BDB Bertsolaritzaren datu-basea

[EN] The Greek mourning song is a musical genre with a long history dating back to ancient times and it is performed during the burial customs after the death of a member of the community. Today, it is sung by one solo performer or even by a group of mourners and is usually accompanied by certain movements, often reaching extremes. Thus, the song is almost always accompanied by loud voices and very often the mourners cut their hair, in order to show the magnitude of their sorrow. It is also possible for the lamenter to pull and pluck her hair, if it is a woman, or his beard, if it is a man. Furthermore, the mourner may accompany the performance of the obituaries by injuring the cheeks with the nails, by tearing the clothes and by beating hardly the chest with his/her hands. In fact, in many cases the mourner exaggerates so, that it is possible to be seriously injured, bleeding or even passing out. It is extremely interesting that exaggeration does not only accompany the modern lament, but even its ancient ancestor, which is performed in the same way, as we can see from the iconographical evidence of the time and also by ancient written sources and especially the Attic tragedies. The survival of these exaggerations for at least three thousand years shows that they are inextricably linked to mourning and that they definitely serve the satisfaction of the mourner's most basic need at the time of performance, which is psychological detonation.

Keywords: lament, mourning, threnos, moiroloi, burial customs, iconography, tragedy