Dimitroula Mou Iassou

A bis at tonight’s concert at Piazza by Nico di Batista and Sokol Prekalori was a tune that Albanians of a certain age are very familiar with. It is a Greek folk song, Dimitroula Mou Iassou.

The history of it is that sometime in the early 80s, several Greek bands had come to Albania. Until then, communist Albania and Greece were in a state of war. Some of it was a legal leftover from the second World War, when Albania, part of Fascist Italy, legally attacked Greece during the Italian Greek war of 1940. But what had aggravated the relations between the two was that during the civil war between Communist and monarchist forces of Greece in 1949, Albania sided with the Greek communists and it also gave them shelter in the country.

Thirty years later, there was a rapprochement, hence those few Greek bands coming to Albania. One of them sang Dimitroula Mou Iassou (Dimitroula, approach me), and this became popular with the Albanians back then.

Sokol Prekalori was familiar with the tune, and Nico di Batista played accompaniment, to continuous applauses.

Tonight’s concert amassed most followers at the Piazza, where about fifty people huddled sitting while the seats at the bars were filled. “The festival has invigorated the Piazza,” says Mentor Bushati, a bartender. “In a normal evening, this street stands mostly empty.” Indeed, it was full of people, and not only the hundreds of strollers who do the evening walk in, walk out routine.

The repertoire was rich, Piazzolla, Al di Meola, the Balkans tune of Dimitroula, and other tunes that continued for about 80 minutes.

We got lucky, the rain, which started at 5.30 pm, had abated fifteen minutes later, and stopped at about 6. The concert started late, at about 7.15, but it went on well, and luckily, there was no rain.