Haralambos (Harry) Koutroumanis was born and raised in Tampa, FL, and moved to Charlotte, NC, in 2023 after graduating from the University of Florida in Gainesville with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Finance. His folk dance research primarily focuses on the island of Crete.
Harry gained interest in Greek folk music and dance through the Cretan Sillogo of Clearwater in 2017, and also began dancing with the Hellas Dancers of Holy Trinity Clearwater. Despite having no Cretan origin, he fell in love with the sound and style of Crete. He attended his first HDF in 2018 with Hellas Dancers, and competed with them at FDF 2019. He later joined Afieroma in Gainesville and competed at HDF from 2022-2023. He is currently a co-instructor for Charlotte’s adult HDF team, Filodoxia.
Much of Harry’s initial knowledge of Crete consisted of the typical Pan-Cretan, modern style of dance, which has been widely adopted as “Cretan Dance”. After attending FDF, he began to realize that Cretan dance has deeper roots than the typical 5 or 6 “Dances of Crete”, which spurred him to begin questioning what he had learned of Greek Dance in general. Harry began collecting research on the customs and traditions of Crete, with a primary focus on the Noumo of Rethymno. He traveled to Crete in the summer of 2024 to conduct his own first-hand research on the area of Rethymno.
His goal as a researcher is to preserve village-specific idiosyncrasies in dance and music, and to study how the same dances from the same areas have evolved over time. Harry emphasizes the different styles of dance and music, primarily within Crete, throughout specific timeframes and how they’ve changed.
To contact Harry for research support 813-455-3665
Music Credit: Alexandros Papadakis