The (Greek) World is Based on Chaos and Cheap Smokes

"Every morning will see me give myself 10 secs to realise where I am and why. There goes another 5 secs to accept my total incapability for any work. The realisation of my tragic financial situation is visceral, a fact that helps me gain time and devote it to my fish. There are times when I long to tell them everything about my life...But even if they weren't deaf, their memory retention ability doesn't last longer than 3 secs, as long as it takes them to swim around the bowl. Maybe that's why I can see my whole life reflected in their eyes, a continuous swirl, a happy nil. These are the first moments of the day, when inspiration comes to rescue me.
 The world is based on Chaos and I'm going to cross it without searching for logical order...This is my life, capiche?"

          ~Renos Haralambidis, Cheap Smokes(2000)

It's not hard to see how the pseudophilosophizing nihilistic types who construct poetic mock-noir films such as Cheap Smokes on a zero budget are in reality nothing of the sort. But this diarrhea of the spirit which takes place in front of an existential mirror is reflecting the plight of the modern Greek to a T: The world is based on chaos and I'm going to cross it without searching for logical order. I wonder though whether this isn't some trait encrypted into the Greek DNA. The classical adherence to Law as the ultimate order of any society of free men addresses probably people who were deeply chaotic to begin with. Otherwise why the marked insistence?

Elsewhere the anti-hero inwardly wonders in a voice-over: "I should be subsidised by the Ministry of Culture. Why should they pay someone to make a statue and not me to wander around town like a moving statue? Damn country! It doesn't appreciate artists!"

Another trait of the modern (and perhaps eternal) Greek: "Why them and not ME?" (Sarcastic) self-loathing is taking a very sideways patriotic course: The country would only be rescued if I were given half a chance!
In a place where you have to be "poniros" (i.e. cunning without being evil) to make things go by, there isn't too much shortage of chaos in the first place. This eternal self-loathing is best spent at a "cafeneion", a coffee shop, "a  place with a huge industry of lost time. It is the art of allowing time to pass by without leaving its mark". Which probably explains why the modern Greek revolutionary spirit is mollified into (intricate) words rather than swift action: Contrast with the Heroic Outlook.

The Wick

Crazied, mad, left over, bankrupt,
tied to dreams, selling out rhymes.

I cling on to the wick, amidst the storm;
my right, my own, I am not bequesting it to anyone.



The Wick (Θρυαλλίδα) is sung by Suzanna and Helen Vougioukli. 

Fata Morgana

I'll take communion with sea water,
distilled from your body drop by drop,
in an ancient copper cup from Algiers,
as done by pirates of old before the fight.

Where are you coming from? From Babylon.
Where are you going? To the eye of the cyclone.
Whom do you love? A Gypsy maid.
What is her name? Fata Morgana*.

A leather sail, all smeared with wax,
smelling of cedar-wood, of incense and of varnish,
like the smell of the hold in an aging ship
built in olden times on Euphrates in Phoenicia.

Where are you coming from? From Babylon.
Where are you going? To the eye of the cyclone.
Whom do you love? A Gypsy maid.
What is her name? Fata Morgana.

Fire-hued rust in the mines of Sina,
the capes of Gerakini and Stratoni.
That ship-coating, that old blessed rust ages us,
It feeds us, feeds on us, and then it kill us!

Where are you coming from? From Babylon.
Where are you going? To the eye of the cyclone.
Whom do you love? A Gypsy maid.
What is her name? Fata Morgana.

The poem Fata Morgana by sea-faring Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias is set to music and sung by Mariza Koch.

*A "fata morgana" is a mirage, an optical phenomenon caused by abrupt variances in air temperature. Objects on the horizon, such as islands, cliffs, ships or icebergs, appear elongated and elevated

"All Alone Am I" or the Adventures of a Greek Song

"Word upon word, we lost sense of time.
We recounted our pains and the night lapsed.
Wipe the tears with your handkerchief,
so that I can drink the sun from your lips.

Don't ask the sky,
the cloud and the moon.
Your dark gaze,
something of the night has got.

Whatever found us, whatever made us sorry
struck us secretly like a knife.
Wipe the tears with your handkerchief,
so that I can drink the sun from your lips".

Sung by Jenny Karezi in the Greek film The Island of the Brave


"All Alone Am I" is the title of a song from 1962 by the American singer Brenda Lee. The music was originally composed by the Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis and recorded by Tzeni Karezi for the soundtrack of the film The Island of the Brave. Later, a new version of the song was produced by Owen Bradley and appeared as the title track on one of Lee's albums. But did it all come to that?

In 1960, the Greek film Never on Sunday was released to considerable acclaim, earning multiple Academy Award nominations in the US. The film's star, Melina Mercouri, was nominated for Best Actress, while the title song from the film won the Oscar for Best Original Song for Greek musician Manos Hadjidakis, who had composed the music used in the film. A melody that appeared in both Never on Sunday and The Island of the Brave was sent to Lee's management as a tune to be considered for the singer to record, and after being translated into English by Arthur Altman, it became "All Alone Am I"

"All Alone Am I" became a Top 10 pop hit in both the US and the UK. The song peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in November 1962 and reached #7 on the UK Singles Chart in February 1963. The song also spent five weeks atop the US Billboard easy listening chart, Lee's only song to do so!

Lyrics were originally written by Ioannis Ioannidis.


