This year marks the centenary of composer and politician Mikis Theodorakis, who died in 2021 having become, almost accidentally, a national icon.
Accidentally? Arrested as a 17-year-old in 1942 by the invading Italian army, he joined the resistance, aligning himself with the communist side. Tortured during the subsequent civil war, he was again imprisoned by the military junta in 1967, which banned all his music.
If Theodorakis’s struggle against injustice in any of these oppressions had led to an unmarked grave, we might not have his Epitaphios, set to words by Yannis Ritsos, or his setting of Ritsos’s Eighteen Little Songs for the Bitter Homeland.
These are evocations of both sorrow (at the deep left-right divisions in Greek society), and a spirit of debate and radical discourse. Song, which was at the heart of all Theodorakis’s music, was essential to his understanding of how we imagine and how we communicate.
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In 1963, with the assassination of socialist politician Grigoris Lambrakis, Theodorakis came openly into political life as the leader of a youth movement. When in 1969 Costa-Gavras made the film Z (in Greek, this means “he lives”) it starred Yves Montand as Lambrakis and the composer was Theodorakis. The composer used music he had previously written for a Greek production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage.
The song The Laughing Boy became a mantra of resistance in Greek politics, and a trademark of Theodorakis’s public face.
The “old” Greece whose values Theodorakis enshrined – regard for the landscape, adherence to family and personal values – has become a “new Greece” which, with EU membership, means, as a former prime minister declared, “Greece belongs to the West”.
It is epitomised today by prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who represents modernisation and foreign investment, often at the expense of “ellenikotita” (traditional Greekness).
So much of Greece – its sense of honour, of the need for discussion, of the need to organise one’s life on one’s own terms (the root meaning of “economics”) – is now silent. Theodorakis gave voice to that silence.
Unfortunately, the acclaim which greeted Theodorakis’s more political musical expressions has obscured his lasting legacy. As the leading authority on his life and music, Gail Holst-Warhaft said in an obituary, published in The Irish Times in September 2021, “The name still conjures up Zorba the Greek. It was often hard for the classically trained composer to live down his image as a writer of memorable film scores” (other films included Ill Met by Moonlight and Serpico). This overshadows his work in symphonies (seven in all) and opera – of which the late works Medea and Antigone are indicative of his continued questioning of arbitrary authority.
A turning point in Theodorakis’s musical and social thinking came when he celebrated Anatolia (the western part of Turkey), where, in Krini (now known as Cesme) his mother’s family had lived. In 1995 he wrote Gallant Little Bird, a song-cycle whose rhythm, as he explained, “takes us straight to the shores of Asia Minor, where Greek culture once shone, my mother’s roots”. It helped to make Greeks more receptive to today’s crisis of refugees from those same shores.
More recently, the elderly, and very frail, Theodorakis came to prominence in 2018, at the height of the dispute over the naming of North Macedonia. “Macedonia will always be Greek,” he proclaimed to a crowd in Athens. It was a passionate appeal to a history which has been overtaken by the modern. Yet there remains a conceptual problem because there is a northern Greek province of Macedonia, with Thessaloniki as its capital. We could look at the division of Ulster as an Irish counterpart.
A recent book, Lifelines, by Julian Hoffman, a Canadian settled in Prespes for the past quarter-century, not only emphasises this innate organic kinship of people to landscape, but points to the realities of living in what, for centuries, has been “border country” – the border being not a political line on a map but a line in the mind – a concept which Theodorakis would have recognised.
The 2018 signing of the so-called Prespes agreement, by which Greece recognised North Macedonia, was a pragmatic and no doubt very necessary aspect of modern international politics. But the lake of Prespes is in fact bordered by Albania, North Macedonia and Greek Macedonia, and the complexity of the landscape, its ethnic, semiotic and cultural dimensions, illustrates the multiform nature of the Balkans to which Greece is, or was, a natural part.
To deny that, as modernisation and westernisation insist, is to deny the intimate interrelationship of the entire Balkan region.
