When he returned from the camp on the island of Makronisos in 1949, Mikis Theodorakis saw that among his relatives - on the other side of the civil war front in Greece - there were disabled people. That war ended at the end of 1949 and claimed around 150.000 victims.
In 1962, Theodorakis composed a series of ballads about a dead brother as a dramatic metaphor for the unhealed division of war, which in the poem Unrequited love (Prodomeni Agapi) from Ballads of a Dead Brother conjured with her deep voice and ancient face actress Irena Pappas:
"If you ever see Pavlos, let me know,
and if you see Andreas, tell me.
I picked them up with the same difficulty
and I wore them with the same sobs..."
Pavlos Papamerkouriou was a student whom Mikis knew well and who joined the resistance and anti-government forces at the age of 25; he was executed in 1949 after being inhumanely tortured by the regime. Theodorakis created in his imagination the character of his brother Andreas, a right-wing member of the National Army who died in battle. Between them stands their distraught mother.
A Greek folk song from the late Middle Ages (dimotiko) is called Dead Brother's Song. As Dr. Katica Kulavkova from the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts writes, similar ballads containing the most significant mythical, folklore, religious, ethical and historical aspects of the Balkan cultural paradigm have been preserved, under different names, in the folklore and oral literary tradition of several Balkan peoples.
Theodorakis was astonished that, at the first performance in 1962, Ballad of a Dead Brother contemptuously and blinded by hatred criticized by both political parties. That ballad was partly censored by the right-wing government, which claimed that the civil war was an unspeakable crime committed by communists, and that the very idea of a dead brother equates the perpetrators and victims.
And the left ignored that work of Theodorakis because it opposed the very thought of holding hands with the fascists who pointed their weapons at their fellow Greeks.
In a letter to the public, Theodorakis said: "I belong to the progressive faction. I was lifting split weights. But I am ready to extend my hand and forget torture and exile forever if we agree on a broad program that will ensure the revival of the fatherland. To achieve this national awakening, I use bitter truths in my work. I did not lie or try to deceive anyone. Do not be too afraid of the truths of a dead brother - for you have been betrayed…”
GREEK McCARTYISM
Hara Tliveri writes that Theodorakis experienced artistic maturity in a period in which Greece was marked by both territorial consolidation and extreme political polarization, as well as the repercussions of the Cold War with all the peculiarities of pro- and anti-communist propaganda.
The Truman and Kennedy administrations viewed Greece as an experimental laboratory for countering Communist and Moscow influence in the region. In Greece, as in Turkey, they supported the hard right.
Historian Minas Samatas finds that Greek McCarthyism was more repressive and violent than the American original. Right-wing governments in Athens recycled anti-communist laws; The Metaxas regime (1933–1941) produced around 40.000 files. The old divisions between the Venizelians and the Metaxians, as well as resentments from the civil war, were maintained.
In the text "The Price of Freedom: The Role of Greece in the Cold War", Greek historian Christos Kollis states that in 1962 the Greek government had 60.000 paid informers out of a population of 8,3 million. According to this, Greece at the time was right behind East Germany (with 100.000 informants per 17 million inhabitants) and Romania (with 400.000 informants per 23 million inhabitants).
Since 1945, the Greek authorities have continued to "cultivate a culture of fear" and kept extensive files on the political affiliations and activities of citizens suspected of being communists, which often resulted in nighttime arrests and torture.
Z - LAMBRAKIS IS ALIVE
When on May 22, 1963, in Thessaloniki, a right-wing extremist killed the doctor and athlete Grigoris Lambrakis, a deputy of the only remaining left-wing United Democratic Left party, Theodorakis said in an Athens newspaper that Lambrakis lived in thousands of suns that would keep him alive.
At Lambrakis' funeral, half a million people sang "Lambrakis zi", "Z" = alive.
This is what Kosta Gavras' film is about Z, for which Mikis Theodorakis wrote the music.
Taking the lead of Lambrakis' democratic youth, Theodorakis published the Lambrakis manifesto: "Who are we? What do we want? Why are they attacking us?"
After the murder of Lambrakis, the aged leader, at that time of the opposition Union of the Center, George Papandreou advocated a confrontation with the secret society IDEA (Ieros Desmos Ellinon Axiomatikon - Holy Union of Greek Officers) organized in 1945 by veteran collaborationist officers, it must be with the great help of the English. From 1947 onwards, the CIA subsidized IDEA with a million dollars a year as one of the main Greek "democratic" (i.e. anti-communist) forces, Christopher Simpson, a professor at the School of Communication at the American University in Washington, wrote in a book in 1988. Kickback: American recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War.
