Marika Ninou

Ninou was born Evangelia Atamian in 1922, on board the ship Ευαγγελίστρια (Evangelistria), which was carrying her family and other Armenian refugees from Smyrna to Piraeus after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Her road to the stage was unusual. In 1944 she met the acrobat Nikos Nikolaidis, known as Nino; she worked first at the ticket office of his troupe and then became his partner in an acrobatic act, the «Ντούο Νίνο» (Duo Nino), touring with him. His mother, an actress, gave her the name Marika, after the great actress Marika Kotopouli, and from Nino came her surname.

In 1948 the singer Stellakis Perpiniadis made her a lead singer at the Florida club on Alexandras Avenue in Athens. Then came the meeting that changed her life: in 1949 she took the place of Sotiria Bellou in the group of Vassilis Tsitsanis, the most important composer of popular song after the war, at «Τζίμης ο Χοντρός» (Jimmy the Fat), a tavern on Acharnon Street. Crowds queued outside to hear them, and their records spread the songs across the country. The partnership was stormy and often broken by quarrels, but it produced classic records, and in 1951 they even sang together in Constantinople.

In the mid-1950s she fell ill with cancer. She had surgery in Athens and went to the United States for treatment, but she died on 23 February 1957, aged only thirty-five, and was mourned by the whole world of popular music.

Ninou did not write songs; her art was her voice. It was clear, slightly nasal, with a sharp edge and a great deal of feeling, and she sang the slow ζεϊμπέκικα and the χασάπικα with a precision that made every word heard. At a time when rebetiko had been a world of men, she, together with Sotiria Bellou, showed that a woman's voice could carry its sorrow and pride just as well. In barely ten years she recorded about 170 songs on 78-rpm discs, as lead or as second voice.

Her name is tied above all to the songs of Tsitsanis, among them Για τα μάτια π' αγαπώ (For the Eyes I Love, 1949) and Ο τραυματίας (The Wounded Man, 1949). She also sang for other composers of the time, for example Ώρες σε κρυφοκοιτάζω (For Hours I Watch You Secretly, 1948) by Manolis Chiotis and Στα μπουζούκια να με πας (Take Me to the Bouzouki Club, 1950) by Giorgos Mitsakis.

One of her most precious legacies is a live recording made in 1955 at «Τζίμης ο Χοντρός» by an amateur with a tape recorder, and released on record only in 1977. Greek popular music was then almost always recorded in studios, so this tape is a rare chance to hear what a night at a bouzouki club sounded like: the noise of the room, the talk between songs and Ninou's voice filling the space.

Ninou's records are easy to find today, and «Για τα μάτια π' αγαπώ» is a good first song. Listening to Ninou and Bellou one after the other is a lesson in two very different ways of singing the same music. Her life, short and partly mysterious, has inspired books, theatre plays and television documentaries in Greece, and her story is often told together with that of Tsitsanis and the club where they sang. In tavernas and music clubs singers still perform the songs she made famous, and many say they learned them from her records. A learner can listen to one of her songs with the lyrics in front of them and follow the words line by line.

• Her real name was Evangelia Atamian; the surname Ninou came from her partner, the acrobat Nino.
• Before she sang rebetiko she toured as an acrobat in a duo act.
• An amateur tape made in 1955 at «Τζίμης ο Χοντρός» preserves her voice in a real club; it came out on record in 1977.
• She took over Sotiria Bellou's place beside Tsitsanis in 1949.