Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki

Vassilis Tsitsanis began "Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki", Cloudy Sunday, in Thessaloniki during the German occupation, when the authorities considered rebetiko degenerate and he played to small audiences in a bar he owned. He later wrote that the song grew out of what was happening around him: hunger, misery, fear, arrests and executions. By his account he first called it Bloody Sunday, because on one heavy winter Sunday night he had watched a young man die in front of him. Finishing it took years. Tsitsanis said no song cost him more trouble, because he could not find one repeating three-syllable word for the verse; in the end it came from the text itself, the cloudiness of the title sung twice. The first recording, with Prodromos Tsaousakis and Sotiria Bellou, was made in September 1948. Authorship was later disputed. In the 1970s Nikos Routsos claimed to have written its lyrics, and a court ruled for Tsitsanis. Another account credited the words to his friend Alekos Gouveris; Tsitsanis eventually acknowledged a collaboration, and Gouveris himself wrote that he had added a single verse. The lyrics give the woman no name and offer no explicit political setting, yet the song is firmly tied to the occupation in Greek memory. Manos Hadjidakis arranged it for piano, Stelios Kazantzidis recorded a famous version with Marinella and Giota Lydia in 1960, and in 1999 readers of the magazine Difono voted it the best Greek song of the twentieth century. It has been called a sort of unofficial national anthem.