George Papandreou demanded that officers from the IDEA society who sought to establish a dictatorship be dismissed, but King Constantine II refused; Papandreou resigned as prime minister in 1965 and temporarily left the country.
photo: wikipediaUNDER THE COLONEL'S RULE: The 1967 Greek Coup d'état.
After the removal of five successive governments in less than two years, on the eve of elections in which Papandreou's party was expected to win again, a group of ultra-right officers, including members of the secret society IDEA, declared a military dictatorship on April 21, 1967.
Just a few days after the coup, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk declares that the Truman Doctrine does not allow interference in the internal affairs of Greece, which does not quite agree with the chronicle of Cold War coups - in Iran in 1953 against Mossadegh, against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and against Jacob Arbanez in Guatemala.
Colonel George Papadopoulos, by the way, was the liaison officer between the CIA and the Greek intelligence service. King Constantine II of Greece practically approved the coup by appointing a prime minister, allegedly with the intention of carrying out a counter-coup.
In the early morning hours of December 13, 1967, he flew to Kavala, which was under the command of a general loyal to him.
The Hellenic air force and navy declared for him, but the coup officers arrested Constantine's royalist generals. And Constantine landed in Rome in the early morning of December 14 in the royal plane, together with Queen Anna-Maria, their two children Princess Alexia and Crown Prince Pavlo, his mother Frederica, sister Princess Irene and Prime Minister Kollias.
Giorgos Papadopoulos, who compared the establishment of a military regime to putting a broken leg in a cast, declared himself regent and prime minister at the same time...
Among the ten thousand arrested leftists were Papandreou and his son Andreas, whom the Americans considered undesirable. The most prominent intellectuals of Greece were classified as enemies, among whom was Yanis Ritsos, a participant in the resistance movement and a lifelong member of the KKE.
FORBIDDEN MAN
By decree number 138, the junta banned the broadcasting, as well as the performance in any way, of Mikis Theodorakis' compositions in Greece. By special army order no. 13, from June 1, it was also threatened that "citizens who violate this order will be immediately brought before a military court", and that they will be tried according to martial law.
Mikis Theodorakis then founded the opposition Patriotic Organization. He was arrested on August 21, 1967, sentenced to prison and interned in the Oropos camp, and then - when he went on a hunger strike in October 1967 - he was taken unconscious to the Averof prison hospital.
After five months of imprisonment, Theodorakis and his family were confined to a house arrest in Vrahati, then deported to Zatoun, Arcadia, and again to the Oropos concentration camp near Athens.
LINKS WITH YUGOSLAVIA
The release of Theodorakis, a famous artist and icon of the struggle against the dictatorship, was demanded at the time by the International Solidarity Movement, led by figures such as Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, American pianist, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, American writer Arthur Miller and singer Harry Belafonte. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, German composer Boris Blacher and others signed a similar petition.
Theodorakis Song of Liberty (Dream of freedom) Milva - Italian singer, actress and leftist Maria Ilva Bjolcati (1939–2021), who was called The Red, Redhead, and Panther of the Day, the panther from Đor - sang in her subtle voice:
"When did you decide to leave?"
all your past behind you,
Flags were paraded down the street.
and you saw freedom,
You poured your anger out on the street,
but freedom was not yours…”
The Union of Composers of Yugoslavia, which was then chaired by the composer Voki Kostić, sent a protest through the Greek embassy in Belgrade to the coup government due to the arrest of Mikis Theodorakis, but the letter was returned to the sender. A collegial invitation was sent to Teodorakis to move to Yugoslavia. Radio Belgrade prominently broadcasted his music. Poet Ljubomir Simović published The Ballad of Theodorakis, and the composer Voki Kostić wrote the music for that song sung by Anica Zubović:
"I see you between the four guards,
I hear the night watches under the window,
I can hear your heart beating softly
like drums on which snow falls,
the sea all in foam and jasmine,
a cliff covered with sea swallows
Prometheus, Piraeus and Athens
tied with you to that wall..."
Before the start of the trial of Theodorakis and a group of 31 members of the opposition Patriotic Front, the Greek press published the text of the indictment, in which it was stated that twenty days before his arrest, he requested refuge with a "Yugoslavian trade representative". His request was actually rejected by the Yugoslav military envoy, suspecting that provocation was behind it.
Historian Milan Ristović, citing official reports, writes that it was embarrassing for the Yugoslav authorities because of possible objections from Eastern European countries, so they had to explain the case to the Soviet ambassador in Belgrade.
In order to control the damage, an official of the Yugoslav embassy visited Theodorakis in Vrahata, in the Gulf of Corinth, and conveyed to him an invitation to visit the Yugoslav embassy.
