This is an old story, as old as myth itself. Orpheus’ song famously taming the wild beasts; music as the most potent instrument of education in Plato’s Republic, reforming the citizens’ soul.

There is, however, another story, equally old but bleak and terrifying. A story retold many times about music and punishment. Different places; different periods; same structures; new technologies. Music as a sensory attack on bodies and minds of prisoners. Music as the ideal weapon of repression. Its scars are deep and pronounced, yet hard to document and prosecute.[1]

This story is about Plato’s formula going awry. It is a story about torture and repression. About music not just as a soundtrack of terror, but terror itself. 

In 1947 as the Greek Civil War was raging, prison camps were established on the barren island of Makronissos. There, life was scarce. Scorpions and dry, scrubby bushes graced the island. Rock, stones, blazed and scorched by sun and wind. The camps were intended for communists and leftists. They were considered as Slavs who had forfeited their Greekness. The alleged quest was re-education. The means were torture, ill treatment, hard labour, and music.

Plato writes that music can soothe and give pleasure to souls. But in the midst of unfreedom, music is enveloped in darkness and abuse. It equals power.

At the Makronissos camps, prisoners were forced to sing nationalist songs with derogatory lyrics. They also sang them during hard labour. Heavy stones from one end of the island to the other and back – Sisyphus forced to sing.

‘They told us “All together, lets sing: Out with the Bulgarians”. Some sang, some howled, others puked blood, and others cried.’[2]

Added to hard labour, forced singing is more than humiliating. Amplifying physical strain on hungry and exhausted bodies, singing moves beyond cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Law deems it torture. For prisoners, the scales of measuring pain are of a different kind.

Yet in Makronissos music was used in more ways than one. Nationalist songs were blared from loudspeakers while Sysiphus carried. At times, a small band accompanied. A lute, a clarinet and a violin.[3]

‘Now they place clarinets and violins… at the front of the group, and we are off to the digging site in the accompaniment of music and instruments. Until we reach the daily ordeal, the violins and clarinets play incessantly and irritatingly. A truly deadly procession is formed at the back. Bodies are bent from the weight on their backs. Hunger is killing our empty stomachs; and the legs are dragged on the ground.[4]

In the horrors of the camp, music fails to soothe. Plugged in to the Makronissos military radio station, the loudspeaker becomes the panopticon of power. The horn blaring out transforms into an eye seeing all. A mouthpiece of totalizing authority, dominating the camp’s soundscapes; impossible to escape.

In Makronisos the loudspeakers would begin in the morning with the wake-up call. In all the barracks they had put columns with loudspeakers. From a central radio station they played national songs, nationalist speeches and so-forth. In other words, from the moment you would wake up, from six in the morning you would hear all this music and the speeches. To escape you would have to go to the sea. In order to avoid this music I enrolled to the rubbish collection service. Because... we were away from all this. Of course we had to chase mice, gather the trash and throw them in the sea. But this was better than listening to this music. It would be played until 9 in the evening. [T]his was the general tactic of breaking prisoners.[5]

As always propaganda has a different story to tell. Listening to good music elevated prisoners, they claimed. It was an ennobling and entertaining experience.[6]

What must be noted are the beautiful times offered to us  every night by our radio station, with its wonderful musical programme. Music nostalgia – songs of the 1920s up to 1935, are an original feature that makes our station unique. Also old tangos, foxtrots and waltzes are an oasis for the soul in the desert of today’s swings. Finally the hour of classical music is something we all listen to in awe.[7]

Prisoners do not speak of elevation. Nor of classical music. In their testimonies, loudspeakers are bitterly raging; an acoustic reflection of violence. For some, nationalist songs and marches were the hardest to bear. For others, it was the love songs.[8]

‘They played us records with old love songs just to awaken in our hearts the nostalgia of life and love. You see, psychology is needed everywhere.’[9]

A decade later, in the dark days of the military Junta, psychology and music were combined in the most potent interrogation techniques: continuous standing, repeated sound, sleep, drink, food and sensory deprivation. These were the new international standard. Greece was no exception.

