Alekos Karavitis

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Alekos Karavitis was born in Aktounta, Rethymno Prefecture in 1904. A talented child, he fell in love with Cretan music and started learning "lyra" from childhood. At the age of 24 he married Chryssoula from the nearby village "Yanniou" and moved to Athens. They had three children; two girls and one boy.

He was already a virtuoso in lyra and his ambition was to spread the Cretan music all over the world. Although he was self-employed in various business, he held every year in Athens the "annual festivity of lyra" with great success. However, his desire and love of the Cretan music urged him to coordinate international manifestations of Greek Folk music and dances with official Hellenic organizations such as the famous schools of the time of "Koula Pratsika", "Dora Stratou" and other well known institutions together with his own Cretan group and others from all over Greece with local folk musicians and dancers.

In 1936, with the school of "Koula Pratsika" they won an award performing at the Olympic games in Berlin, Germany. This award included a well organized cruise in north Europe and the North Sea fjords of Norway and Sweden on board the then famous cruise ship "Oceania".

Then, after the war, in the fifties he organized another venture with the school of "Dora Stratou" and started from Cyprus, to proceed to Alexandria, Egypt where they were enthusiastically welcomed by the large Greek community of Egypt at the time and then to the United States of America where in the zenith of his musical triumph he performed at the famous Carnegie Hall of New York to complete his childhood and everlasting ambition to spread all Greek folk music and especially this of his own birthplace Crete, as far as he could humanly take it during these difficult prewar and postwar times.

He died in 1975 and although technology was not yet at the levels of today in producing and preserving recorded music, some of his work is still available in vinyl but also in CD format. He had many followers and talented lyra-players who learned from him and his music and some of them are well known in the Cretan communities. There is not one true Cretan over the age of forty who is not familiar with his famous music.