This blog is an echo of the beats of my heart. Written for my greek friends and out of gratitude for what I found in Greece. And born from a wish of some important greek stories to be told and not to be forgotten.
Phaedon Georgitsis, one of the most famous actors of Greek cinema, died in Athens on Friday at the age of 80.
He had been suffering from cancer for the last several years.
Georgitsis starred in dozens of films in the 1960s and 1970s, thirteen of which were produced by the leading Greek studio “Finos Film.” He also starred in many plays on the Greek stage.
Born in in 1939 in Nea Smyrna, Athens, Georgitsis was attracted to the cinema from an early age. Despite opposition from his father, a naval officer, who wanted young Phaedon to pursue a military career, Georgitsis enrolled in the famous Karolos Koun Drama School.
For those with only a nodding acquaintance with Greece and Greek music, the name of Mikis Theodorakis, who has died aged 96, still conjures up Zorba the Greek and that moment on a Cretan beach when Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates break into an ecstatic dance. It was often hard for the classically trained composer to live down his image as a writer of memorable film scores. Despite the performance of his operas, symphonies and songs in some of the major concert halls of Europe, Theodorakis remained, for many, the man who wrote the catchy bouzouki music of Zorba and the Costa-Gavras film Z.
For those who remember the 1967-74 military dictatorship in Greece, he was also a symbol of resistance to that regime. But Theodorakis was much more than a political symbol and a writer of film scores. He was a composer of great melodic gifts: he composed more songs than Schubert and the best of them – his settings of Lorca, Seferis, Brendan Behan, Kambanellis, Elytis and Ritsos – do not suffer by the comparison. It may be that his other works will one day occupy a place in the repertoire of 20th-century classical composition, but his songs will undoubtedly remain the most enduring legacy of the man known to his friends simply as o psilos – the tall one.
The sudden death of Theo Angelopoulos, the greatest Greek film-maker, while shooting his latest film on the current troubles, has acquired great symbolic significance. In recent months, reporting on Greece has concentrated on the deficit, debt and the untrustworthiness of its people. The films of Angelopoulos remind us of another Greece and a different humanity. In his dreamlike historical films, he chronicled the melancholic nature of a nation torn between an invented tradition of classical glories and a traumatic history of repressive state policies, dictatorship, corrupt and dynastic politics. He narrated the lowly lives of the defeated in the vicious civil war 1946-9, the degradations and melancholy of exile, the Odysseus-like return of people who go back to a place they nurtured in their memories but turns out alien and unwelcoming.
In his mesmeric long sequences, a simple gesture, a silence or smile acquire philosophical depth and historic significance. This is epic cinema made out of the fragments of everyday life.
Coming from the left, as did most of the Greek cultural renaissance of the second half of the 20th century, but ascribing to no orthodoxy, Angelopoulos described the degradations of ordinary people both in the hands of rightwing governments and in the Stalinist regimes where the defeated partisans retreated but found no haven.
For Angelopoulos, humanity survives in the memories and dreams of exiled, travelling people who never fully make it back to Ithaca. What makes us human, Angelopoulos tells us, is found in traumatic memories, in the desire to preserve an imaginary beauty, and in eternal returns perennially frustrated. Angelopoulos was both the Homer of modern Greece, and the country’s magical realist storyteller.
Stathis Psaltis, one of the most popular comedians of the past few decades, passed away at on Friday April 21, after losing his battle to lung cancer. He was 66 years old.
In the past few days, Psaltis was hospitalized at Agios Savvas Hospital for cancer patients. The disease had spread to other vital organs as well.
The actor, who was born February 27, 1951 in Velo, Korinthia, became famous for his 1980s movies that coincided with the time of the VHS video craze of the decade. He starred in many films and television series, while also following a lucrative career in comedy theater.
At the age of 11, his family moved to Athens, in the Aigaleo neighborhood and Psaltis attended the acting school of Kostis Michailidis. He also received a Law degree from the University of Athens.
His 1980s movies became insanely popular, still enjoying cult status in the 2010s. He had great success in movies such as “Kamikazi agapi mou,” “Troxonomos Varvara,” “Ta kamakia,” “Vasika Kalispera sas,” “Kai o protos matakias,” “Trellos eimai oti thelo kano,” “Ela na agapithoume darling,” “Mantepse ti kano ta vradia” and many more.
My friend Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, who has died aged 80, was a poet whose work was widely admired not only in her homeland of Greece but across Europe and the US. She was also a translator of many works from English into Greek, including the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath, and was particularly proud of her translation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
Katerina was born in Athens, the daughter of Yannis Anghelakis, a lawyer, and his wife, Eleni (nee Stamati). She had her first poem published in the New Era magazine in Greece in 1956, when she was 17, having been urged to submit it by the writer Nikos Kazantzakis, her godfather and a friend of the family. After schooling in Athens she studied languages at universities in Nice and Geneva.
