Baglamas particularly popular with musicians who needed an instrument transportable enough to carry around easily or small enough to shelter under a coat. During parts of the 20th century, players of the bouzouki and baglamas were persecuted by the government, and the instruments were smashed by the police. The name comes from Turkish , a similar instrument. Baglamas The baglamas () (plural "baglamades") or baglamadaki (), a long necked bowl-lute, is a plucked string instrument used in Greek music; it is a version of the bouzouki pitched an octave higher (nominally D-A-D), with unison pairs on the four highest strings and
Bouzouki Bouzouki The bouzouki (; also "buzuki"; , ; plural "bouzoukia" ) is a musical instrument popular in Greece that was brought there in the 1900s by Greek immigrants from Turkey, and quickly became the central instrument to the rebetiko genre and its music branches. A mainstay of modern Greek music, the bouzouki has a flat front, usually heavily inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The instrument is played with a plectrum and has a sharp metallic sound, reminiscent of a mandolin but pitched lower. There are two main types of bouzouki: the "trichordo" ("three-course") has three pairs of strings (known as courses) and