Sapphic Plea: "Come back to me, Gogyla"

"Come back to me, Gogyla, I beg you!
Show yourself to me again...wearing the milky-white robe.
Oh, what beauty!
If you but knew what passions you awaken, thus adorned...
and how joyful I am that it is not I, but the Goddess from Cyprus herself that is reproaching you;
whom I have for many years begged and beseeched.
Gogyla!
It is as if I long to die on the river banks where the lotus flower blooms,
gazing through the mist at Acheron."

Nana Venetsanou sings a classic poem by Sappho in the ancient Aeolic Greek dialect, put to music by Manos Hadjidakis. The accompanying paintings are mainly by the Pre-Raphaelites, greatly influenced by classical antiquity.

January Came Like an Angel on the Graves

Painting by Yiannis Tsarouhis (1910-1989)

N.Hatzykiriakos Gikas

The Eternal Adolescence of Voice

"Elsa, I'm scared of you. Elsa, I love you.
One moment with you is slaughter. And when you dance alone, walls break and the ceiling falls down.
I thought I was a free bird...but the only one who's free is YOU".


Gone-but-not-forgotten Greek singer Flery Dadonaki sings a song by Dionysis Savopoulos from the 1960s, "Elsa, I'm scared of you" in her own unimitable way. (Recording is from 2000, album "Flery Dadonaki, The Eternal Adolescence of Voice").

Nikiforos Lytras

Painting by Nikiforos Lytras, "The Carols" (Kalanda in Greek) An era long gone.

Jacqueline de Romilly: 1913-2010

The woman who taught me my own heritage, Thucydides, was a Jewish French who applied for Greek citizenship in 1995. So she ultimately became Greek. Or perhaps she always had been.
To quote Isokrates:

“So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.”

~Isocrates, Panergyricus, 50, circa 380 BC (J. A. Freese Translation)

Jacqueline de Romilly, who espoused the Classical spirit like few people have, is no more. And the world is assuredly poorer for it.

Elytis on "Greekness"

Europe was born here.