Hymns of the All-Night Vigil Byzantine Music Days Festival

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

The agrypnia — the all-night vigil — is Orthodox chant built to run from dusk to sunrise, one service flowing into the next with no gap between them. On 24 October the fourth and final night of the Byzantine Music Days folds that arc into a single concert: the hymns of the vigil, drawn from the service that keeps a church awake until morning.

The festival is a four-night strand of the Greek National Opera's Alternative Stage, curated by Zacharias Karounis under the subtitle «Γένη και γενιές της ψαλτικής τέχνης σήμερα» — genres and generations of the psaltic art today. Karounis, born in Laconia in 1977, holds a degree in Byzantine music from the Athens Conservatory and a postgraduate specialisation in hymnology; he has sung alongside Domna Samiou, Giorgos Dalaras and Stavros Xarchakos and performed with Hadjidakis's Orchestra of Colours. His programme gathers historic choirs, established cantors and younger voices, women's chanting ensembles among them.

You will sit among people who can name the mode a piece is in before the second phrase, chant students, and listeners who came for the specific weight of unaccompanied Byzantine music. It is a hall that stays silent between hymns rather than applauding through them.

The setting is the black-box Alternative Stage inside the SNFCC — a room the Greek National Opera keeps for work its main hall won't stage, here given over to liturgical music sung as concert. The sound is monophonic and unaccompanied: a melodic line above the ison, the held drone that never leaves, the eight modes of the octoechos turning underneath. No instruments, no harmony in the Western sense — just voices and the architecture of the chant.

The four nights run in liturgical, not calendar, order — Nativity on the 21st, the Divine Liturgy on the 22nd, Holy Week and Resurrection on the 23rd, and this vigil closing the sequence on the 24th. Hearing the agrypnia last is the point: it is the service that, in a monastery, would carry straight through the night.

If you want melody you can hum home or an orchestra to fill the room, unaccompanied psaltiki asks something different of you — attention to a single line and its drone rather than to harmony. But if you want to hear the living state of the art, sung by the choirs and cantors who carry it, this is the night the festival has been building toward.

The SNFCC sits on the Kallithea coast with no metro to the door — take the free shuttle from central Athens or the coastal tram, and allow time; the black-box seating is rebuilt for each production, so arrive early to choose a spot. Tickets are 12–15 EUR, 10 EUR concession.

Four nights walk the church year from Christmas to the all-night vigil; this is the one that ends at dawn.