Transporting Personal Belongings to the Museum : Sophia Vembo, Headscarves and Vinyls as National Memorabilia

Efi Gazi

In the War Museum of Athens, there is a display case containing a few unusual for this context items: a gramophone record, a traditional dress, a photograph depicting a woman wearing a headscarf and some other objects and documents (Fig. 1). They belong to or depict the artist Sophia Vembo [Σοφία Βέμπο] (1910? -1978). Another collection of Vembo’s memorabilia was gifted to the Thessaloniki branch of the War Museum by the collector and artist Katerina Petridou, after an exhibition held in 2005. Vembo became synonymous with the Greek fight against Mussolini’s troops in 1940-1941. She was not only a singer but an efficient performer, bringing together acoustic and  visual elements involving folk clothing. She often accessorized her outfits with a  headscarf (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 (left). Vembo’s photograph (Athens War Museum). According to K. Petridou, the photo was taken in a performance in 1964 on the occasion of Vembo’s thirtieth anniversary in the art scene (Petridou 2014, p. 187). (right). Her performance costume kept at Athens War Museum.

Performing  ‘Greek tradition’ 

Sophia Vembo, née Sophia/Efi Bembo/[ Σοφία – Έφη Μπέμπου], was born in Gelibolou/Kallipoli in the Ottoman Empire and moved to the Greek state with her family in the years following World War I.  Vembo started her career in the musical theatre in the early 1930s. By the end of the decade, she was popular in Greece and in Egypt where she mainly performed for Greek communities. At the time, songs were important in theatrical plays as gramophones were not widespread and Greek broadcasting radio had not been launched yet.  Columbia Records started the production of records in Greece in the beginning of the 1930s. Vembo was one of the artists whose career was  linked to the development of gramophone records and the new materialities of songs (Liavas 2009, 163-190).   

In the beginning of her career, Vembo embodied the modern young female artist with novelties and lifestyles of the era, i.e. public smoking. Yet, she soon transformed her persona along different lines. During the 1920s and the 1930s, Greece experienced major socio-economic, demographic and cultural changes, in the wake of World War I and the defeat in Asia Minor in 1922 and due to the world financial crisis of 1929. A constant interrogation around definitions of Greekness emerged. The changing landscapes of both urban and country settings and the arrival of refugees and other populations with various cultural identities, backgrounds and experiences had an important impact on cultural and artistic life.

The rural drama ‘Golfo ‘ [Γκόλφω]  was produced as a silent movie in 1914-1915. It inaugurated the genre of bucolic ‘fustanella dramas’ which idealized rural space and the ‘traditional village.‘ In fact, the quest for the ‘folk’ aspects in Greek identity had emerged in the late 19th century but it accelerated in the early 20th century.  The ‘traditional’ village set the frame of a community which lived away from the urban centers. Audiences for cultural artefacts focusing on the ‘village’ included urbanized villagers, Asia Minor refugees who were trying to re-build their lives in the Greek nation state but also the Athenian elites which romanticized rural life (Karalis 2012; Karakasidou 2020).  

The intellectual, cultural and artistic turn into the ‘authenticity of pre-modern life’ further expanded in the 1930s. Up to the late 1950s,  films  which depicted ‘authentic’ Greek villages with distinct moral female characters, portrayed as the bearers of tradition, were popular. For Vembo, the year 1938 was important in her career. She acted in the film ‘The Refugee Girl’ [Η προσφυγοπούλα],a Greek-Egyptian productiondirected by Togo Mizrahi. A refugee girl from Asia Minor lives in a Greek province and struggles to overcome a marriage crisis and to carry on with her life as a folk singer. The film became popular in Greece, Egypt and the USA, screened for Greek communities and migrants (Poulakis 2024, 365, 370).  In the same year, Zehra [Ζεχρά],  an ‘oriental’ song with lyrics by Aimilios Savvidis and music by the composer Michalis Souyioul (Souyioultzoglou), was launched. Ever since, Vembo’s ‘traditional’ images, including headscarves, acquired greater popularity.

National Identity and Resistance in WWII

The Greek Italian war of 1940 found Vembo performing patriotic and resistance songs, including pieces which satirized Mussolini and the invading Italians. The legendary song Children of Greece [Της Ελλάδος Παιδιά] composed by her partner Mimis Traiforos (1912? -1998) on the musical pattern of Zehra, remains famous to this day.

Vembo adapted herself to the war culture. Hence, she also fitted in the wider context of the era. Her ‘neo-demotic’ songs and outfits, her headscarves, her performance of ‘local accents’ of various Greek communities ranging from Epirus to Asia Minor, ‘translated’ and transmitted patriotic messages with the use of familiar cultural codes for wider audiences. Following the German invasion in April 1941 and the Axis occupation of Greece, Vembo was arrested. After her release, the occupation authorities forbade her performances and singing. In an interview for the Greek television after the fall of the Colonels’ dictatorship, Mimis Traiforos mentioned that she was not allowed to wear her  headscarf, considered by the occupation forces to be ‘a symbol of resistance or national pride’  (interview to Freddy Germanos, 18:11).

