Women of Rebetiko: A Journey in the Footsteps of Music and Memory

March 10, 2026, Tuesday
18:30 - 20:30

Venue: Hrant Dink Foundation Anarad Hığutyun Building
Papa Roncalli St. No: 128 Harbiye, Şişli/İstanbul
*The talk will be in Turkish and there will be no simultaneous translation.

To register for the event, please fill out the form.

The Hrant Dink Foundation Minority Rights Academy will host an event with artist and independent researcher Lidya Durmazgüler exploring the musical journey of women rebetiko artists.

Women of Rebetiko, brought to life by Lidya Durmazgüler, is an interdisciplinary memory and music project that reopens space for the overshadowed and marginalized female voices of rebetiko music.

This musical journey begins in the 1920s with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, stretching from Anatolia to the ports of Greece and from there to the first record recordings in America. It is woven around the themes of migration, exile, solidarity, and resistance. Although rebetiko has often been conveyed through male narratives; women played a defining role among its carriers, through their voices, their creative output, and their lived experiences.

Women of Rebetiko questions this invisibility. It frames music not merely as a stage practice but as a space of memory.

In the repertoire brought to life by Lidya Durmazgüler’s vocals, the traces of women rebetiko artists are followed—artists who accompanied the collective memory shaped by the 1922 population exchange and transcontinental journeys. This narrative, spanning from Marika Papagika to Roza Eskenazi, from Rita Abatzi to Stella Haskil, and from Marika Ninou to Ioanna Georgakopoulou, is explored through archives, stories, and live performance.

Shaped around vocals, bouzouki, and guitar; the musical structure on stage rearticulates the multilayered musical heritage of the Eastern Mediterranean with an interpretation faithful to historical style.

In this special gathering, Lidya Durmazgüler will be joined on stage by Ali Baran Özcan on bouzouki and Kerim Arafa on guitar.

Women of Rebetiko concert series invites the listener not just to a musical experience, but to a cross-cultural, historical, and emotional journey of memory.

 

Lidya Durmazgüler

Lidya Durmazgüler (1990, Istanbul) is a multilingual vocalist, independent researcher, and interdisciplinary artist. A graduate of Istanbul University’s Department of Russian Language and Literature, she is also a translator. She grew up in a multicultural environment in Kurtuluş/Tatavla and was introduced to the stage at an early age through her music education in Armenian schools and church choirs.

In her work, she approaches music not merely as a performative field but as an intersection of memory, migration, and cultural identity. Founded in 2024 and first brought to the stage in March 2025, the Women of Rebetiko project has met audiences in nearly 30 performances across six different cities. It emerged as a continuation of her multilingual and multicultural artistic journey.

With a repertoire in Turkish, Armenian, Greek, and various Mediterranean languages, she produces and stages projects aimed at rethinking cultural heritage on stage.

 

This project is financed by the European Union.