Lyubka Rondova
Today we celebrate the life and music of Lyubka Rondova, Bulgarian folk singer who was born in 1936 in Greece. She is especially well known for her performances of folk songs from the Pirin region. She passed away on March 15, 2016 after a long illness.
Video #1 is a performance with Lyubka Rondova and Ilia Lykov of the song Цъфнало цвеке шарено ("Bright Flower Blowing" according to the webpage). I think they were referring to blooming flowers, not blowing ones, but translations from Bulgarian can be a little strange sometimes. Or it could have been a typo.
The dance to this is lesnoto.
Lyubka Rondova was also fond of songs from Aegean (Greek) Macedonia. Dimitrula Mou (My Dimitrula) is in Greek, from a recording done many years ago.
It is a happy song about going to the taverna to drink retsina (wine made from pine resin). To me, retsina smells and tastes like turpentine, but since the Greeks have been drinking it for over 2000 years, it is obviously an acquired taste.
The dance for this song is a devetorka.
Video #3 is a song that tells a story: Belomorie, made for a documentary about Bulgarian refugees from Macedonia, Thrace and Dobrudja. You can find the translation here.
Lyubka Rondova was a refugee child uprooted from her village during the Civil War in Greece. Most of the victims were children of Slavic language speakers who lived in the Greek province of Macedonia, and many of them died, along with their caretakers, during their journey out of the country. They were resettled in refugee camps all over Eastern Europe. Lyubka Rondova was sent to Poland, and later moved to Czechoslovakia before she rejoined her family in Bulgaria in 1960.
If you enjoyed this you may also like:
Voices from the Past: Classic Bulgarian Folk Songs, Part One and Two
The Best of the Bisserov Sisters (and Family)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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