Sung by Alkinoos Ioannidis and Demetra Galani.

Translation of lyrics by Elena Vosnaki.

Greek Easter: A Celebration of Spring Awakenings

It's no hyperbole to say there is no celebration more joyful, more optimistic, more heart-wrenching, in its way, in all of the Greek calendar (and it is already full of those) than Orthodox Easter. The awakening of spring, which sheds its pagan archetypes shining upon everything is walking hand in hand with the tradition of a pious Christianity that is nevertheless smiling, instead of morose, and lenient, instead of boasting a stern Biblical face.


In the processions of the Holy Week, especially in the sunny, picturesque countryside and on the numerous islands, I can still witness the joie de vivre that can exist only in cultures that have been deprived for long; it is only then that people can appreciate the smalleest pleasures, the generosity of nature itself, the simple human contact that needs no social agenda whatsoever. Man is enjoying life, much like he did in the classical era, because he's not entirely convinced there will be a better one, even though the prospect of one delights his soul through the promise of spring's and Christ's resurgence. In Greece where the National Revolution also symbolically sprang along with the first throes of spring, resurgence takes on a loaded nuance: the soul fills with renewed courage for every hardship ahead.

The spring air is aromatized with fragrant effluvia from trees and plants, an intoxicating bouquet that is hard to forget: bigaradiers with orange blossoms in full bloom, bushes of lilacs (called Πασχαλιά/Pashalia in Greek because they bloom exactly during the month of April, when Pasha is celebrated), violets in deep shades but also stocks (Mathiola longipetala) with their spicy, skatole-rich, intense aroma. Dill, thyme, spearmint and humble chamomille are beginning to make the countryside smell like a giant pasture or one enormous kitchen herbs cabinet.
And of course food, glorious food: from red Easter eggs, which make households smell of vinegar and onion peel (traditionally used to "anchor" the dye on the hand-painted egg) as they're prepared on the eve of Good Friday, to the succulent, sweet, cardamom-laced Eastern bread which whets the appetite for the feast of Sunday.

Greek Easter is a Dionysian celebration...

Rembetika, the Greek Blues

The 1983 film "Rembetiko" by Costas Ferris recounts the life of old "rembetes" (musicians and songwriters of the urban outcast sub-cultures, originally in the Greek-Anatolian coast and then refugees in port-towns of Greece where they fled in 1922); especially of Marika Ninou, but also based on other artists' lives. They wrote rembetika songs, what are affectionately termed "Greek Blues" due to their mood. But watching the film we not only get a glimpse of the culture of the rembetes, but also a glimpse through Greek history from 1917 to 1957; from the aftermath of WWI, the Asia Minor Catastrophe, WWII and the Nazi occupation, the Civil War, the political upheaval and the return to a legally represented government.

The harrowing, foreboding music is written by Stavros Xarhakos, the lyrics by Nikos Gatsos. Sung by Sotiria Leonardou.



The first song (Kaigomai Kaigomai i.e. I'm burning, I'm burning) follows the Anatolian mode of "amané" (from the poignant cry "aman" throughout), a heavy, deeply sorrowful tune, here reminiscing of the plight of the refugees who had to flee Asia Minor and especially Smyrna/Izmir in 1922.

When man is born,
a sorrow is born.
And when the war erupts,
the blood cannot be count.

I'm burning, I'm burning,
throw more oil in the fire.
I'm drowning, I'm drowning,
throw me into a bottomless sea.

I swore upon your eyes, which I considered Gospel,
the slash you gave me to turn into a smile.

But you, deep in Hell, break the chain,
and if you drag me there beside you, blessed may you be.



The second song (The Net) is as Greek as it gets: concept, melody, style, lyrics and mood. A life lesson, distilled times seven...

Every time you open a road in life,
don't wait till midnight catches up with you.
Keep your eyes wide open, day and night,
because right in front of you, there's always a net spread.

If ever you get caught in its mesh,
no one will be able to get you out.
Alone you'll have to find the end of the thread
and, if you're lucky, to start over.

This net bears heavy names,
written in a seven-times-sealed scroll.
Some call it underworld's treachery,
and others yet call it first springtime's love...


Translation author's own.

If only '21 would come back...

1821 that is...

"One by one the glorious years come back to me,
if only '21 would come back for a moment.

To cross the wide plain, my horse astride,
and alongside Kolokotronis to drink wine.

To fight on the castles during the day,
my sword sprinkling sparks.
And to hold a beauty under the stars
during the night".

What made the Greek National Revolution of 1821 the seal of valour that it truly is to this day is, in my opinion, that it was bitterly opposed by every single one of the European countries and administrations when it erupted as the just complaint of a people rising up again an opressor. The French Revolution and the surge of Napoleon throughout Europe, you see, had convinced the chancellors of Europe that the status quo should not be distrurbed ever again.
The revolutioners fought against every adversary as if they were protecting what was eternally theirs: their right to rule their own lives, the soil of their fathers and their classical culture as the identity by which they wish to be identified. The chancellors of Europe only changed their stance when they saw that, after years of successful fighting, the outcome would not be in their favour if they did not implicate themselves into the procedure.

Faces and incidents change, but history remains the same.



Painting by Theodore Vryzakis (1865), The Oath at Aghia Lavra
Lyrics by Sotia Tsotou from the song "If only '21 would come back" by Stavros Kougioumtzis, sung by Grigoris Bithikotsis.