He expressed his desire that when he is able, he would come to Yugoslavia, "in addition to the artistic world" to meet "especially the other Tempa". Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo was Tito's commissioner for Bulgaria, Albania and Greece during the war.
At the request of the French politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, on April 13, 1970, Theodorakis was finally allowed to fly secretly to Paris from the private airport of the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis. Director Costa Gavras, actress Melina Mercuri and her husband, film director Gilles Dassin, awaited him at Le Bourget airport.
Myrto Theodorakis, Mikis's wife and their two children were transferred by boat from Greece, via Italy, to France a week later.
THEODORAKIS AND TITO, NERUDA, KASTRO, BRANT, PALM TREE...
A month after leaving Greece, recovering and being treated for tuberculosis in Paris, Theodorakis arrived in Belgrade. Josip Broz Tito, with great publicity, received him on May 19, 1970 as the president of the National Council of the Patriotic Anti-dictatorship Front of Greece. In a conversation with Theodorakis in 1970, Tito also took an interest in ELAS war commanders Nikos Zahariadis and Vafiadis Markos.
One of the results of the visit to Belgrade was that Theodorakis wrote the music for the film in 1973 bra, directed by Stipe Delić, in which one of the main roles was played by the Greek actress Irena Pappas.
Theodorakis was a friend of Yugoslavia until its end and of Serbia until the end of his life. He criticized the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia in 1999 and held a large protest concert in Thessaloniki, and in Belgrade he demonstratively conducted the RTS orchestra and choir, which performed music from his ballet. Zorba the Greek, for which he gave the copyright to the Serbian National Theater in Novi Sad free of charge six years earlier.
After going to asylum in 1970, Theodorakis was not only a fighter against the junta in Greece, but also an icon of the leftist poetics of national liberation, in accordance with the internationalist ethos of the left to which he belonged.
When he met Pablo Neruda and Salvador Allende (later killed in a 1973 coup), he composed music based on Neruda's General singing - Canto General Los Libertadores. He wrote the national anthem of Venezuela. He composed and sang an ode dedicated to Ernesto Che Guevara in 1976 - Saint Che on the threshold of time.
When his friend Olof Palme was killed, at his funeral, according to Palme's wishes during his lifetime, the Finnish singer and activist Arja Helena Sajonmaa sang a fragment of Theodorakis' hymn to freedom. Go to the villages., the one where the waves are high, the sorrow is great, and the sin is bitter...
Theodorakis trilogy Mauthausen (with lyrics by Jakovos Kabanelis in 1966) was rated as the most moving music about the Holocaust. Those ballads were sung very effectively by Maria Faranturi, and later by Joan Baez.
He was an opponent of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, whose national anthem he composed in 1972 at the request of the Palestinians and met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
He also drew attention to the oppressed Kurds.
INSTEAD ENOSISA - THE END OF THE JUNTA
That the junta is not in control of the situation was seen on May 23, 1973, when the Greek warship Velos, under the command of Nikolaos Pappas, refused to return to Greece after participating in NATO exercises and remained anchored in Fiumicino, Italy, and a large number of naval officers who planned to act against the junta.
In September 1972, thousands of young people marched behind the coffin of the deceased Nobel laureate Giorgos Seferis, turning the poet's funeral into a demonstration against the junta, which he had condemned a few months earlier.
In January 1973, a group of students was put on trial for founding a political party and distributing leaflets.
In June 1973, Papadopoulos announced a referendum on the monarchy and the establishment of the so-called The Third Greek Republic, amnestying many political prisoners, including Alexander Panagoulis, the man who tried to kill him.
In Athens, on November 17, 1973, the army under General Dimitros Ioannidis invaded the Athens Polytechnic and massacred students who were on strike and protesting against the junta, NATO and America, whose Sixth Fleet the junta allowed in 1972 to use the port of Piraeus as a domicile.
Ioannidis replaces and arrests Papadopoulos in an internal coup, and promises the democratization of Greece. The following year, on his orders, the National Guard staged a coup d'état in Cyprus on July 15, 1974, deposing the charismatic Cypriot president Archbishop Makarios III and placing in power Nikos Simsons, the nationalist leader of the movement Enosis (Union).
Although General Ioannidis claimed that he received assurances from the Americans that they would influence Turkey to be restrained, a Turkish invasion followed in the north of Cyprus, which instead of joining Cyprus to Greece resulted in the division of the island, on which the dividing line between the Turkish and Greek parts is still controlled today UN forces.
The Greek public was outraged, the junta was overthrown, and Constantine Karamanlis, the leader of the New Democracy, was invited to return to Greece after an eleven-year exile.
