Interpretation of “My expatriated birds” by Alkyone (traditional)
For this entry in the series, I have picked a traditional song from Heperus (Ήπειρος), the northwestern part of mainland Greece. Traditional Heperotic music is renowned for its laments: slow-paced songs that revolve around themes of loss, suffering, and hardship, but also of honour and commitment to ancient values.
One such lament is My expatriated birds (Ξενιτεμένα μου πουλιά). I could not find a high quality video of the old-school style, so I am including these otherwise remarkable covers by Alkyone and Konstantis Pistiolis (Κωνσταντής Πιστιόλης), respectively:
As is common with traditional art, there are slight variations in circulation. I am picking the one sung by Alkyone. Its lyrics are right below, followed by my faithful translation of them, and further comments.
Ξενιτεμένα μου πουλιά
Ερμηνεία: Alkyone
Στίχοι: Παραδοσιακό
Μουσική: Παραδοσιακό
Ξενιτεμένα μου πουλία
και παραπονεμένα
μωρέ ξένε μου
η ξενιτιά σας χαίρεται
τα νιάτα τα γραμμένα
Tι να σου στείλω ξένε μου
ν'αυτού στα ξένα που'σαι
μωρέ ξένε μου
Σου στέλνω μήλο, σέπεται
κυδώνι μαραγκιάζει
σου στέλνω μοσχοστάφυλο
στο δρόμο σταφιδιάζει
Σου στέλνω και το δάκρυ μου
σ'ένα χρυσό μαντήλι
μωρέ ξένε μου
το δάκρυ είναι καυτό
και καίει το μαντήλι
μωρέ ξένε μου
My expatriated birds
Singer: Alkyone
Lyrics: Traditional
Music: Traditional
My expatriated birds
and complaining [birds]
oh my foreigner
the foreign land enjoys you
the fated youth
What shall I send you my foreigner
there abroad where you are
oh my foreigner
I send you an apple, it rots
a quince, it withers
I send you an aromatic grape
it becomes a raisin en route
I also send you my tear
in golden handkerchief
oh my foreigner
the tear is hot
and burns the handkerchief
oh my foreigner
The Greeks are a diaspora nation in large part due to their homeland. Greece is a mountainous, rocky place, surrounded by sea. Salt coming from the vapours renders the coastline unsuitable for cultivation. There are relatively few spots for agriculture in the hinterlands. The effects of geography are more pronounced in the many islands.
The presence of mountains makes transportation difficult, maritime travel is especially dangerous during the winter, while the absence of abundant minerals prevents the establishment of local heavy industry. Many Greek communities were thus insular, forming a loosely connected ethnic whole. Only nation-state building (e.g. public education, conscription) and modern technology (telecommunications, transportation, …) have changed the dynamics towards an ever-closer sense of belonging.
In recent decades, Greece has relied on tourism to boost its exports. The sector as a whole is booming, though this is not the blessing one would imagine. Business has its own logic, which typically is rapacious. It turns housing into yet another commodity that is instrumentalised in the service of the given product. Locals are priced out of their houses and forced away from their lands. Those are taken over by commercial interests of dubious origin and turned into what I have described before as a “theme park”, i.e. something that has the trappings of tradition but is devoid of authenticity: https://protesilaos.com/politics/2025-09-02-when-your-country-is-a-theme-park/. Put differently, the age-old history of hardship persists in this land, adapted to present-day circumstances.
Against this backdrop, the lament for the grief of expatriation is as pertinent as ever. The song alludes to destiny (τα νιάτα τα γραμμένα) in recognition of the contributing factors to the phenomenon; factors which have been germane to the Greek experience from antiquity, and which may thus be talked about as if they are connatural of Greekness, hard-coded in our genetic makeup as it were. “This is our land, these are its prevailing conditions, such are the options we have” is the thinking.
Relatives and friends of mine are scattered around the planet. I also emigrated, originally in pursuit of city lights, but eventually relocated to a mountainous region where I built my modest house. The most daring, the most desperate, the most capable, migrate in hope of a better fortune. As a result, the local communities experience a drain of talent. It is, in fact, a loss of vitality as immigrants are typically young. Younger people with big ideas and a zest for life are nowhere to be seen. The villagers are withering away and with them a culture becomes extinct.
Those who stay in the rural areas or those who arrive out of a conviction to fight against the trends can only subsist without making structural changes to their milieu; changes of the sort that would reverse the historical trajectory. This is because the vibrancy of a community is a game of numbers: the fewer and the older people are, the less dynamic their society will be. Even if some individuals are more active than others, they cannot compensate for the lack of numbers. They may not, for example, start a small business or play a team sport.
It is virtually impossible to entice those expatriated folk to return to their ancestral lands. As the song points out, they are in a distant place, symbolised by the decaying fruit and tears of sorrow that never reach them in their spontaneous, unfiltered form. This distance may be physical, though that is relatively easy to manage nowadays with work-from-home, renewable energy, mobile Internet, and superior road networks. The greater challenge is how to bridge the mental gap, which pertains to an individual’s increasingly vain wants and expectations. This is a problem of attitude.
Heperus, here a proxy for every land where the slow-paced life is the norm, cannot offer modern attractions or distractions. Doing so would be inwardly contradictory: a drift towards its theme-park-isation. Heperus has no bling and no space for miracle workers. All it offers are open vistas and a feeling of direct connection to the Earth Mother. It cannot entertain the illusion—for it is only an illusion—of plentiful options that the megalopolis engenders, nor can it feed the hopes of the arrivistes for ever-higher social standing.
The lived experience that is conditioned by material constraints, not the inevitability of death and certainly not our shared human nature in abstract, is the greatest equaliser. When people believe they can earn more, their greed takes hold of their ego and makes them compete with each other over glory and recognition. They develop a ruthless individualistic outlook, facilitated by the anonymity of large crowds, rationalised as pop culture social Darwinism, and talked about in terms of the homo economicus.
When the American oligarchs incorporated the motto “In God We Trust” on their dollars and other symbols of statehood, they did not merely perform an act of tokenistic theism. No! They formalised the culmination of a certain ethos of insatiable desire and maximum competitiveness towards all. This is now the dominant lifestyle in many parts of the world. It is all about more, and more, and more. The faster the pace of life, the closer people are to the all-devouring money-god.
The song reminds us that we are all birds; birds who still have differences between them, though who shall all live the same kind of life. Material constraints make this point evident. Under such conditions, those who try to fashion themselves as special look ridiculous, for the means at their disposal are largely the same as every other person’s in their midst.
In the Greek conception of fate, there is inevitability though there is also space for luck (unpredictability or the open-ended interplay of factors more broadly) as well as choice. It has indeed been the case that most birds left their lands. Though the world can go in circles and the agrarian society may become the norm once more.
Not all hope is lost. We will recognise our likeness, we will stop competing to the point of collective annihilation, only when, through physical proximity and shared woes, we rediscover the need for community qua extended family.