Once a day. Every morning.

Skaro, in the winter, Skaro?

- We milk at Skaro for three, four months. - Three months continuously.

- Why milk them at Skaro? Do they burn? - Yeah, they're bloated with milk.

They have too much, you have to milk them often.

They have a lot at that time of year.

We should start heading towards the sheep.

Yes, let's go.

They'll stop down there to rest.

You should warn us so we approach them slowly.

- The dogs won't attack us, will they? - No, they're going back to the flock.

- There's wild boars here too. - Really?

- They come to the pond. - To drink the water?

Yes.

Skaros means "midnight grazing."

The shepherds would take the sheep out at night during the hottest times.

Sheep would graze better at night in the cool

and the shepherds would play the skaros on the flute to pass time.

That's what skaros means, waking the flock

and taking them to graze at night when it's hot during the day.

The music brings peace and relaxation.

Ever since the age of seven or eight, living in the village,

I remember the panigiri was a big deal.

We looked forward to it all year

and as children we could watch,

eat ravani from Maritsa, buy a toy or two.

We didn't have many toys back then.

Later when we grew up and reached the age of 17 or so, then it was time for us to...

We started to dance.

We would join in and try to learn the dance.

We learnt them slowly at the panigiri and gradually began to lead the dance.

The Zagorian panigiria are different

because they haven't lost the traditional style.

Where, in the surrounding areas, Ioannina, Thesprotia,

that isn't the case.

People over there dance with their friends and family separately,

circles form everywhere, it's nothing!

Over here we dance all together.

Weddings in the past, if there were no musicians,

we would sing unaccompanied.

Sarakatsani weddings, even if there's no band, we would just sing.

Groups of men and women would take turns singing.

We would make a panigiri with our voices and we would dance to our own singing.

That's if we couldn't find musicians.

We are Sarakatsani. Stratos, the boy Apostolis, and me.

- Will you play a Sarakatsani song? - Okay.

Play a Sarakatsani song.

Which one?

"They Have Taken the Sheep."

He's a very good butcher.

This is the gift of Chris. For Chris.

I told you when I first met you

that you don't see people working with their hands with the meat in America.

It's sterilized.

Everything is wrapped in plastic. Plastico.

And that's the same way that I feel about the music here, it's raw.

It's... It's not...

There's no plastic over the music here.

I'm going to say it in Greek, Chris.

I like the fact that we maintain tradition.

We haven't lost tradition, that's the main thing.

Because you always know where you'll start from in order to move on.

You need to have a past.

There isn't only the future, there's the past, too.

You need to know the past in order to move into the future.

It's never about the future alone.

Music is life itself. Sadness and happiness are both in it.

- It's a healer? - Yes, a healer, that's right.

Whatever you do, good, bad, ugly, nice, music is there.

If you're sad, you listen to music. If you're happy, you listen to music.

And when it comes to death, again...

A balsam to the soul.

That's right. We have so many mirologia from where I come from that are amazing.

Especially because I am a Sarakatsan.

Regarding mirologia, we Sarakatsani people

have some amazing stuff.

I went to a funeral.

Actually, it was my grandmother's funeral.

Five old Sarakatsani women did the keening of the mirologia,

and it was something else, believe me.

These things still exist?

Yes, because we know where we come from.

We aren't neo-Greeks.

I wish I could play him the Alexis Zoumbas

to see how he reacted to it, since nobody here has ever heard it.

Zoumbas?

I can play it. On Wi-Fi?

Is it on YouTube?

- Is it on YouTube? - It's on YouTube, yeah.

Alexis Zoumbas.

Alexis Zoumbas. Listen.

Can I turn up the volume?

- Sorry. - I have to start it all over again.

Is it from the 1960s or the '70s?

He's asking when it was recorded.

- In '60? - Oh, uh, 1926.

New York.

No way, man.

He died poor. He died poor.

He died poor, he says.

Very poor.

That's the reality in Greece.

There's no place for the good.

Oh, man, it makes the hair stand on my arms, what can I say?

That's what it's supposed to do. Puts the hair up on your arms.

- It's to die for, isn't it? - Yeah.

