Athens Rebetiko Festival

Join us for an unforgettable celebration of music, culture, and tradition in Athens every year.

About Our Festival

The truth is that the existence and the establishment of ‘Rebetiko’ does not need a Rebetiko Festival.

Rebetiko is a highly experiential, emotional musical genre that was born at the beginning of the 20th century, carries on its back half a century of Greek history and has been firmly etched in our cellular world.The initiative, to take place and with the wish to establish an annual Athens Rebetiko Festival by a "pentaple" of people, the three of whom make up the "Grecous" Greek Music Archive, seemed to us like a seed that was missing from the Attic land. What was impressive for us was that the very first steps of this effort were embraced with such warmth and excessive zeal by dozens of volunteers, artists and people of culture, that we do not hide from you that it was our main flame of implementation. And this is because we too hoped and aimed for a collective and creative cultural osmosis. A fermentation not only of musicians, bands, patrons and artists but also of institutions, academics, musicologists, researchers, journalists, writers, instrument makers, Karagiozi performers and all those people who deal with the genre the dissemination & rescue of the Greek Musical Culture, so as to create a common ground. A place of musical soul deposit, research, study, recording, Rebetico indulgence and traveling extroversion.