His love for the music of Epirus and the Balkans brought him to Konitsa in northwestern Greece, where he’s made his home these past five years. Christopher King is doing rather well in his adopted homeland, too, having organized, until last year, the annual festival, “Why are the Mountains Black,” in cooperation with the Onassis Foundation’s Cultural Center, which recently led to the creation of a documentary series of the same name by Cosmote TV.
Following the success of his book, “Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey Into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music,” the American ethnomusicologist recently released his first work of fiction, the novella “Ama einai na kaei” (If It Should Burn). The story is set mainly in 1931, in a village outside Grevena: It’s Good Friday and Father Konstantis fervently urges the villagers to carry out the customary burning of an effigy of Judas; in the commotion, however, the youngest son of a family in mourning, Lazarus, is paralyzed. The priest believes that being injured endowed the boy with the ability to perform miracles, so he tasks him with creating a new, “divine” Judas effigy. The controversy that erupts as a result is between religious faith and empirical observations, the power of the mighty and the freedom of the vulnerable, unexplained phenomena and efforts to explain them. And all this in a book we’d describe as Southern Gothic, even if it is set in the Greek north in the interwar years.