Only to...

Truly, these mirologia really hit you.

They fuck you up.

Put a beep sound there.

- Drink tsipouro? - Of course.

Yamas.

- The meat is very good. - It's the best meat.

The mirologia are songs about

loss, suffering, they carry grief.

That's why they're called mirologia.

That's the reason we play them.

We still play them nowadays.

We play them when someone passes away.

People at the panigiri can ask for a miroloi,

not at the peak of the dance but in the morning.

"Play a miroloi for those who have passed on, Grigoris."

So I play a miroloi.

Okay. Okay.

It was a deeply life-altering experience

when I realized that there was something

that had been able to survive the ravages of time and change.

Modernism, globalism, everything.

That something stayed here relatively pure,

whereas everything else had died on the vine.

The panigiri, that's sort of like the stage

upon which all of our emotions are played out.

You have loss and remembrance at the beginning

and you have loss and remembrance at the end.

What occurs between is precisely the folly that we all have,

it's the human experience, it's exuberance.

But when you actually sit back and think about it,

you have memory and regret, at the beginning, at the end.

The miroloi seems to open up

all the wounds that I thought were healed at one point,

but they kind of had only a superficial clotting.

They actually had a rawness underneath them.

When I hear the miroloi, it seems to more fully address these wounds that we have.

During most of the year, with the exception of a couple of weeks,

there's only a few dozen villagers there in Vitsa at any given time.

It's only during the panigiri

that suddenly you have several thousand people visiting.

Xenitia is this notion of having to leave,

having to estrange oneself from one's home soil

to go make a living elsewhere.

And even though it's a universal Greek concept,

it's particularly deeply felt in Epirus and in Vitsa

because so many people have to leave and work elsewhere.

And so whenever they have a chance, they fly back home like migrant birds.

Whoo!

The dancer and I, we interconnect.

Because we're the same, the dancer and I, exactly the same.

- One soul. - One soul.

The dancer and the music are like

the warp and weft of fabric.

You know how the warp and weft interlock? It's like that.

Around 2,000 years ago, in what is now Turkey

but what was then Greek-speaking Asia Minor,

a lady died.

Her name was Euterpe and her husband commissioned a memorial.

Written in stone are these words:

"While you live, shine."

"Have no mourning at all."

"Life exists a short while and time demands its fee."

It's the earliest known written musical composition in the world,

and what you hear in those lines and verses

is the same as what you would hear sung as a miroloi

or played as an instrumental in the mountains of Epirus.

To me, the music there embraces life and death equally.

It celebrates both. It knows what they are.

The music in Epirus calls a spade a spade.

I fear for the future of this music just like I fear for the future.

Everything changes.

Uh...

Possibly people here may be enticed with the riches of the Western world,

and once they leave their villages, they may never come back.

If that happens, then that would be the death knell for the music.

Uh, the only hope I have is that so far, that's not really occurred.

- So far? - So far.

Will it?

I don't know, I mean, is there that much that's enticing

about the Western world that you'd forget your blood soil?

- Yeah. - Like what?

Well, people like comfort, they like money,

they like, you know, TV, they like pop music.

- They like all kinds of things. - Yeah, but that's all garbage.

Uh, you have everything you need in the village.

Maybe you don't have money, but you have comfort, you have family.

You have cosmos.

Uh, the last question. Are you really gonna move here?

Yeah, of course. It's not an idle threat.

- When? When are you gonna move? - As soon as I fucking can.

Uh... as soon as I can.

Start carving it.

I don't have a knife!

- Want me to get one? - It can't be carved otherwise!

There's a small knife in a bowl over there.

I need a knife to carve it!

It's small, but it works miracles!

It cuts very well!

Don't eat anything yet.

Wait, this knife cuts better.

Bravo to the chef! Chef, well done!

Finished with the pliers?

Cut right here.

Let me know when you're ready so I can call people to eat.

Knives, the knives, look at all the knives!

Medieval years!

Zorba would have eaten like this!

Chris!

Where is Chris?

Hey, Chris.

What will people think when they watch this?

"These people are a hundred years behind!"