In a last embrace of flowers, music, tears, words of encomium, laments and applause, Greece bade farewell to its most beloved singer on February 8, at the First Cemetery of Athens. There are a very few persons whose death is the signal for a mass funeral convocation. The people, with their sure instinct for the genuine, determine who these are.
Nikos Xylouris, at the age of forty-two, had been fighting a hopeless battle against cancer for many months and, during the last weeks, as, morning after morning the Third Program of the radio broadcast his recordings, one always wondered; as they played them on the day he died, and one wondered, until the news came. He died at 4 a.m. That evening at 8:10, an hour-long commemorative program was projected on television, showing the gathering of villagers in the street in front of his Cretan home in Anoyeia. In shots filmed in the morning, one heard the beginning of a moiroloyi (words of fate) which it was later reported, continued through the day and night without pause. These scenes mingled with old film strips of Xylouris singing and brief statements of friends.
Known as the Cretan shepherd in his early years in Athens, Xylouris was born and spent his childhood in the village of Anoyeia, on the slopes of Psiloritis (Mt. Ida), of a family dedicated to freedom and resistance to any form of oppression. The stubborn village was burned by the Germans in 1945. Always fond of music, he learned to play the lyra at an early age and soon moved to Herakleion, there and at home participating in festivals, weddings, baptisms.
In 1963 he moved to Athens and began singing in a Cretan eating place. From there his musical career was established and it was inevitable that during the years of dictatorship he should carry on his local tradition in his interpretation of songs of freedom, old and new. His first collaboration with a composer was at a boite, the Lydra, with the songs of Markopoulos, as well as Cretan rizitika. Later he worked closely with Xarhakos. Those who listened to him, month after month, at the Lydra, heard a voice breaking the silence of the seven years — not a whispering, complaining or muttering hostility against the Junta — but a proud, upright insistence on freedom. On evenings when the audience was particularly roiised, his songs were interrupted frequently by applause. Almost naive in his questioning of the Junta’s ban on his singing, he queried “Why? It’s not right. I don’t understand it.” And he kept on singing, despite the censorship.
Described by his cousins as modest, a bit shy, selfless, straightforward and honest, he appeared to live in his own world, far from evil and the trickeries of the time. He impressed those who knew him as being an informed innocent. His voice was recognizable by its own special quality, not rough, but rather with a unique timbre. It is said that he was probably unaware of all the ancient elements he brought to his singing. Instinctively he knew good from bad music, and showed it in the writing of his own words and music for Cretan mantenades. Today’s Athens had a place for him; he was needed in the center of the brick-and-cement, that breath of Anoyeia.
So thousands packed the First Cemetery, standing for hours among the tombs and outside the gates. They included Government Ministers, Members of Parliament, the Mayor of Athens, representatives of the musical and theatre world, his relatives and many friends from his village, and “the people” from all walks of life. It was a combination of deep mourning, high Orthodox celebration and village tradtion.
Whoever has been to a wake knows what it means — to remember with fondness anecdotes from the life of the one now dead before him, humorous incidents, moments of love and many little things which made up the life. Each one at this funeral was holding his own wake of memories, if only of how Xylouris always smiled as he swung into the playing of his lyra. As M.P. succeeded M.P. in the list of eulogies, a few in the crowd began to murmur “It’s becoming political.” But it did not become political despite the precautionary presence of the police. There was no threat to the real meaning of the occasion. The word most often applied to him was the Greek psyche — badly translated as spirit, soul, heart, energy — all of these; in fact the life force of a strong and positive, creative person. A palikari, leventis, a tree with deep roots.
“You have left us your voice.”
“As long as Psiloritis stands, so long will the memory of you remain.”
They spoke of how he had become a symbol of the struggle for democracy, particularly with his singing presence at the Polytechnic during the resistance there.
At the crucial moment of bringing forth the casket, a voice over the loudspeakers begged, “The greatest tribute you can give is silence.” And the crowd remained silent. In another moving tribute, small bouquets rained on the casket. But the most moving of all was his own voice, emerging from the church, hovering in the air above the casket, accompanying it in procession with the Cretan: ‘Mother, when my friends come, when my people come, Don’t tell them I have died and make them heavy-hearted.’ And finally the “words of fate” of his own people at the grave. “Fate” played a large role in the words expressed, an unjust Fate. And the epithet “deathless” in this case was more than an epithet. He will live long, longer than he did. For many, Crete is the heart of Greece, and today Xylouris certainly spoke for the heart of Crete. It is the start of a legend, one which the fortunate will remember as living presence. “Know him?” replied one. “I knew him better than I do many of my friends. No, I never met him. But to remember him is to bless him for the memory.”
As the eulogies were addressed to him, not about him: Nikos Xylouris — Godspeed.
AMID the wave of strikes that have hit the country during the last two months, including agricultural producers wanting a greater share of marketing profits, small shopowners complaining of limits put on retail profits, petrol carriers demanding higher transportation fees and OTE workers and garbage men demanding higher pay, the Government in mid-February declared with aplomb that the strikes were causing no serious problems for the country’s economy. The reason for this, it claimed, was that only a minority of workers were obeying their unions. The Government has a point. Strike-breakers, or “pirates1′, as well as “moonlighting”, appear frequently.
