The Big Polyphonic Caravan travels every summer, linking the regions of the Epirotic polyphony, bridging with the other Greek and Greek-speaking genres of polyphony, meeting the polyphonies of neighboring peoples as well. It is about a multimode journey of collective tracking and initiation in the field of the polyphony. Concerts, meetings, celebrations, collective field-based recordings, travelling seminars, presentations, projections, touring are some of the main actions.
The Big Polyphonic Caravan is a long-day journey. It begins during the last days of every July and extends to the first ten days of August. It traverses all borderline Epirus, from Grammos to Sagiada, expands its events at both sides, at West Macedonia and Corfu, while, since years now, it has as a point of departure villages of Elassona in Thessaly. It often crosses the borders, to the regions of the Greek minority at Southern Albania and the Greek-speaking villages of Southern Italy.
The Big Polyphonic Caravans constitute the gradual evolution of the International Polyphonic Song Meetings. They optimized the first years experience, adjusting their character to that of the polyphonic song. An outgoing, centrifugal institution, always on the road, often off road, which, as the years go by, less and less claims for its self-recognition as institution and more and more claims for a place in folk culture, constantly enforcing the community of polyphony.
The participation in all the events and actions of the Big Polyphonic Caravan is free, without any financial fee. Its main stations, the squares of borderline villages and towns, the threshing floors of abandoned villages, the small churches, the riverfronts, the gorges, the open spaces in mountainous forests, the archaeological sites. A journey which links the natural and social landscapes of the Epirotic, Greek and Greek-speaking polyphony.