Tomorrow morning the main square of Pyrgetos will fill with dancing and clarinets for the Kiwi Festival. The square is no accident: it bears the name of Vaios Malliaras, the clarinettist who was born here and carried the sound of the village as far as Australia.
A village between Olympus and the sea
Pyrgetos is built on the eastern foothills of Lower Olympus, at about 140 metres, and looks out on one side over the plain and the Pineios Delta and on the other over the Thermaic Gulf and, on clear days, Chalkidiki. It is about 40 kilometres by road from Larissa and lies a few kilometres below Rapsani. In the 2021 census it had 1,373 residents.
Most people live from the land: sugar beet, sunflowers, maize, wheat, vineyards, olives and, in recent decades, kiwis. Around it, Rapsani, Aigani and Krania are villages with a tradition of wine. At the place called Leivadi, remains survive of a bridge of Venetian construction which, from 1726, made crossing the Pineios easier.
Antypas and the square
In 1907 Marinos Antypas, the man from Kefalonia who stood by the sharecroppers of the plain, was killed in Pyrgetos. His statue stands in the centre of the village.
The clarinettist of Pyrgetos
Vaios Malliaras was born in 1907 in Pyrgetos and died in 1988. According to the biographical note of a collection of his recordings, as a boy he made a flute out of reed and learned the clarinet from two Roma clarinettists, while his uncle, Konstantinos Malliaras, also played the clarinet across Thessaly and Macedonia. The same note says that in late 1933 the future Archbishop Seraphim found him in the village and invited him to Athens to record for Columbia, and that from 1934 to 1981 he made hundreds of recordings and played for the Greek diaspora in Canada, Australia and Europe.
His records also survive in international recording archives, such as the database of the University of California, Santa Barbara, with pieces like «Wedding Procession» and «Back to the Village». In his honour, the main square of Pyrgetos was named after him.
If you go tomorrow
The second day of the Kiwi Festival starts on Sunday 25 October at 11:00 in Vaios Malliaras square, with dances by the Panthessalian Association of Spilia «O Kissavos» and the Pyrgetos Cultural Association and a feast with a live band. From Pyrgetos, Rapsani is a quarter of an hour's drive further up the mountain.
