With the Fourth Volume of our series, we complete the documentation of Urban songs from the Greek East. All the classifications we provided, e.g., Popular, Traditional, Smyrnaiika, Politika, etc., were somewhat arbitrary, but we believe they helped in a categorization that has never been done before.

Although the four hundred songs were initially classified, last-minute changes occurred with the aim of achieving a more complete representation of a category of songs. Despite our efforts, there may have been errors due to our incomplete information regarding the origin of certain songs. For these reasons, and because we publish supplementary information about the songs from previous volumes in each volume, we recommend our friends to acquire the entire series to gain a complete picture of the publication.

We hope to continue with four more volumes in the first phase, which will contain songs from Thrace, Pontus, and Cappadocia, the islands of the Northern Aegean, and the Dodecanese. In the Fourth Volume, we included songs from Istanbul, the Sea of Marmara, and Bithynia.

There is no secure criterion for determining whether an urban song originated from Istanbul or Smyrna. Thus, various parameters were studied, such as its melodic similarity with the Mismajiès, the musical mode they follow - since some sounds (like the heavy) are more commonly found in the City than in Smyrna - the content of the lyrics, which sometimes refers to specific place names (Galata, Staurodromi, Tawtala, etc.), the earliest musical recordings, and the origin of their singers.

Additionally, their notation in various musical publications of the time (Forminx, Ecclesiastical Truth, etc.), their spread in areas around the City compared to villages outside Smyrna, and finally, the personal testimonies of artists and scholars from that time as well as contemporaries such as Simon Karas, Chronis Aidonidis, etc. were also examined.