Coaxing melodies out of fir and maple
In his charming ground-floor workshop in the Athenian neighborhood of Galatsi, the violin Dimitris Kakos holds in his capable hands is more than an instrument; it is a thread stretching back three centuries to Cremona in northern Italy. The 30-year-old craftsman, one of just a handful of luthiers in Greece right now, feels that Niccolo Paganini’s soul lives on in his tidy shelves and drawers containing the tools of his trade.
And it is an exacting trade, so challenging that it has made him humble. “We don’t use electric tools, which help move the pace along, here. Everything takes time,” he says.
‘Making the instruments for a classical string quartet is like making your family whole,’
Having gotten into the business in 2015 and opened his workshop in 2019, Kakos has so far made around 40 instruments (violins, violas and cellos), each of which takes 400 to 600 work hours – though it’s not something he boasts about. “I don’t sit there counting the hours each one takes me; I’d go crazy if I did! Time flies in here,” says Kakos, whose instruments are already being played by Greek and foreign professional musicians like Jonian Ilias Kadesha, Kostas Panagiotidis, Odysseus Korelis, Dionisis Vervitsiotis, Laertes Kokolanis and Antonis Manias, to name but a few.
Indeed, his instruments featured in a concert last month by the Athens String Quartet (Apollon Grammatikopoulos and Panayiotis Tziotis on violin, Paris Anastasiadis on viola and Isidoros Sideris on cello) at the Parnassos Literary Society. “In order to feel whole as a craftsman, I believe you need to do this at least once in your lifetime: Making the instruments for a classical string quartet is like making your family whole,” says Kakos, who had the idea for the initiative two years ago and worked on the project pro bono, with proceeds from the concert going to charity. “My soul is in the instruments those top musicians play,” he says.
Exploring the footsteps that brought him to where he is today, we travel back to the village of Prodromos in Evrytania and to the 1990s as he was growing up beside his father, a respected builder and a self-taught – for lack of any other option – luthier. “He designed his first violin after one he was given by a traditional fiddler, making the pattern on cardboard,” Kakos says proudly. “I made my first violin at the age of 15 under his guidance.”
As his love for the craft grew, he decided to travel to Cremona, the heartland of luthiers, to study it and meet other people in the business. “Of course, that’s where I learned that the truly good craftsmen haven’t got the time to teach at schools. My most important acquaintance, my golden opportunity, was Davide Sora, a very famous Italian luthier. He was my teacher and we’re still in touch.”
Dimitris Kakos is not just a capable luthier, he is also a skilled violinist, in both classical and traditional music. “Whether you’re playing classical or traditional music, it’s still the same violin,” he says emphatically.
Our conversation goes back to his father – a constant point of reference for the young man – as we talk about wood, his trade’s primary material. “I was 9 years old when I lived the experience of going with my father to cut a tree that he would use to make a violin. This was not a frequent occurrence, of course. Sure, you can find trees that yield some good wood, but the ideal material for our work comes from abroad. Specifically from the Italian and German alps, where we find the best fir trees for our work, as the temperature doesn’t rise so sharply in the summer and the wood isn’t stressed. The best maple, another wood we use, comes from Bosnia,” he explains.
Access to these materials explains why violin-making evolved in Cremona, the birthplace of Antonio Stradivari. Paneveggio in the Dolomites, known as the “violin forest” (and is, unfortunately, now under threat from climate change), was where the legendary luthier got the wood for his world-famous violins. Three hundred years on, Dimitris Kakos also needs to travel there to get his wood from trusted suppliers. But what is it that gives a violin the “perfect sound”? “The perfect sound, in my opinion, comes from the contrast of the spectrum of frequencies across their range, the melodic colors, as well as the rich harmonics produced by the instrument’s speaker,” he says.
