Justinian - Epic Symphony

Music composed by Farya Faraji, and featuring instruments by Dimitris Athanasopoulos, Ilias Vlamakis, Ilias de Sutter Ndavidlis, Gökhan Saraç, Izet M, Carmel Abramovitch, and Latin translations by Demetrios Paraschos. A massive shoutout to Ilias Vlamakis for allowing me to use his lyra recordings. Please check out his amazing work at Cretan Lyra Lab: This symphony tells the story of Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, using the musical language of modern Greek music and its Byzantine medieval antecedents, both secular and liturgical. The soundscape consists of a wide variety of instruments: the oud, kanun and lyras, which served as the central trinity of Eastern Roman court music in the 1000’s to the end of the empire, ancient instruments going all the way back to Antiquity and still played today like the tsambouna and mandouras, and folk instruments like the tambouras family of lutes and the kaval flute of northern Greece.