A TRIBUTE TO MIKIS THEODORAKIS

I was deeply saddened by the passing of the colossus of Greek music, Mikis Theodorakis. In the
same year that Greece celebrates the 200th anniversary of the start of the Greek Revolution of 1821,
it has lost its most revolutionary spirit of the modern era – a man who embodied the passion of
resistance against oppression, fascism and authoritarianism.

My real introduction to Mikis Theodorakis was in December 1973 when I visited Greece for the first
time. The hush in the trolley bus as we passed the Athens Polytechnio was palpable. The brutal
crushing of the student revolt by the Greek Colonels barely weeks earlier was a stark reminder of the
fascist regime (now controlled by the Generals) that had strangled the lifeblood of Greek democracy.
I met up with a cousin and his student friends in an apartment in Athens and we listened to a copy of
the students’ defiant radio broadcasts before the tanks drove through the gates of the technical
collage and extinguished, albeit briefly, the democratic flame in the Greek capital. But I also listened
to some tracks by a Greek composer, songs of resistance which my friends told me were banned by
the dictatorship because they were alleged to revive political passions and cause discord and moral
depravity.

And here I was being a ‘subversive’ and listening to the music of Mikis Theodorakis.

As George Seferis, the Noble prize-winning poet had written in 1969:

“I see before me the abyss towards which we are being led by the oppression which has spread over
the land.”
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The Athens Polytechnio in November 1973 before the tanks rolled in

Mikis Theodorakis’ triumphant return to Greece in July 1974

Athens concert 1974

That was the beginning of my life-long passion for the works of Mikis Theodorakis.

Fast forward to July 1974. I will never forget the moment I learnt that the junta had fallen (more
precisely, dissolved away) and that a civilian government was to be formed under the PM-elect
Konstantinos Karamanlis.

Theodorakis, who had been living in exile in Paris since 1970, returned triumphantly to Greece and
was mobbed at Athens airport by adoring fans. He went on to stage mass concerts in September
and October 1974 in the Karaiskaki Stadium in Athens where singers of the calibre of Farandouri,
Bithikotsis, Dalaras, Kalogiannis, Halkias and many others sang the immortal songs of resistance to
mark the triumphant restoration of democracy to its birthplace. Greece had finally emerged from
the stone years of the junta.

Those songs still resonate today.

Theodorakis, an unabashed Marxist who had endured imprisonment and brutal torture during the
war against the Nazis and again in the bloody civil war that wreaked havoc throughout Greece, was
imprisoned by the Greek junta in 1967 following the coup, initially in the notorious Bouboulina
prison complex in Athens and then exiled to Zatouna, a remote village in Arcadia, and finally sent to
the concentration (detention) camp of Oropos.

But the Greek Colonels would not break his spirit, even in exile. As one commentator wrote at the
time, the crudest of peasants had taken over the palace, run the simplest of slogans up the flagpole
and prepared military solutions for all visible problems. However, they could not reckon with Mikis
Theodorakis.

The Greek composer taunted the junta. In his Journals of Resistance Theodorakis wrote:

“You have tanks. I have songs … I am stronger than you, because your tanks will rust while my songs
will grow stronger with time”.

Theodorakis worked on numerous compositions whilst imprisoned or in exile and was able to have
them smuggled out by journalists and visitors. The story goes that in Zatouna one day the local
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priest asked: “Did you compose a hymn today, my son?” Mikis nodded, “Yes, I did, Father, but it was
a march.”

Those songs, which were also banned, meant that Theodorakis music became the soundtrack of the
Greek resistance movement. Theodorakis embraced Greek contemporary poetry and fused them
with elements from the ballads which the klephts sang in the War of Independence, folk and
byzantine music and Homeric songs. He popularised the laiko tragoudi (urban popular song).

The music of Theodorakis defined Greece. In 1958 he had composed in Paris the music to Yannis
Ritsos’ tragic poem, Epitaphios, about the death of a tobacco worker in a strike in 1936, captured in
a photograph of the grieving mother over her dead son’s body:

“A day in May you left me/A day in May I lost you.”

The song became a rallying song of resistance to the Colonels.

Ritsos, the poet of the Greek Left and of the resistance, also wrote a great long poem Romiossyni
which expressed the suffering and the experience of the German occupation, the Civil War, and the
betrayal of the Resistance. “When the Bells Will Ring” still sends chills up my spine:

And based on the poetry of Odysseus Elytis, Theodorakis composed Axion Esti founded on Orthodox
liturgy combined with classical and popular music in both a celebration and lament for Hellenism.
The composer, in his own words, wanted to create a modern Greek musical sound which would
elevate the musical taste of the people. He wanted his music to concern the Greeks and to tie them
tightly to the “emotional-spiritual and intellectual” territories familiar to all. Theodorakis blended
high poetry with folk song melodies and created accessible and often politicised messages
addressing the problems of exile, imprisonment and deprivation of liberty. In the words of his
biographer, Gail Holst, Theodorakis’ music and lyrics were “politico-cultural idealism”.

When he turned to the poetry of George Seferis, Theodorakis composed Στο περιγιάλι το κρυφό
(“By the seashore) based on the poem Αρνηση (“Denial”) which came to be the anthem of resistance
to the regime and was sung by the enormous crowds lining the streets at Seferis' funeral in Athens in
1971: “By the secret seashore so sweet and small and so white as the wings of a dove in flight,
we thirsted at midday, but the water was undrinkable.”

As Theodorakis declared in an interview with Newsweek in 1972 he drew his creative power from his
nostalgia, his sense of tragedy and his optimism. But at the same time he declared:

“My songs are anti-death. But without death you can’t have resurrection.”

Mikis Theodorakis has finally spread his wings and flown into eternity. As he confided years ago:

“I have no interest in taking part in a purely musical event unconnected with the Greek struggle for
freedom … I cannot live without Greece”.

But Mikis Theodorakis will live forever.

George Vardas