In mid-February it was probably the prolonged strike of bank employees and the taxi drivers’ strike which were primarily disrupting the lives of already distraught Athenians. It looked for awhile as if the currency flow would all end up in the hands of kiosk owners, and other collectors of cash — such as cab drivers. Hence when a passenger got into a “pirate” taxi (a private car) and found that the driver was unusually polite, calm and knew his way about, she asked him if he was a taxi-owner working with his private car. “No,” he said, “I am a bank clerk.” The moral to this is obvious. These strikes clearly prove that we are all in the wrong line of work. If bank clerks make such fine cab drivers, there is no reason to think that cab drivers should not make excellent tellers. Ruffling stacks of bank notes is far more calming than weaving through traffic. Meanwhile, OTE workers, fainting by the score indoors, would do well to get into the fresh outdoors and pick up the city’s rubbish, while garbage men can warm up their fingers plugging and unplugging wires on operating boards.
All of this disgruntlement on the part of workers would have been avoided if they had watched with greater care the economic debate that was televised from Parliament back on a Friday in January when it was made quite clear by Mr. Karamanlis and opposition leaders that there is an economic crisis and that we must all face up to it. Unfortunately, most viewers were unaware that the debate at the last moment replaced the popular series, /, Claudius (Episode 10) in which Caligula leads his horse into the Senate and has him crowned. It just shows how inattentive television audiences can be.
THE wearing of safety belts for front-seat drivers became mandatory last December. On January 8 the Greek Automobile Club, ELPA, sent out a circular advising its members on how to operate seatbelts. Shoulder belts, it cautioned, should not be worn too tight near the neck and the horizontal type should not be placed above the stomach.
The idea of being strangled by a safety device is not a pleasant one and the most cursory glance at the Laocoon sculpture shows a classical Greek example of how rjorto wear a shoulder or a hip belt. The circular goes on to say that there are special seatbelts for particularly short drivers while children under twelve should sit in the rear seats where it is not necessary to wear them. Furthermore, the circular says that pregnant women should not wear seatbelts.
Of course all laws have loopholes, and it is incorrigible human nature which looks for them. Although the thousand-drachma fine for non-wearing of seatbelts is payable at the scene of the violation, an instant pregnancy test cannot, of course, be made there. The authorities, however, may ask for a medical paper from the driver certifying pregnancy.
The only general danger raised by the law so far takes place in the vicinity of a traffic officer. The reason for this is that people who forget to put on their seatbelts suddenly remember them on the first glimpse of a policeman. Hence the general phenomenon of cars weaving dangerously out of their lanes as drivers struggle to attach their belts with one hand on the wheel (and sometimes none, as when the belt is tangled under the seat). In such cases, don’t panic. Common sense is the best recourse. A thousand drachmas will not go very far these days in beating out a dented fender. Furthermore, policemen are human and must be aware that such hazards in their presence endanger them, too. Indeed, Greek police are more exposed to human frailty than almost anyone. In the long run it is perhaps best to succumb to a new, sensible and in this case, even a pleasant habit. One way of testing the right degree of tautness of shoulder belts, not mentioned by ELPA, but suggested by the behaviour of lovers at stoplights, is this: If the belts are just loose enough to allow the driver and the front-seat passenger to kiss, then the chances of being strangled are greatly reduced.
THE late author’s bibliographer and long-standing friend, Katerina Plassara, herself an author, has written the following:
“Stratis Tsirkas, one of the great prose writers of our times, died on January 27. He was born in Cairo in 1911 when the Greek colony in Egypt was flourishing. When he was a young man he began working in the cotton business in Upper Egypt and during his ten years there, he became familiar with the miserable existence of the fellah, the local peasant. Fellahin was the title of his first collection of poems, published in 1937 in Alexandria. When Tsirkas moved permanently to Athens in 1963, he had lived most of his life in Alexandria and an important part of his work was devoted to the Greek-Alexandrian poet, Cavafy. His major study Cavafy and His Time won him the Academy of Athens’ prize in 1958. His great novel Akyvernites Polities, a trilogy describing the anti-fascist movement in the Near East during and immediately following World War II, won the 1971 French Critics’ Award as the best foreign novel of the year under the title Cites a la Derive. As Drifting Cities, it was published by Knopf, New York in 1974, in a translation by Kay Cicellis.
“For us, Tsirkas’ work has an element of the exotic and an intense cosmopolitanism which characterized the world in which he lived. But these are the external qualities of his work. What lifts Tsirkas’ work to the highest level of contemporary prose is his admirable mastery of structure which embodies the theme and around which characters, ideas, situations and emotions move with ease.
“It must not be forgotten that Tsirkas throughout his work was chiefly concerned with an ideological struggle. Both in his life and in his writings, the big issue for him was the effort to release the Leftist Movement from its vulnerable elements, from whatever could consume or undermine it. The struggle was not an easy one for the writer since· it takes, as always, great courage to displease one’s fellow-believers for the sake of an idea.
“If we brought his way of thinking into the world of Greek letters, then we could say that Stratis Tsirkas, beyond and above his undisputed literary merits, has opened up roads which create great hopes, as well as great obligations, for writers of the younger generation.”
