Rosa Eskenazi is a giant of Greek music. A versatile singer, and occasional songwriter, she recorded hundreds of songs in a range of styles, including both Piraeus-style and Smyrneika rebetiko.
Eskenazi was born in Istanbul in the last 1890s and her family relocated to Thessaloniki, then still under Ottoman control, in early years of the 20th century. Rosa moved to Athens in 1917, shortly after the death of her husband, in order to become a singer. She was discovered by the composer Panayiotis Tountas in the early 1920s and made her first recordings in 1929. By the mid-’30s, Eskenazi had reportedly recorded more than 300 songs, many of them rebetiko, making her a star.
Eskenazi perfomed throughout the 20th century not only in Greece but in the Balkans, Turkey and the U.S. Her work was rediscovered by young Greeks in the waning days of the military junta (as part of a rebetiko revival) and she continued performing — and working alongside such stars as Haris Alexiou and Glykeria — until 1977, when she was thought to be 80 years old. She died three years later.
It’s hard to pick one Rosa song from among so many, but Our Hookah is Forbidden, written by Dimitris Barousis and Nikos Mathesis, is typical mid-1930s rebetiko; Rosa adds Smyrneika-stye vocal ornamentation. The first verse is “Our hookah is forbidden / cause mangas inhale it / but all aristocrats /secretly smoke it, too.”
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