Originally published 2021-09-02.
Theodorakis on stage at Karaiskaki Stadium, Athens, in 1974, shortly after the military regime collapsed and he came home from exile.
Mikis Theodorakis died at his home in Athens on 2 September 2021, at the age of 96. He was the composer behind the film scores for Zorba the Greek, Z and Serpico, the author of song cycles that almost every Greek household knows, and one of the best-known opponents of the 1967–74 military dictatorship. The Greek government announced three days of national mourning, and his body lay in state at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens before burial in Crete.
For many people outside Greece, his name is tied to a single tune: the dance from Zorba. Inside Greece he meant far more. His life ran through the Nazi occupation, the civil war, prison camps, exile, parliament and street protests, and his music travelled with all of it.
Who was Mikis Theodorakis?
Theodorakis was born on the island of Chios on 29 July 1925. His father's family came from Galatas in Crete, and his mother's family were Greeks from Çeşme on the Anatolian coast, now in Turkey. Because his father was a civil servant, the family moved often: Mytilene, Cephalonia, Patras, Pyrgos and Tripoli all appear in the story of his childhood.
He grew up surrounded by two musical traditions that shaped him for life: Greek folk song and Byzantine church chant. He started writing melodies before he had proper instruments or lessons, took his first formal training in Patras and Pyrgos, and gave his first concert in Tripoli when he was 17.
Occupation, civil war and the prison islands
In 1943, with Greece under German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation, the teenage Theodorakis moved to Athens. He joined a reserve unit of ELAS, the armed wing of the left-wing resistance, and studied at the Athens Conservatoire at the same time.
Liberation did not bring peace. In December 1944 fighting broke out in Athens between the left-wing resistance and British forces backing the Greek government, and the country slid into a civil war that lasted until 1949. Theodorakis took part in the December fighting on the left. During the civil war he was arrested, sent into internal exile on Ikaria and then to the camp on Makronisos, where left-wing prisoners were pressured to sign declarations renouncing their beliefs. He was tortured there and, according to his own accounts and his biographers, was twice buried alive. The experience left lasting damage to his health.
From Paris to world fame: the music
After finishing his studies in Athens, Theodorakis spent time in Crete, where he ran the music school in Chania and founded his first orchestra. In 1954 he moved to Paris to study analysis with Olivier Messiaen and conducting with Eugène Bigot. During these years he wrote symphonic works and ballet scores that won recognition in Western Europe.
Around 1960 he made a decisive turn. He began setting serious Greek poetry to music built on popular forms, including the bouzouki, so that ordinary listeners could sing it. The key works of this period include:
- Epitaphios (1960), a setting of Yannis Ritsos's poem of a mother mourning her son, killed during a strike.
- Axion Esti, based on the epic poem by Odysseas Elytis, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- The Mauthausen song cycle, on poems by Iakovos Kambanellis, a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp.
- Canto General (1971–82), an oratorio on texts by Pablo Neruda.
Cinema carried his music around the world. His score for Michael Cacoyannis's Zorba the Greek (1964) produced the famous "sirtaki" dance, a tune that is now played at weddings and tavernas far from Greece. He also scored Costa-Gavras's political thrillers Z (1969) and State of Siege (1972), and Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973).
Banned by the junta, defended by the world
In 1963, after the assassination of the left-wing MP Grigoris Lambrakis in Thessaloniki, Theodorakis founded the Lambrakis Democratic Youth movement. The following year he was elected to parliament for the left-wing EDA party.
When army colonels seized power on 21 April 1967, he went underground and helped found the Patriotic Anti-Dictatorship Front (PAM). He was arrested that August. The regime banned his music. After months in prison he was sent into internal exile in the mountain village of Zatouna and later held at the Oropos camp.
His case became an international cause. Composers and artists including Dmitri Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller and Harry Belafonte called for his release. In April 1970, after an intervention by the French politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, he was allowed to leave for Paris. For the next four years he toured widely, using concerts to rally opposition to the dictatorship.
The junta collapsed in July 1974, after the disaster of its Greek-Cypriot coup and the Turkish invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus. Theodorakis returned on 24 July 1974 and soon played to huge crowds, including the Karaiskaki Stadium concert shown at the top of this page.
A long and complicated political life
Theodorakis never fitted neatly into one camp. He was associated for decades with the Communist Party of Greece and sat in parliament as a left-wing deputy in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. Then, in 1989, during a period of deadlocked elections and repeated votes, he stood as an independent on the New Democracy ticket. He served as a minister of state from 1990 to 1992 in the centre-right government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis in the early 1990s, explaining the move as an attempt to help end the political stalemate and the tension left over from the 1980s.
After leaving office he remained outspoken. He opposed NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. During the Greek debt crisis he founded the "Spitha" (Spark) movement in 2010 and addressed large crowds in Athens against the austerity terms attached to international loans. In 2018, already in his nineties, he spoke at a rally in Athens about the Macedonia naming dispute.
Some of his public remarks drew strong criticism, notably comments about Israel and Zionism that critics called antisemitic, a charge he denied. At the same time he wrote one of the most moving musical memorials to the Holocaust, and in 2013 he publicly condemned the far-right Golden Dawn party for Holocaust denial. A fair portrait holds both sides of that record.
Death, mourning and where to start listening
Theodorakis died of cardiopulmonary arrest. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the son of the leader he had once served under, declared three days of national mourning. Following his wishes, he was buried in Galatas, near Chania in Crete, beside his parents and brother.
If you know only Zorba, a few starting points give a better sense of his range:
- Epitaphios for his early popular style, where poetry meets the bouzouki.
- Axion Esti for his large-scale writing for voice, choir and popular orchestra.
- The Mauthausen cycle, especially the "Song of Songs" movement, for his most intimate and painful work.
- The Z soundtrack to hear how he used music as political argument on screen.
Listening to these alongside the dates of his life makes the music easier to understand. Many of his songs were written for crowds, sung in protest and banned by a dictatorship; they were never meant only for the concert hall.
Sources: Mikis Theodorakis (Wikipedia); Greek Reporter, report of his death (2 September 2021). Photo and video clips: archive footage of Theodorakis concerts via YouTube.
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