biographies

Musical instruments
The Cretans are greatly attached to the musical instruments at the heart of their folk tradition. Every social occasion provides an opportunity to play, sing and dance for hours on end to the sound of the lyra (plural "lyres"), the lute and the mandolin. In the towns and cities of Eastern and Western Crete the fiddle often takes the place of the lyra.

Music played on the bulgari, the mantoura, the askomantoura, the chambioli or thiamboli, the mantola and the daouli is rarely heard nowadays, as their use has almost completely died out.

Quite apart from their value in terms of music, vrontolyres, lyrakia, lyres and viololyres are frequently masterpieces of woodcarving.





Chambiolia or thiambolia (thick reed pipes)
Cretan bagpipe player, Theocharis Provatakis Collection (Theocharis Provatakis, Vikelaia Municipal Library, Heraklion)
Reed pipes: various sizes of mantoura and a double pipe known as the tzimbraghia
Cretan drum from the east of the island, 2007 (Yiannis Harkoutsis)
Cretan folk instrument workshop, 2004 (photograph: Multimedia Lab)
String instrument known as the boulgari, 2007 (photograph: Yiannis Harkoutsis, Michalis G. Kotis)