AFTER RETURN
The Karaiskaki Stadium in Piraeus was like a volcano during the eruption when Antonis Kalogiannis started to sing This is a helidonium., a poem by the surrealist poet, Nobel laureate Odysseus Eliti, for which the music was composed by Mikis Theodorakis: "There is one swallow, but spring is expensive..."
…And also to the lyrics of the song by Yannis Ritzos Eisai Ellinas – “I am Greece”.
In a referendum in December 1974, both the Greek military junta and the monarchy were ousted for supporting the junta. Ioannidis was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975.
After his return from exile, despite his great popularity, Theodorakis was defeated in the parliamentary elections in August 1974 when he supported the policies of Constantine Karamanlis. He was the target of numerous attacks on multiple fronts. In a statement, the daughter of Yiannis Ritsos expressed her disappointment that her father's anti-fascist songs, which Theodorakis found musical expression, are now being sung by the children and grandchildren of those who tortured Ritsos and Theodorakis in the camps.
In October 1980, Theodorakis went to Paris again, in voluntary exile; in October 1981, with the support of New Democracy, he was still elected as a deputy.
He distanced himself from the Communist Party of Greece in 1986.
From 1990 to 1992, he was a minister in the center-right government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis. He regained his parliamentary mandate, was appointed general music director of the choir and two orchestras of the Hellenic State Radio.
Towards the end of his life, Theodorakis welcomed a court decision declaring the right-wing Golden Dawn a criminal organization and began to re-associate with the Communist Party of Greece. In one letter, during that period, he will say that he was and remained a communist all his life.
CONCERT IN EPHESUS AND CRITICISM IN THE US
His efforts in the 1980s to bring peace between Greece and Turkey were witnessed by the Turkish musician, poet and politician Zulfo Livaneli, who was arrested during the coup d'état in Turkey in 1971. Turkish audiences loved his music and in 1987 Theodorakis was awarded the peace and friendship "Abdi Ipekci".
About 30 people attended Theodorakis' concert in the ancient theater in Ephesus in 1988, which electrified audiences in both countries. Theodorakis then visited the province of Izmir, where his mother Aspasia Poulakis was born and escaped from.
He also intensively campaigned for peace and friendship between Greeks and Turks in ethnically and politically divided Cyprus.
After those pacifist efforts, as Leonidas Karakacanis writes in the study "Turkish-Greek relations", Teodrakis began to get angry with Greece's external enemies and to claim that his country was alone in the world.
At meetings he used to say: "Macedonia is Greece".
He strongly criticized the US aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, calling the Americans "disgusting, merciless cowards and murderers of people around the world".
He blamed American Jews for the economic crisis in Greece, which critics wrote off as his anti-Semitism, but he repeated that he loves Jews but does not love Zionists, that he is not anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist.
He criticized the left-wing Syriza for agreeing to a German ultimatum during the 2015 Greek debt crisis.
GOLDEN AGE OF GREEK CULTURE
Mikis Theodorakis is described by some as perhaps the most politically active musician since the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski became the Speaker of the Polish Parliament in 1940.
But, above all, he was an important actor in the Greek cultural revival that developed, evolved and flourished during the short democratic respite between 1960 and 1967.
Asteris Kutulas, Romanian-Greek publicist and filmmaker, writes in the newspaper "Neos Kosmos" that the "New Golden Age" of Greek culture in the 1963s left its mark in all artistic disciplines. One of the undisputed highlights of that period was the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979 to Yorgos Seferis, for whose song cycles Theodorakis composed the music; and in XNUMX to Odysseus Elitius, whose poem it is based on Axion Esti from 1954, Theodorakis composed the homonymous oratorio.
Asteris Koutoulas also writes that during the second half of the 20th century, the national and cultural identity of Greece was primarily defined by the term "romiosini", which originates from the Byzantine idea that the Greeks are the real Romeos, the heirs of the Roman Empire.
One of Theodorakis' most striking works is entitled Romiosini, after a poem by the poet of the Greek left Yiannis Ricos, who otherwise believed that the Greek partisans of EAM/ELAS in the Second World War were the heroic heirs of the mountainous Romiosini kleft (hajduk), the medieval epic hero Diogenes Akritas and the revolutionaries who fought against the Turks in the 1820s. In the beginning, the Turks called all ethnic groups in the occupied part of Byzantium Romiosins.
NOSTOS
Hara Tlivery, who holds a doctorate in archeology and modern art from King's College London, uses a term from ancient Greek literature to describe Theodorakis's work. Nostos, which describes an epic hero returning home by sea; in ancient Greek society, those who managed to return were considered great and heroes.
