Breaking Free: The trouble with artificial insemination...

NIKOLAOS Moustakis of Filoti on the island of Naxos in the Cyclades, is a player and maker of the island’s traditional bagpipe, the tsambouna, an instrument with a heritage that some islanders assert reaches back more than 2,000 years.

In the south central Aegean Sea, Naxos rises, often steeply, to the 1,004-metre high peak of Mt Zas. It is the largest of the Cyclades Islands, long envied for its fertility and famed for its wine. The snowy-white marble of Naxos was prized in the classical world, and many of the island’s sculptors and craftsmen became wealthy contractors in the raising of monuments and buildings that came to visually define the formative era of western civilisation.

Over the centuries, the island fell variously under Athenian, Spartan, Macedonian, Egyptian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian and Turkish rule, before at last becoming a part of the modern Greek state in 1830.

Naxos, says one version of the legend, is where the omnipotent god Zeus was raised. It is where his son Dionysus — god of wine, peace and civilisation, farming, celebration and the theatre — was born, grew up and wed the beautiful Ariadne after her desertion by Theseus, the hero-king of Athens. Her death and rebirth were the focus of a cult that wildly celebrated the ripening, death and regeneration of nature.

An ongoing excavation by archaeologists from the University of Athens and the Technical University of Munich has uncovered ruins of an ancient Sanctuary of Dionysus a few kilometres from Chora (the main town). Archaeology has also revealed walls and stone houses, the pottery and art of a well-developed society that existed here more than 5,000 years ago.

Nikolaos Moustakis has made and sold more than 100 of his culture’s rare and endangered instruments, most of them going to aspiring players in expatriate Greek communities in the United States, Canada and Australia. “There is nostalgia in these communities and dancing,” he said. “They listen to recordings and learn that way.” On Naxos, the tradition is perilously close to extinction.

Nikolaos’ wife has a shoe shop by the road in Filoti, and had arranged to meet us there to lead us up the maze of narrow footpaths to their home. Directions would have been impossibly confusing. In these steep, ancient villages, there is no car access and no need for street names or numbers — everybody knows everybody. Homes, terraces, squares and paths nestle from anchoring foundations and heap above one another. We arrived to find we were guests for a dinner party. Nikolaos’ son had that morning gone scouring the hills for snails, for our introduction to kohli bourbouristi, ‘bourbouristi’ fairly representing the popping sound of the snails as they fry. Seasoned with olive oil, vinegar and rosemary and served on a bed of salt, they're gamier than French escargots, but pleasant enough. Pork and French fries followed, with tumblers of raki.

The tsambouna, I had learned, is played publicly only for Apokries, the carnival period that falls in the later part of the Greek winter, occupying the three weeks immediately before Lent in the Orthodox Church calendar. It is a season once associated with Dionysian celebrations.

The tsambouna certainly has the appearance of olden simplicity about it, and the bag is held in front of the player’s body rather than under the arm, in a way that’s seen in some early pictures and paintings of pipers. But the double-chanter playing technique is anything but naïve and the sound produced is complicated and acoustically ‘busy’.

Nikolaos Moustakis’ instruments have a finely crafted finish to them, the cow-horn bells notched and engraved for decorative effect. If the pipes are secured into the yoke with wax, a damaged piece of cane can be readily replaced. If glue is used, the whole assembly has to be replaced. But glue is a cheaper option in the first instance. He leaves the choice up to his customers, with prices starting at 150-200 Euros.

Nikolaos’ father, Andreas, and grandfather, also called Nikolaos, were pipers before him. “The tsambouna is a shepherds’ instrument,” he said. “It’s how we enjoyed ourselves and it’s how we learned. I have three brothers, one of whom also plays.

“My father was an excellent player: sweet sounding, precise execution… and he had a huge repertoire. He once played three days and nights without stopping but I can’t keep it up for more than two hours. My father watched the feet of the dancers and a good dancer could make him play even better.”

Niko gave me the oddest answer I ever had in course of a decade of interviewing bagpipers for the National Piping Centre’s magazine, Piping Today.

Through an interpreter, Souzana Raphael, I’d asked an open-ended question about what he saw as obstacles to the instrument’s survival. As she translated my question, his face became severe and he replied instantly. I looked at Souzana. “Artificial insemination,” she said.

I assumed she’d mistranslated and asked her to check. “Yes,” she said. “Artificial insemination.”

She and Niko talked back and forth, and then she explained the problem he faced: thanks to changed farming practices, de-horning pastes and the earlier slaughter of cattle, large, fine-looking cow horns had become difficult to find and expensive to buy. He’d sourced a small amount of suitable horn from Skinoussa, a small island south of Naxos, but artificial insemination had made bull ownership less essential and further reduced the supply. A fine piece of imported cow horn could add markedly to the cost, and Nikolaos was exploring the possibilities of turning the bell sections of his instruments from oleander wood. But that would be a considerable break with tradition.

Nikolaos Moustakis was eight years old when he began to learn to play the tsambouna, taught by his father. “In grammar school, there were three or four of us who played. It used to be that young children began playing but I’m the youngest one playing here now. No-one is learning. They play laouto and violin instead.”

It was from his father that Nikolaos also learned to make tsambounas… “and I try to make better instruments than he did,” he said. “I had his work as a model. There is no teaching for makers; maybe it is seen as something too difficult. You have to have it inside you and you have to know how to play the tsambouna to make a tsambouna.”

And in many of the island’s more traditional villages, there are empty houses and few young people to learn such archaic skills. They have been drawn to new coastal resorts and incomes from the burgeoning tourism industry.

There are new ways of doing things.

Even, it seems, the laundry: