On the 100th anniversary (July 29) of his birth Miki TheodorakisO Ministry of Culture proclaims this 2025as “Miki Theodorakis Dedicatory Year”.
The Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni made the following statement:
“Today, July 29, the birthday of Mikis Theodorakis, the Ministry of Culture declares 2025 as the “Dedication Year of Mikis Theodorakis”, as it marks 100 years since his birth. Our initiative is the smallest tribute to his legacy, but also an opportunity to reevaluate his life, to revive, through a multifaceted program of actions, his work. Miki’s songs and music have accompanied us since our youth, naturally giving rise to emotion and elevation, recalling our History, the one that was enclosed in his melodies, but also the one that he co-shaped. Approaching his work, the debt of the State demands that we highlight his many faces: the composer, the fighter, the politician, the thinker, the citizen. His life and work constitute an indelible cultural heritage of Hellenism, highlighting his universality. Mikis Theodorakis’ music uniquely expresses the deep desires of the people, from the concerns of everyday life to the definitive consolidation of an open, inclusive and democratic society.
I will only say that the composer is blessed… Like the sea, which no matter how much the winds and waves beat it, it foams in a thousand ways, but all this happens on its surface, because a little below it remains calm, beautiful, blessed. This is my life, which has lived it all. In the superlative. Joy and pain. The red and the black. Love and hate. Triumph and disappointment. Light and darkness. This was my life. (…) I lived calm, confident and blessed.’ Let us keep his words.”
Mikis Theodorakis, a unique figure in our modern history, embodied a completely personal model of reunion, a meteoric creation with his indomitable and continuous political action. His talent is revealed in every era, along with his competitive action. He lived through the division of the Civil War in exile in Ikaria, then, in Makronissos, he was a leader of the Left, leading, after the imposition of the April dictatorship, the formation of the Patriotic Anti-Dictatorship Front. He was arrested, imprisoned and deported. After being released from prison in 1970, he gave concerts all over the world, offering valuable services to the cause of raising awareness of world public opinion against the Colonels. Post-politically, he was again elected deputy for the KKE, later for New Democracy, serving as a minister in the government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis, before retiring from active politics, maintaining his noisy and influential public intervention in the imperative of settlement and reconciliation.
“He lived a life of passion and intensity. He consistently and passionately served the values of freedom and justice, but above all the unity of the Greeks,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in his farewell address, recalling that Mikis Theodorakis “transformed music from an individual experience into a mandate for collective action.”
He was introduced to music in the provincial towns where his father, a civil servant, was transferred, thanks to the Orthodox liturgical service he heard from his grandmother, but also from the clergy of the churches where he even sang. His training at the Athens Conservatory was followed by studies in Paris. His creative career is characterised by excessive impulsiveness in melody, by the strengthening of overwhelming emotion against rationality and by the synthesis of melodic richness with competitive content. The power of Miki’s melodies, sometimes epic in proportion, like perhaps no other contemporary composer of ours, conceals his father’s heritage of the Byzantine organ, folk song, rebetiko and Western influences, with the opening of music to the masses and high-quality poetry set to music.
An inexhaustible personality, a unique and fascinating storyteller, but also an expert craftsman of speech, From For Greek Music and Music for the Masses to The Debt, diaries 1967-70, 1970-74, The Fighting Culture and, of course, his prolific autobiography The Streets of Archangelos. He left us an enormous volume of writings, which capture with energy but also with anxiety his artistic, political and social pursuits, almost always intertwined. A corpus of texts that should be studied again in relation to their creation and action.
Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Diligence:George Koulouvaris
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