Moving by the force of circumstances in his childhood from place to place throughout Greece, Mikis Theodorakis had the opportunity to absorb scattered elements of Hellenism and Byzantine tradition, to lay the foundations for their artistic unification and to leave his artistic stamp on the development of the Greek cultural and national image of himself. in the 20th century, writes Hara Tliveri.
He composed more than 1000 works: operas, ballets, symphonic, chamber, church and sphere music, cantatas, oratorios, liturgies, epitaphs, hymns - and denounced rebel rebetiko and - "artificial sirtaki".
A significant part of the oeuvre of Mikis Theodorakis in the sixties of the 20th century was occupied by ancient themes intended not only for the elite audience but also for those in cinemas. Among the 24 films for which Mikis Theodorakis wrote the music is Michael Kakogiannis' trilogy Greek tragedy (Electricity 1962 Trojans 1971.i Iphigenija 1977).
Between 1958 and 1960, Theodorakis also gained international popularity thanks to his distinctive scores for films by Michael Powell, Gilles Dassin and Anatole Litvak starring Anthony Perkins, Melina Mercuri and Ralph Vallone. And for Serpico Sidney Lamet, in which Al Pacino plays... His music from the film The Honeymoon Song later it became part of the Beatles' repertoire.
Greeks were all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s. In Los Angeles, Cannes, Berlin, Paris and London, Greek films, directors or actors were nominated 16 times for the Oscar.
At the peak of fame were Maria Callas, Melina Mercouri, Irena Pappas, Nana Mouskouri, the composer Evangelos Odysseus Papathanasiou - Vangelis, as well as the actor John Cassavetes or the directors Elia Kazan, Konstantin Kosta Gavras, Theodoros Angelopoulos, Yanis Kounelis and of course Mikis Kakogiannis, the director of the film Zorba the Greek (1964).
photo: ap photoLIFE FULFILLED TO THE LAST BREATH: Mikis Theodorakis
LIKE ZORBA?
Greece's national brand of sorts became Theodorakis' sirtaki at the end of the film Zorba the Greek (1964), which, according to legend, was invented on a film set. American actor Anthony Quinn, who played Alexis Zorba, injured his leg during filming, so he could not play the scene in which Zorba teaches his young friend Basil (Alan Bates) how to dance, to distract him from the despair that everything around it destroys him. When he took off the cast, he realized that he could still achieve a dramatic effect by dragging the injured leg in a light, quickening rhythm, as if he were making a pattern on the sand. That's how he "invented that unusual stretched step", stretching out his arms, like in traditional Greek dances. He claimed that he personally came up with the Greek name for the resulting dance - "sirtaki", a diminutive of the word sirtos, which is the name of several Cretan folk dances...
Some, on the other hand, write that Anthony Quinn confided to the director of the film Mihalis Kakogiannis, otherwise from Krićan, that one of the locals actually showed him those movements.
Kaliopi Stiga, who studied piano at the Athens Conservatory and musicology at the Ionian University in Corfu, writes that in soundtrack-in the movie Zorba the Greek, and in ballet Zorba the Greek and in the suite Zorba, Theodorakis in the new "artificial" sirtaki actually made a mixture of the former "butcher" hasapiko dance from Constantinople and "eagle dance" zembeikiko Turkish irregular militias from Constantinople and Smyrna. "He conceived it 'not as an antithesis, but as a synthesis', because he is", writes Kaliopi, "a Cretan, a Greek and a European, and through that work, Greek popular music makes its official and spectacular entry into Western symphonic music..."
When Mikis Theodorakis passed away on September 2, 2021 at the age of 96, tribute writers unanimously concluded that his passing marked the end of an entire era.
Mikis Theodorakis in the text on his cult album An odyssey, for which he composed the music at the age of eighty-one, writes: "We live on the edge of utopia... The awareness of such a great tragedy is what dries us up even more." Salvation is found at least in an emotional return to the depths of our 'being', in case we find the water we lack and quench our thirst…”
And when he acknowledged the failure of the attempt to build a better world, for which he had spent most of his life, he, perhaps like Konstantin Zorbas at the end of that film, said that for better or for worse, and even in the moment of complete disaster, one should be bold, unrestrained and free to experience the great gift called life - whatever it may be.
How has his music outlived both him and his era?
Theodorakis's method is the opposite of Nietzsche's title The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music because his biography tells about the birth of music in Greek tragedy. And perhaps the answer lies in Nietzsche's sentence at the end of that book about Hellenic culture:
"But tell him, strange stranger, how much this people had to suffer to be this beautiful."
