Mourning for Mikis Theodorakis: A great Greek

The music for the film “Alexis Sorbas” made him world famous: the composer Mikis Theodorakis died at the age of 96. But for many Greeks he was much more – he was the “voice of the people”.

It would be difficult to find another contemporary composer to be taken seriously who can show a similarly extensive and broad spectrum as him. Mikis Theodorakis has composed symphonies, orantiores and ballets, written chamber music and song cycles, and composed film and theater music.

The “Blues of the Greeks”

He is also considered to be the one who made the rembetiko, the so-called “blues of the Greeks”, public beyond the country’s borders and as the inventor of a dance that Central Europeans believe has always been the symbol of the Greek way of life, albeit it has never existed before – the sirtaki.

Theodorakis wrote the music for the film adaptation of “Alexis Sorbas”, the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, whose main character on screen Anthony Quinn made unforgettable. The piece gradually became something like the secret national anthem of Greece, especially during the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974 – which brings us to another side of the 1.90 meter tall man who was born in 1925 on the island of Chios off the Turkish coast .

For “Mikis”, conscience was about dogmas

Theodorakis, who is actually only called “Mikis” in his homeland, has been politically active throughout his life and that with skin and hair. He joined the resistance against the German occupation in World War II, which he paid for with imprisonment and torture, and fought on the side of the communists in the civil war that followed, for whom he also sat in the Greek parliament shortly afterwards.

However, he was not a loyal leftist. Because he always placed conscience above dogma, which was later reflected in strange curiosities. He was honored with the Lenin Prize in Moscow. However, his works were not allowed to be played in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s.

Arrested as a resistance fighter

Even when the colonels put on a coup in 1967, Theodorakis joined the resistance. He was arrested, his songs banned and deported to France in 1970. Looking back at this time, he still had a certain bitterness for a long time:

I still annoy the absence of prominent Greeks. They should have stood in the way of the putschists and said: In the name of the people: ‘No’. But that did not happen. Madam, I founded the first resistance organization, was arrested and sent into exile with my family in the village of Zatuna for six months.

Although Theodorakis was regarded everywhere as a kind of model communist – he also gave concerts in the GDR – this image did not prevent him from becoming involved after the dictatorship for the Social Democrats, even for the conservative Nea Dimokratia, under their head of government Konstantinos Mitsotakis even held a ministerial office in the early 1990s.

“I have never sinned politically”

That he was therefore a Wedehals, as some more right-wing foreign critics said, is just as untrue as the claim of orthodox leftists that “Mikis” later regretted his advocacy of conservatives and described it as a mistake. In any case, Theodorakis was never called an opportunist in his native Greece. In addition, even in this question, he was characterized by a pronounced calmness:

I have never sinned politically or taken the wrong path. I’ve always done what I assumed was right for my country. I have always been an example of the good communist wherever I have been politically active.

Leaving the stage was difficult for him

It took a long time until the “voice of the people”, as Theodorakis was also called, said goodbye to the public. He gave his really last concert in Athens’ Herodion Amphitheater in September 2007, although a number of other concerts than the last had been announced beforehand: The master found it visibly difficult to leave the stage. Even if the legendary rowing of his arms at the conductor’s desk is now finally a thing of the past, it cannot be ruled out that concerts will be given in his honor even after his death.

The Greek government has now ordered a three-day state mourning for his death.