Macedonia is one of the geographic regions of continental Greece and constitutes the southern and largest part of its wider geographical and historical region. Today Macedonia constitutes the northern geographic and historic district, the second most populous and the largest in extent (25.9% of the total area) of the Greek territory, defined to the north by the borders with FYROM and Bulgaria to the south byThessaly and the Aegean Sea to the east by Western Thrace and to the west by Epirus and Albania.
Traditional dances of Macedonia by Claidy Durbaku
Geography Macedonia, according to its geomorphology is divided in: Central Macedonia which includes the prefectures of Thessaloniki, Kilkis, Chalkidiki, Pella, Imathia and Pieria. Western Macedonia which includes the prefectures of Kozani, Florina, Kastoria and Grevena. Eastern Macedonia which includes the prefectures of Serres, Kavala, Drama. This project’s main objective is to highlight the plethora of dances that exist in Macedonia as well as to where anyone can find them in the literature of traditional dance.
Variety and Multiculturalism In Macedonia you can observe a wide variety of dances, music and rhythms belonging to the dancing tradition either of the indigenous populations or the refugees who came from Northern Thrace and Asia Minor and settled in it after 1923. We meet circular and opposing dances. Moreover, at its limits there are obvious influences from Thrace, Epirus, Thessaly, the Aegean islands, as well as of the Slavic tribes of its northern borders.
Mobility patterns • The information of the dances that follow comes essentially from literature research. A lot of the dances are found in more than one region, usually with a different name or a different kinetic pattern, so it is difficult to put them somewhere just geographically. Very brief information about each dance is given, as its pace, some information on the way it is danced, and the place in the literature where we can find it. • In the cases where there are differences among authors in terms of the number of steps of a dance, it is often due to a different way of analysis of the kinetic pattern and not necessarily to the existence of different dance steps, without of course excluding the second case. If this happens, the researcher should refer to other references for a more complete picture of the dance.
Classification of dances • All the dances referred to as circular are danced in an open circle. In the old days men and women used to form separate circles, or in the same circle all the men entered first and women followed. The link between men and women was always the scarf one side of which was held by the last man and the other by the first woman. • Many dances of Macedonia have the feature of starting very slowly and ending up at a very fast pace; egBagpipe, Maren, Stankena, Souleimanovo, Gkeiko etc. A special feature of the dances of Macedonia is the great variety of rhythms encountered. We find rhythms of 2 meters up to 16meters.