Kostas Novakis

Kostas Novakis ( Greek Κώστας Νοβάκης , Macedonian : Костас Новакис; * 1957 ) is a musician and amateur ethnographer from Greece . He is a member of the Slavic speaking ethnic group in the Greek part of Macedonia . Kostas Novakis collects and publishes recordings of traditional folk music in local Slavic Macedonian dialects .

biography

Kostas Novakis comes from Koufalia, near Giannitsa , Greece , where he works as a dentist. Since the mid-1990s, he has been documenting Slavic-Macedonian songs in various locations in West and Central Macedonia. He also began to interpret and record this music himself together with his wife Haroula, an ethnic Greek. The recordings were originally distributed privately among friends. In 2002 and 2003 he released three CDs with a collection of these songs accompanied by local instrumentalists and musicians from the border towns of Gevgelija and Bogdanci in the neighboring Republic of Macedonia . The CDs contain tracks in Macedonian and Greek . The publication was described in the press as the first of its kind in Greece and as “breaking a taboo” because this kind of music had not been performed publicly in Greece for decades and had not previously been documented. He claims to have recorded more than 1000 songs in local Slavic Macedonian dialects. Novakis is a member of the “Center for Macedonian Culture” in Greece and was a guest of the “Meeting of Refugees from Aegean Macedonia” in Trnovo, Republic of Macedonia.

Discography

• White field down to the White sea (Avlos Editions) (Λευκός κάμπος πλάι σε θάλασσα λευκή / Бело поле до Белото море)
• Rising of the green forest (Avlos Editions) (Πράσινο δάσος / Развила гора зелена)
• Offer from Thessaloniki (Avlos Editions) (Πρόσφορα από τη Θεσσαλονίκη / Понуда од Солун)