This article looks at the dual activity of Aris Fakinos, author of novels published in French and producer of radio programmes in the 1970s and 1980s. Fakinos’s texts, fuelled by the experience of exile in 1967 and a reflection on Greek identity, helped to change the representation of Greek music in France in the 1980s. Challenging, like Jacques Lacarrière, the stereotypes of mass tourism, Fakinos used specific narrative techniques in his novels to evoke Greek traditions, particu- larly music and dance, while raising the issue of their survival. He has also contributed to the development of Greek ethno-musicology, producing a whole series of recordings for the Ocora-Radio France collection that have met with great success in France. Alongside Elias Petropoulos and Simha Arom, he has sought to bring other musical practices to French audiences (notably rebetiko), placing Greek music in a wider Mediterranean and Eastern cultural context and accompanying the revival of Greek traditional music at the end of the twentieth century.