Name Kostas Novakis | ||
Kostas Novakis (Greek: Κώστας Νοβάκης, Macedonian: Kostas Novakis; born 1957) is an amateur ethnographer and musician from Greece who has published CDs with Macedonian folksongs.
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Biography
Kostas Novakis comes from Koufalia, near Giannitsa, Greece, where he works as a dentist. During the mid-1990s, he began recording traditional Macedonian songs from elderly people in various places in western and central Macedonia. He began to perform these songs himself, together with his wife Charoula, initially circulating CDs privately among friends. In 2002 and 2003, he published three CDs with a collection of such songs with a band of local instrumentalists and of two musicians from the Greek border towns of Gevgelija and Bogdanci in the neighbouring Republic of Macedonia. The publication was noted in the press as the first of its kind in Greece and as the "end of a taboo", because the songs had not been publicly performed in Greece for decades and had not been previously documented. He claims to have recorded over 1000 songs in the local ethnic Macedonian dialects, which by Novakis' own assertions are played on local radio stations in the region.
Novakis is also reported to be a member of the "Centre for Macedonian Culture" in Greece.