During the occupation, Vembo escaped in the Middle East. She engaged in the ‘theatre of the resistance,’ in artists’ collectives which continued performing for the allied army forces. Because of her patriotic devotion, she gained a wider recognition after World War II while she has lived in collective memory as the ‘Singer of Victory’.

Antifascist and patriotic songs and tunes formed a distinct repertoire which accompanied the resistance across Europe during World War II. Vera Lynn (1917-2020) was an English resistance singer whose songs and performances became famous during the war. The Italian partisan song Bella ciao is also a telling example. Music and singing acquired an important position both in the resistance politics but also, later on, in the mnemonic cultures of World War II. The remembrance of the resistance, to this day, relies on the ‘echo of the past’ and on the soundscape of World War II, on tunes, songs and rhymes in various countries and contexts.

The Making and Re-making of ‘Vembo’

Vembo is primarily associated with World War II, the Italo-Greek War in 1940-1941 and the Resistance songs. Yet, her itineraries during her lifetime are much more complex. In 1946, Vembo returned to Greece from Egypt. She was now the ‘official singer’ of the resistance against the Axis powers. In the civil war, Vembo sided with the anti-communist forces.  Zehra, the ‘oriental’ song which had been adapted as a resistance song (Children of Greece), acquired new lyrics. The re-make praised the state army fighting against the communists. Vembo continued her remarkable career in Greece, Egypt and the USA during the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the Cold War era. Despite her engagement with Cold War anti-communist politics, Vembo sided with the students and the youth who participated in the Polytechnic School uprising against the dictators in November 1973. She hosted persecuted young people in her apartment. A third version of the Children of Greece, referring to the students’ uprising and their fight against the dictatorship, circulated soon (George Pavrianos’ testimony, 30:00).

Vinyls, Memory and Nostalgia

An important part of Vembo’s image, in the context of national culture and collective memory, links to a growing cult around objects attributed to her or with her records. The gramophone record at the War Museum of Athens is the Tobacco Case [Ταμπακέρα] first recorded in 1950, much later than Vembo’s resistance songs (Fig. 3). According to the signboard, it was a gift to the museum by Lieutenant Nikolaos Roussos.

 ‘Vembo’s cult’ is part of a wider nostalgia and audiophilia in which records, mostly vinyl records, stand as icons and fetish objects of analog music. The revival of vinyl records reflects an interest in ‘retro-technologies’ which re-frame the meanings and uses of material objects in popular culture and memory.

Vinyl records are tactile objects whose value and meanings are tied to the physical act of handling, storing, and passing between people. Engaging with vinyl involves rituals of care (i.e. cleaning and preservation) while their circulation through trading, collecting or sharing turns them into ‘things in motion.’ The revival of the vinyl, its comeback, indicates that music involves sensorial and material aspects which transcend sound and which relate to communication, heritage and memory. Also, in phonography’s history, vinyl’s preservation of the human voice is understood as an indication of its ability to preserve the ‘authentic’ and to reclaim the ‘voice of the dead.’ In this sense, vinyl is a material object which bridges the present and the past (Bartmanski, Woodward 2016).

A Multifaceted phenomenon

Material culture is a multifaceted phenomenon. The study of the ‘social life of things’ is not limited to their ‘material’ aspects. It is embedded in sensorial and emotional histories and in various forms of visual, acoustic or tactile experiences.

Vembo’s lasting legacy has been constructed through her music but also through her ‘things,’ such as records and garments. A main aspect of this legacy, articulated through the making and re-making of Vembo, involves the formation of a gendered version of national identity and of ‘national tradition’ from the mid-war years to the late 20th century, with a particular emphasis on World War II and its aftermath.

References

Dominik Bartmanski, Ian Woodward, ‘Vinyl record: a cultural icon,’ Consumption Markets and  Culture 21, no. 2, 2016, p. 1 – 7.

Ελεάνα Γιαλούρη (επιμ.), Υλικός Πολιτισμός. Η ανθρωπολογία στη χώρα των πραγμάτων  [Material Culture. Anthropology in the land of things], Athens: Alexandria, 2012.

Anastasia Karakasidou,”Bucolic dramas and the Greek village: a transcultural comparison,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 29, no 1, 2020, p. 1-17.

Vrasidas Karalis, A history of Greek cinema, New York: Continuum, 2012.

Λάμπρος Λιάβας, Το ελληνικό τραγούδι από το 1821 έως τη δεκαετία του 1950  [ Greek Song from 1821 to the decade of 1950s], Athens: Commercial Bank of Greece, 2009. Κατερίνα Πετρίδου, Σοφία Βέμπο. Τραγούδαγε την Ελλάδα κι όλη η Ελλάδα τραγουδούσε μαζί της [Sophia Vembo. She sang about Greece and all of Greece sang along with her], Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2014.

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