Beginner's Guide to the Tzouras, with Antonis Antoniou (Monsieur Doumani)

Cypriot musician Antonis Antoniou admits that he had to do a bit of research for this interview. “I thought I knew many things but apparently some things… I knew them in a different way.” He laughs. “I realised that there are many different stories about the history of this instrument.”

He points to the tzouras, sitting in its case next to him. It turns out that while it’s widely known that this long-necked, pear-shaped lute is the smaller cousin of the more famous bouzouki, there’s more to the story.

Watch – Antonis Antoniou plays his tzouras with Monsieur Doumani:

He explains that he recently learned that the instrument’s ancestry can be traced back to the ancient three-stringed pandura, which was closer in size to the tzouras. “Through the years the pandura travelled to other areas than Greece, because Greece was not Greece then…” The instrument travelled to Turkey, where it eventually became the saz.

With the population exchange of 1922, approximately 1.5 million Orthodox Christians (both ethnic Greeks and Turks) were expelled from Turkey to Greece. “They brought their habits and their instruments.” In its new environment the saz developed into the bouzouki and tzouras, which became key instruments in the rebetiko music that sprung from that era.

While the neck of the tzouras is roughly the same length as the bouzouki, the body is smaller, which gives it its distinct, more intimate timbre.

Like the bouzouki, it features three sets of doubled strings, each pair tuned to the same note; the top and bottom pair tuned to D and the middle pair to A.

Often a player will pick all the strings together to create a drone. “The old rebetiko is mostly droning, it’s mostly on D. The whole song is just one chord.”

While Antoniou grew up listening to rebetiko and traditional Cypriot music, like any good teenager he first rebelled against them. “We became rockers,” he laughs.

He eventually moved to Athens to study jazz on the guitar. While studying he went to visit a friend in Crete who had a rebetiko band. Antoniou found himself immersed in the music. “We were, all day for four days, staying in this house and playing rebetiko or listening to rebetiko… Suddenly this thing that I had from when I was growing up, came back to me. It was like it struck me.”

His friend gave him a mixtape of all the classics, which he took back to Athens with him. “I started listening like I was obsessed… two weeks later I said OK, it has to happen. So, I went to a shop and I bought the tzouras…”

Why the tzouras? I ask. “I felt that the sound was closer to me, it was not as grandiose as a bouzouki, the king of Greek music. [The tzouras] was more intimate, more, how do you say, shy.”

Years after he bought his first tzouras, he went back to Cyprus. “I started playing in front of my father and that’s when he told me that he had a bouzouki back in Kyrenia and that he used to play. He had never shared this with us.”

Antoniou was surprised to find the music was in his blood; his father used to play the bouzouki for fun when he was young and living in the north of Cyprus. “After the war, he left it at his house, thinking that they would return. This is what happened with all of the refugees. They didn’t suspect that it will be a permanent thing. So, he left it there.”

While the tzouras has given him a connection to the past through freshly unearthed roots, Antoniou remains committed to pushing the boundaries of the instrument, experimenting with effect pedals and different techniques in his trio Monsieur Doumani. “I feel that it [the tzouras] has huge capabilities, that there are still amazing sounds to be revealed. So, this is also something that I will continue to explore.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today