A women's Easter song from Matoneri, turned into a moving poem.

Sirmena is sung by the women of Matoneri, Kalambaka, at dawn on Easter Sunday, right after the liturgy. It remembers a raid in the Ottoman period when men and girls were taken to Ioannina, and it holds the lament of captivity and the joy of Easter at once. It is in Greek, in a mostly Vlach-speaking village, and survives in fragments, by mouth. Even its name is a sound worn down over centuries, from a line about the Easter bell ringing out across the village.

We made it a concrete poem. Lines leave one point, move like the voices of a polyphony and meet again. Each verse breaks into letters and syllables that drift along the curves, the way the singers' cries and broken notes carry to the farthest listener.

Live at sirmena.alasu.works.