Her voice was crystal clear, strict, light, sweet, with character. There are no exaggerations in her presence on the stage, no pretense and show in the performance. Baked in the brutality of her years when she grew up, when Rena Kumiotis spoke to you, she had grace and strength. Moreover, she showed strength, and great, in the last years of her life, suffering health and losses.

“It was a great voice, Dorik. He had the potential to have a brilliant career. He could have replaced Vicky Moxoliou.” says Manolis Mitsias “K”. For Rena Kumiotiswho died at the age of 81. They first collaborated in 1968 in “Apanemia”. “She was a woman without a heart, she was not such an orderly life. He lost opportunities by going abroad to work.”

Kumioti was identified with the boites and new wave era, but above all with “Dromos” by Mimi Plessas and Lefteris Papadopoulos, the most commercial album of Greek discography, on which she sang with Giannis Poulopoulos and Popi Asteriadis in 1969.

OUR M. Plessas characteristically describes their collaboration in “One Road, a Thousand Notes” by Makisu Delaporte (Ankara Publishers), emphasizing that he gave her two unique female songs on the record, “For the First Time” and “Give Me Your Mouth”: “Her truth is so me convinces that in the next Days of Summer, I give her a tie with Giannis Poulopoulos, who was a big name at that time. Then, in “Thalassa picrothalassa” with Virvos, I again trust her with most of the songs, but here she is most successful with “Agia Kyriaki”. Everything that she said and “Stop the hands of the clock” “was not sung by anyone better than her, as she captured it with her inimitable Doric and imperious voice.”

Her parents were refugees from Asia Minor. She lost her mother when she was seven months old and was raised by her grandmother, as were her two siblings. Immediately after elementary school, Rena Komiotou, as her last name was before Alekos Paciphas changed it to her, worked as a laborer. At one of her jobs, at the Papastratos factory, she met and married her first husband at a young age, with whom she had her first son, who died last year.

“She was a woman without a heart, she was not such an orderly life. He lost opportunities by going abroad to work,” says Manolis Mitsias.

First time

In a sweet interview with Antonis Boskoitis (Lifo), Kumiotis describes how she first started singing when she went with a friend to the Menidiatis brothers nightclub. “Does she have a bump on her neck?”, The owner of the center naturally asked the singer. “Are you better at singing?” he told her, and she replied: “From her, yes.” “I also knock over a beer, relax, and say, ‘I’m going out for a walk.'” And he went out with Spyros Liosi on a bouzouki.

A little later, she went to “Apanemia”, where he saw her Manos Loizos and called him Lefteri Papadopoulos listen to him while he and Mimi Plessas were preparing The Road. Plessas read manuscripts at the lyricist’s home while he was on the phone.

L. Papadopoulos did not believe that they would become songs, because he did not process them, they did not have a verse-chorus, but two days later his composer played them on the piano and convinced him to give them to Alekos Pasifas. . He named them “The Road”. Papadopoulos, while listening to Kumiotis in “Apanemia”, advised her to listen to Paciphas and made an appointment for her to meet Plessas. The success of the recording was great, and in 1970 a musical performance at the Sinéac-Paksinu Theater followed.

In his book Songs Write Their History (published by Janos), L. Papadopoulos writes that Dromo’s performances fell on weekends of the Paxinos-Minotis couple, who played Ira and the Peacock. There are many spectators, but few at the usual performances of two actors. “This greatly disturbed Minotis, who gave an interview, spoke about the ‘buzuqcid’ and cursed us.”

In subsequent years, Rena Kumioti collaborated with them. Bitikotsi, Kokota, Christakis, Zambeta, Dionysius, Linda etc. In 1974, in Montreal, she met her second husband, with whom she had a second son. He divorced in 1983 and returned to Greece to sing. But times have changed, and so has the song.