Study of Present Day Folk Poetry

When starting to read the book Words as Events: Cretan Mantinades in Performance and Composition, the first questions that arise are: What are mantinades? What is their relation to folklore? Why are they characteristic only for Crete? These questions and many others find their answers in the book by Venla Sykäri, a Finnish scholar who visited Crete for the first time as an exchange student at the University of Crete in Rethimno in 1997. Since then, for the next twelve years, she made many research visits in this country, in search for Cretan mantinades.