Political Macedonian Dance & Gaida in Greece | Recording Earth

This is something I (Olly) on my bicycle trip from London to Delhi. This was in Greece while cycling through the remote and rolling region of West Macedonia.

While trying to avoid the ferocious ankle-biting wild dogs who clearly believe bicycles are the devil’s work, I passed several police checkpoints and then a large ultra-nationalist demonstration. They were protesting a Macedonian circle-dance in a nearby village, where I incidentally had planned on camping. I decide to go to the venue hosting the dance, camera in hand, ambling through crowds of tense protesters outside. Sat on my own, receiving some bothersome looks, a lawyer came over and invited me to join his table. His friends told me that they are exercising their ethnic right as Macedonian minorities by dancing to the gaida, a bagpipe from the Balkans.

Traditionally made from a treated sheep or goat’s hide, the gaida, unlike the Scottish Highland bagpipe which has five pipes, only has three: a ‘blowpipe’, a ‘charter’ and a ‘drone’. Bagpipes have existed for more than a millennium in Eurasia and Africa; in Galicia (Spain) they are called the gaita, and in Turkey the tulum.

After filming the dance, which ultimately transpired nonviolently, I was persuaded to have a boogie.

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