Text 13. Gatchina (гатчина)

Notable for its weathered limestone exterior, much less florid than other imperial palaces, Gatchina, 45 km southwest of St Petersburg, was a gift from Catherine the Great to her lover Grigory Orlov for helping her get rid of her husband Peter III. It was later passed on to Catherine and Peter’s son Paul I.

Gutted during WWII, only a small portion of the palace, which is shaped in a graceful curve around a central turret, has been reopened since restoration work began in 1985. The handful of state rooms on the first floor are impressive, as is the small chapel still under restoration. The most interesting feature is a 135 m-long tunnel running from the palace cellar to the ornamental lake; the entrance is beside the small exhibition of antique firearms.

The best reason for coming here is to wander around the attractive park which has many winding paths through birch groves and across bridges to islands in the lake. Look out for the Birch House (Beriozoy Dom), with a facade made of birch logs, and the ruined Eagle Pavilion (Pavilion Orla).

In the nearby town there are a couple of interesting churches. The baroque Pavlovsky Sobor (ul Sobornaya), at the end of the main pedestrianised shopping street, has а grandly restored interior with a soaring central dome. A short walk west is the Pokrovsky Sobor, a redbrick building with bright blue domes.

Hungry? Take your pick from either Dom Khleba (ul Sobornaya 2;  8am-8pm), a good bakery and café that’s handy for a snack or for picnic supplies, or Kafe Piramida (ul Sobornaya 3A; mains R80;  10am-11pm), a publike place serving simple Russian meals with some outdoor seats on the pedestrian street.

Infrequent suburban trains run to Gatchina (R30, one hour) from Baltisky vokzal. The palace is a couple of hundred meters directly east of the station. It is easier to take the metro to Moskovskaya vokzal and then hop on express bus K18 (R25, 40 mins) which runs roughly every half-hour to the palace entrance. Alternatively there are several marshrutky (R30, 40 mins) shuttling between Moskovskaya vokzal and Gatchina, stopping along pr 25 Oktyabrya from where the park and palace are immediately to the west.

Раздел 4: искусство, промыслы, ремесла (art, crafts, folk art) Text 1. Music & dance

Assignment. Text 1, 2. Read and translate the texts paying special attention to the names of dances and instruments. Think about the ways of introducing them in the English text and the ways of rendering them in Russian. How can you account for such a great number of xenonyms in these texts?

The folk dances of today derive from the ritual dances performed in ancient Greek temples. One of these dances, the syrtos, is depicted on ancient Greek vases, and there are references to dances in Homer’s works. Many Greek folk dances, including the syrtos, are performed in a circular formation; in ancient times, dancers formed a circle in order to seal themselves off from evil influences.

Each region of Greece has its own dances, but one dance you’ll see performed everywhere is the kalamatianos, originally from Kalamata in the Peloponnese. It’s the dance in which dancers stand in a row with their hands on one another’s shoulders.

Singing and the playing of musical instruments have also been an integral part of life in Greece since ancient times. Cycladic figurines holding instruments resembling harps and flutes date back to 2000 ВС. Musical instruments of ancient Greece included the lyre, lute, piktis (pipes), kroupeza (a percussion instrument), kithara (a stringed instrument), aulos (a wind instrument), barbitos (similar to a violin cello) and the magadio (similar to a harp).

If ancient Greeks did not have a musical instrument to accompany their songs, they imitated the sound of one. It is believed that unaccompanied Byzantine choral singing derived from this custom.

The bouzouki, which you will hear everywhere in Greece, is a mandolin-like instrument similar to the Turkish saz and baglama. It is one of the main instruments of rembetika music - the Greek equivalent of the American Blues. The name rembetika may come from the Turkish word rembet which means outlaw. Opinions differ as to the origins of rembetika, but it is probably a hybrid of several different types of music. One source was the music that emerged in the 1870s in the ‘low life’ cafes, called tekedes (hashish dens), in urban areas and especially around ports. Another source was the Arabo-Persian music played in sophisticated Middle Eastern music cafes (amanedes) in the 19th century. Rembetika was popularised in Greece by the refugees from Asia Minor.

The songs which emerged from the tekedes had themes concerning hashish, prison life, gambling, knife fights etc, whereas cafe aman music had themes which centred around erotic love. These all came together in the music of the refugees, from which a subculture of rebels, called manges, emerged. The manges wore showy clothes even though they lived in extreme poverty. They worked long hours in menial jobs, and spent their evenings in the tekedes, smoking hashish and singing and dancing. Although hashish was illegal, the law was rarely enforced until Metaxas did his clean-up job in 1936. It was in a tekes in Piraeus that Markos Vamvakaris, now acknowledged as the greatest rembetis, was discovered by a recording company in the 1930s.

Metaxas’ censorship meant that themes of hashish, prison, gambling and the like disappeared from recordings of rembetika in the late 1930s, but continued clandestinely in some tekedes. This polarised the music, and the recordings, stripped of their ‘meaty’ themes and language, became insipid and bourgeois. Recorded rembetika even adopted another name - Laiko tragoudi - to disassociate it from its illegal roots. Although WWII brought a halt to recording, a number of composers emerged at this time. They included Apostolos Kaldaras, Georgos Mitsakis and Manolis Hiotis. One of the greatest female rembetika singers, Sotiria Bellou, also appeared at this time.

During the 1950s and 1960s rembetika became increasingly popular, but less and less authentic. Much of the music was glitzy and commercialised, although the period also produced two outstanding composers of popular music (including rembetika) in Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hatzidakis. The best of Theodorakis’ work is the music which he set to the poetry of Seferis, Elytis and Ritsos.

During the junta years, many rembetika clubs were closed down, but interest in genuine rembetika revived in the 1980s - particularly among students and intellectuals. There are now a number of rembetika clubs in Athens.

Since independence, Greece has followed mainstream developments in classical music. The Athens Concert Hall has performances by both national and international musicians.