Agathonas Iakovidis

Agathonas Iakovidis was born in 1955 in Evangelismos, a village near Lagkadas, north of Thessaloniki. In a 2014 interview he explained that his parents’ village had been built by refugees from Asia Minor who arrived in 1923; his own grandparents came from the area between Izmit and Bursa. The first songs he heard were melodies from that refugee world. He began making music around 1971 and taught himself almost every string instrument of rebetiko: guitar, baglamas, oud, bouzouki, tzouras, mandola and mandolin.

His first professional appearance came in 1973 in a small music club in Thessaloniki, and from then on he devoted himself to rebetiko. Around 1977 he founded the Thessaloniki Rebetiko Ensemble, which played in clubs, gave concerts across Greece and recorded two albums. From 1981 to 1987 he worked in Athens with musicians such as Giorgos Koros and Vasilis Soukas, and then returned to live and work in Thessaloniki. Concerts later took him to Europe, the United States and Australia.

In 2013 the young band Koza Mostra invited him to sing with them, and together they represented Greece at Eurovision in Malmö. Agathonas kept performing until the end of his life. He died in Thessaloniki on 5 August 2020, aged 65.

Agathonas was both a performer and a collector. He gathered songs issued on shellac gramophone discs from 1885 to the 1960s: rebetiko, but also folk songs, operetta and popular hits. In 2014 he estimated that about 25,000 such records existed and said he had almost all of them, archived on his computer by composer, singer and recording date. He used this collection on radio programmes and, above all, on stage, where he sang well-known rebetiko alongside old songs that few people still knew.

His recordings show the same aim. After two albums with the Thessaloniki Rebetiko Ensemble in 1982 and 1983, he made Τα μπελεντέρια (Ta Belenteria, 1994), subtitled rare rebetiko songs in a new recording. Later albums include a 1998 record with the singer Glykeria, rebetiko duets with Babis Goles, and a 2000 album devoted to the composer Kostas Skarvelis. He named Markos Vamvakaris as his greatest model and worked with the older rebetiko musician Roukounas.

He also liked to cross styles. He recorded a song with the rock singer Antonis Tourkogiorgis, and in 2013 he sang Alcohol Is Free with Koza Mostra, a young band playing Balkan beat. Despite its English title, the song is sung in Greek. It came sixth in the Eurovision final.

When Agathonas died in 2020, musicians, newspapers and politicians across Greece paid tribute, and he was buried to the sound of rebetiko and a baglamas. ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, keeps in its online archive a 1983 programme, Νέα Πρόσωπα (New Faces), in which he and the Thessaloniki Rebetiko Ensemble talk about rebetiko and play their instruments. Try a short listening task: play a minute of one of his recordings, for example from Τα μπελεντέρια, and do not look at any lyrics. Name what you hear with simple Greek: Ακούω τη φωνή (I hear the voice), Ακούω ένα μπουζούκι (I hear a bouzouki), Ακούω μια κιθάρα (I hear a guitar). These are our own practice sentences, not words from the songs.

• His favourite instrument was the bouzouki, yet he called himself only an average bouzouki player, because as a boy he had to learn every string instrument.
• Most of the 25,000 old records he talked about were folk songs; rebetiko made up only about a third.
• In May 2020 he played rebetiko at the entrance of Papageorgiou Hospital in Thessaloniki to thank health workers.
• He refused the title of rebetis: he said there are no rebetes today in the old sense, since the old ones had nothing to eat.