In the early 1960s she met an Englishman, Rodney Rooke, a Liverpudlian classics scholar who was studying in Athens. Rodney was chronically shy while Katerina was the opposite, and they were married in 1963: she described him as her “rock”.
Her first collection of poems, Wolves and Clouds, appeared in the year of their marriage. After a gap of seven years her second volume, Poems 63-69, was published in 1971 and thereafter her new collections came out at more regular intervals until she had more than 20 volumes published by her death, with translations in more than 10 languages.
Her sensual writing was at times merciless in its observation of the human condition, while the body – its shortcomings, its erotic struggles and desires – was central to her work, for which she won the Grand State prize for literature in Greece in 2014.
Katerina was not only a poet but also a highly accomplished linguist. Aside from her main work on English language authors, which also included Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, she translated Russian writers into Greek – notably Vasily Grossman, Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin.
Paganistic, loving life, humorous and boasting a unique filmic style, Dimos Avdeliodis’ films have left their imprint on Greek Cinema. Actor, playwright, film and theatre director Avdeliodis was born in 1952, in Chios, Greece. He has directed four highly acclaimed feature films, among which “The four seasons of the Law” (1999) has been repeatedly voted by Greek film critics as one of the best films of Greek cinema. Avdeliodis has taught film studiesat Panteion University (1993-1998) and has also served as Head of Municipal and Regional Theatre of the North Aegean (1997 - 2000, 2003 - 2010). Through some twenty plays that he has directed he is continuously experimenting with new creative theatrical routes.
Avdeliodis told Greek News Agenda* that what drove him towards these art forms was the need for self exploration. He talks about his relationship with the island of Chios, his birthplace, explaining that giving Chios a leading role in his films was a repayment for the gift of beauty that the Island has given him. He stresses that art plays a unifying role and underlines the humanistic aspects of Greekness in his work.
Greece’s oldest actress died on Saturday, October 19.
Her name was Titika Nikiforaki and she was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1914.
She first appeared as an actress at the Greek National Theater in 1935, at the age of 21.
She played in ”Peer Gynt” of Henrik Ibsen.
Commenting on Nikiforaki’s death, Greece’s Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni said that she was a great lady of Greek theater, a great actress and a translator.
“…Glezos’s life was itself complete. Many of his hopes were failed — and there were many dark times as well as moments of proud resistance. But his struggle was continuous, and uncompromising. As his old comrade Missios put it, a life characterized by freedom, by conviction, in harmony with oneself, does not end just with the death of a man, but with the transmission of this same spirit to thousands of others.
In this sense, we should feel lucky that we are standing on the shoulders of giants like Manolis Glezos. When we raise a glass to him, when we say his name, when we try to follow in his footsteps, the important thing is to fight with determination for what we believe is right. For, as the great man himself put it, no struggle is ever futile.”
The famous actor George Papazisis has died at the age of 80, after losing his battle with cancer.
Papazisis was born in Athens in 1938. He studied at the drama school of the Greek conservatory and soon became established in Athens’ music theaters.
He took part in creating the ‘golden age’ of the Greek cinema of 60’s and 70’s and was distinguished for his acting as well as his special accent — as he mainly played the role of ”Manolios”, the goodhearted Cretan.
His first appearance in cinema was in the 1962 film Terma ta difraga.
Popular Greek actor Christos Simardanis has died at the age of 61.
Simardanis starred in numerous Greek TV series and movies over the last decades.
His voice was instantly recognizable as he did many adverts for Greek TV and was also an announcer for MEGA TV.
Since 1985 he starred in popular TV series such as “The Life of Attik”, “Petrina Chronia”, “The Nanny” and a number of Greek films such as “Safe Sex” and “Elias of the 16th”.
Simardanis was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and lived there until he was six years old.
For nearly a decade, on and off, Andreas Georgiou has been Greece’s Public Enemy No. 1.
The government has brought a relentless series of criminal prosecutions against him. His countrymen have sought their own vengeance by hacking his emails, dragging him into court, even threatening his life. His lawyers in Greece are now preparing for his latest trial, which begins this month; Georgiou himself will watch from the United States, where he lives in a sort of self-imposed exile.
Georgiou is not a mobster. He’s not a hit man or a spy. He’s a statistician. And the sin at the heart of his supposed crimes was publishing correct budget numbers.
For decades, the term “Greek statistics” had been a punchline. Official data were massaged so that the government could claim it was meeting European Union fiscal commitments and retain access to international capital markets. The Greek statistical service, which was controlled by whatever party held power, had taken to reverse-engineering its official budget data. That is, it would choose a final number at the outset and then backfill the assumptions necessary to produce that result. (This technique is not unique to the Greek government, of course.)
