• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

“Our Mikis has gone”: ‘Zorba the Greek’ composer Theodorakis dies at 96

September 2, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

September 2, 2021

By Michele Kambas and George Georgiopoulos

ATHENS (Reuters) – Composer Mikis Theodorakis, whose life and music mirrored Greece’s soul and crossed international boundaries in his captivating score for the film ““Zorba the Greek”, died on Thursday, plunging the country into three days of mourning.

A towering man with a brooding presence and a shock of wavy hair, Theodorakis’s work evoked a progressive, democratic vision of the world, though his political struggles reflected a darker side of Greece rarely seen by visitors.

As news of his death at home in Athens at the age of 96 swept across the country of 11 million, authorities declared three days of mourning and tributes poured in from across the political spectrum.

“Today we lost a part of Greece’s soul. Mikis Theodorakis, Mikis the teacher, the intellectual, the radical, our Mikis has gone,” said Culture Minister Lina Mendoni.

Theodorakis introduced a carefree image of Greece to the world in the 1960s with “Zorba”, the earthy soundtrack to a movie starring Anthony Quinn as the lovable, eponymous rogue who dances barefoot on a Cretan beach.

But, at what was a tumultuous time in Greek history, he also came to epitomise the bitter struggles of class resistance with the thumping intensity of his “Romiosini” (Greekness) cycle of songs that became anthems for the political left.

Praising a man he dubbed the “Universal Greek”, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said: “We had all forgotten that he was a mere mortal. But his legacy of music, his political activism and his service to the nation in times of crisis lives on.”

Greece’s Communist party KKE called Theodorakis’s body of work “a constant confrontation with injustice and defeatism, of new struggles and resistance”.

It also released a letter Theodorakis penned to the party last year in which he stated: “I want to leave this world as a Communist.”

JAILED AND TORTURED

Born on the Greek island of Chios on July 29, 1925, Theodorakis was repeatedly jailed for his beliefs.

He was arrested in 1947, accused of being a sympathiser with guerrilla forces in the civil war that broke out soon after World War Two between right-wing royalists and left-wing popular forces.

Sent to a notorious camp on the island of Makronisos in 1948, he was beaten and tortured, had his legs broken and on one occasion was buried alive and left for dead. He was released in August 1949.

Theodorakis entered politics in 1963 after his friend Grigoris Lambrakis, a left-wing lawmaker, was murdered during a peace demonstration. The Costa Gavras film “”Z”, scored by Theodorakis, was based on the killing.

The composer was elected to Lambrakis’s seat in February 1964. When a military junta seized power in April 1967, he went underground, working against the coup until his arrest and imprisonment later that year.

He remained in jail – where he was again tortured – until international pressure helped secure his release in April 1970.

He served as a deputy for the newly legalised Communist Party from 1981 until 1986, but began to have doubts about the left and abandoned politics.

He returned to parliament in 1989, but this time for the conservatives, run by Constantine Mitsotakis, father of the current Prime Minister.

“”I’m not a communist or social democrat or anything else. I’m a free man,” he told Reuters in an interview during the 1990s.

(Reporting by George Georgiopoulos and Michele Kambas; additional reporting by Renee Maltezou; editing by Robin Pomeroy and John Stonestreet)

Source Link “Our Mikis has gone”: ‘Zorba the Greek’ composer Theodorakis dies at 96

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Number of people with dementia set to jump 40% to 78 million by 2030 -WHO
  2. Taliban prepare to reveal new Afghan government amid economic turmoil
  3. Oil rises on declining inventories and weaker dollar
  4. UK card spending slips to 93% of pre-COVID level – ONS

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Biosignatures, New Brain Implant Can Decode Your Internal Monologue, And Much More This Week
  • Crocodiles Weren’t All Blood-Thirsty Killers, Some Evolved To Be Plant-Eating Vegetarians
  • Stratospheric Warming Event May Be Unfolding In The Southern Polar Vortex, Shaking Up Global Weather Systems
  • 15 Years Ago, Bees In Brooklyn Appeared Red After Snacking Where They Shouldn’t
  • Carnian Pluvial Event: It Rained For 2 Million Years — And It Changed Planet Earth Forever
  • There’s Volcanic Unrest At The Campi Flegrei Caldera – Here’s What We Know
  • The “Rumpelstiltskin Effect”: When Just Getting A Diagnosis Is Enough To Start The Healing
  • In 1962, A Boy Found A Radioactive Capsule And Brought It Inside His House — With Tragic Results
  • This Cute Creature Has One Of The Largest Genomes Of Any Mammal, With 114 Chromosomes
  • Little Air And Dramatic Evolutionary Changes Await Future Humans On Mars
  • “Black Hole Stars” Might Solve Unexplained JWST Discovery
  • Pretty In Purple: Why Do Some Otters Have Purple Teeth And Bones? It’s All Down To Their Spiky Diets
  • The World’s Largest Carnivoran Is A 3,600-Kilogram Giant That Weighs More Than Your Car
  • Devastating “Rogue Waves” Finally Have An Explanation
  • Meet The “Masked Seducer”, A Unique Bat With A Never-Before-Seen Courtship Display
  • Alaska’s Salmon River Is Turning Orange – And It’s A Stark Warning
  • Meet The Heaviest Jelly In The Seas, Weighing Over Twice As Much As A Grand Piano
  • For The First Time, We’ve Found Evidence Climate Change Is Attracting Invasive Species To Canadian Arctic
  • What Are Microfiber Cloths, And How Do They Clean So Well?
  • Stowaway Rat That Hopped On A Flight From Miami Was A “Wake-Up Call” For Global Health
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version