1967 to 1974, the time of the Colonels: The loudspeaker is back, even louder, more totalizing. From the camp of prisoners to solitary confinement and the interrogation cell. The new sensory attack was holistic, untraceable, perfected through psychological research. Science in the service of power, evading human rights laws. Popular songs played in loops, incessantly. Their lyrics made ironic and humiliating. A sensory attack inscribed in memory:

What I remember is that day and night they played a song that I will never forget. It was “I will go to the jungle with Tarzan.” Day and night, top volume. Repeatedly. It’s like the Chinese drop. It grates on the nerves.  And there were, of course, various sounds, and screams. We were made to stand all the time. Standing up continuously, no bed, no nothing. The cells are black, with a bit of blood. “Tarzan” was played all the time. This has stuck in my memory. [...] A repetition that made your head explode, preventing you from sleeping.[10] 

The violence of repeated music stumbles on the silence of survivors. Later, some remember the music, others not at all. In the aftermath, the struggle to symbolize, to bring the event into language. Memory is shaped by trauma; by each one’s relation to music.

Perpetrators too opt for silence, or recall music selectively.

The music people referred to by people who were violated by the regime was played during their torture. [...] When logic and emotion are blinded by pain, they heard this music; some of them could trace it, perhaps others in their pain were not able to understand what it was.[11]

Mouthing classical philosophers, the dictators stressed the power of music. Music therapy, they said, was a primarily Greek affair. Music ennobled the soul. But also degraded it. The state’s prerogative: to intervene and protect its citizens. Once more the loudspeakers were raging; this time at the prison camp at the blasted island of Giaros.

Music was played non-stop for 12 hours at a time. It was something terrible. We were down on the ground, on mattresses made of hay. Locked in one room all 150 women. [...] We did not sleep or wake up like normal people. In our sleep we heard screams, women having nightmares […]. But what was terrible was the morning wake-up call with loud, blasting music: folk songs and national-liberation songs. The march ‘The Enemies’ Troops Have Passed’ and the folk song ‘Famous Macedonia, Country of Alexander’. And from then on, folk dances and all that would start. Essentially they played what we loved. I can still dance ‘Famous Macedonia’. I come from Macedonia. We had learned the dance at school and I loved it. But when this was taken by them... they appropriated it as if they were the Greeks and we the non-Greeks. When I would hear it, it would make me physically sick.[12]

Greece is one case in a string of many. Examples abound. Nazi concentration camps; Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Guantanamo, Iraq. Brutal means and ends, overlapping efficiencies; practices long established but not acknowledged. Unexposed, unnoticed, unrecorded, undebated. A blind spot floated on benign visions of music. A positive force of culture, jewel of enlightened civilization, music can do no wrong.  It has no traffic with interrogators. Breakers of spirit and subjects. Yet, music’s link to power is an old story, as old as myth itself. Plato writes, that ‘overseers to the city should beware of new forms of music, which are likely to affect the whole system’. They should preserve music intact. No innovations made. For ‘changes in styles of music are always politically revolutionary.’[13]

[1] Music reference from Aris Retsos, Sophocles’ Antigone (1995).

[2] Nikos Margaris, History of Makronisos vol. 1 (Athens: Dorikos, 1966; in Greek), 12.

[3] Extract from Giannis Kyriakatis (clarinet), ‘Énas Aitós Kathótane’ (‘Ένας αητός καθότανε’; folk song).

[4] Letter written by imprisoned soldiers to the communist newspaper Rizospastis, Rizospastis (25 June 1947).

[5] Interview conducted by Anna Papaeti in 2012 with Dimitris, a former political prisoner who was held in Makronissos from 1948 to 1949. Pseudonames are used for the names of interviewees.

[6] Extract from Theophrastos Sakellaridis, ‘Athína Trelí Tsachpína’ (‘Αθήνα τρελλή τσαχπίνα’, 1928) sang by Lina Ranta & Nikos Trimis.

[7] ‘Night Radio Prorammes’, Skapanefs [Propaganda magazine] (Makronissos: March 1949), Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI).

[8] Extract from Sophia Vempo, ‘To Proí Me Ksypnás Me Filiá’ (‘Το πρωί με ξυπνάς με φιλιά’, 1940).

[9] Ourania Staveri, The Exile’s Triangle of Martyrdom: Chios, Trikeri, Makronisi (Athens: Paraskinio, 2006; in Greek), 94–95.

[10] Interview Ι conducted in 2012 with Costas, a former political prisoner, detained at the Greek Military Police Headquarters in Athens in June 1973.

[11] Interview Ι conducted in 2012 with Andreas, a former soldier of the Greek Military Police (ESA) in 1973–1974.

[12] Interview Ι conducted in 2012 with Maria, a former political prisoner, imprisoned at the island of Giaros from 1967 to 1968.

[13] Plato, Republic (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series), ed. G.R.F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 117.