The defi (also known as the daire) is a jingled Greek frame drum, 25 to 40 cm across, traditionally built from wood with an animal-skin head and thin metal jingles set into the frame. The most distinctive regional version is the Epirotiko defi from Epirus in northwestern Greece — a medium-diameter drum used to accompany dances like the pogonisios, the tsamikos, and the kalamatianos, often in irregular meters (7/8, 3/4) that mark the region’s music as rhythmically distinct from the rest of Greece.

The defi’s history runs back to the ancient tympanon, the frame drum of Dionysian and Cybeline ritual in classical Greece, played mainly by women and so closely tied to festive gathering that the playwright Aristophanes opens his comedy Lysistrata with a joke about women’s tympana blocking the streets. Modern teaching of the instrument owes a great deal to composer and percussionist Gerasimos Siasos, whose published method books and compositions — including the well-known solo piece “Four Steps From Epirus” — have become a standard reference for the defi’s technique.