Series about the Greek music tradition. The aim is to record and promote to the audience the richness, variety, and expressiveness of our musical heritage, through the local musical idioms as well as its modern potential in the urban environment of the big city.

The show "Salt of the Earth" and Lambros Liavas invite us to a charming musical journey "West of Ayvalik!..."
The starting point is the heritage of music and dance that was transplanted from Asia Minor to the Aegean. In particular, the islands of the East Aegean (Lesbos, Chios, and Samos) functioned, even before the Asia Minor Catastrophe, as an extension of the Asia Minor hinterland, with the sea connecting rather than separating the two regions. Thus, songs, dances, musical instruments, and instrumentalists ran through this musical-cultural network, which, with Smyrna and Constantinople as the centers of activity, spread from the Balkans to Cyprus!
Dances such as sirtos and ballos, zeibekiko and karsilamades, aptaliko and tsifteteli, melodies with improvised couplets and turns that we find all over the Aegean confirm that Asia Minor was indeed a "matrix of music" for Hellenism. This sea remains timelessly a "roaring sea" since Homer's time, with the characteristic nine-beat rhythms that we find in the same places, already in the lyrical poetry of Sappho!
The musicians participating in the show are: Panagiotis Vergos (santur - music curation), Giorgos Marinakis (violin), Antonis Keramydas (accordion), Ilias Mavrikis (guitar), Lazaros Akrivopoulos (percussion), Christos Charis (clarinet), Ignatis Symenis (trumpet). Kostas Kaldelis and Stavroula Daliani sing.
Dancing are members of the Dance Workshop of Nea Ionia (curated by Dimitris Mitsis & Mantha Ziva).