The poet of the popular soul

"I'm not here for those who ask / is closed shop and we do not sell" wrote in the well-known style of liberal freedom in one of the monumental words of Manos Eleftherios that leaves life full experience, in the 80s. A hot July day, that is, the glorified year more than any other, while loneliness announces red and that the "Malamate words" seem ephemeral like the wave. He never liked cold climates or cold hearts and wanted his tormented souls to teach his songs: he did not write for poetry other than the solitary soldier, the hermit tortured, the abandoned but proud man who does not share his wisdom for false glories. He also knew it as he grew up the difficult years of occupation in a place where the sophisticated mind was identical to the struggles of memory and the refugee. Because if anything was Eleftheriou – he says the free surname – beyond a writer, lyricist and poet is definitely Syrian. 100 percent, in thought, idiosyncrasy and vision.

Born in Ermoupolis, Syros, with a naval father and a free spirit, he learned in the iconic theater, built to host great performances and events, that the arts should not hide some closed spectators but for everyone. With this spirituality to follow him in every move, he moved to Athens and in the early 50s decides that drama is his destiny – and never even music, he did not dismiss it from the theatrical way to work. In 1955 he meets Angelos Terzakis and it is he who convinces him to enroll in the Stavrakos School, which then rejoices to have the glorious names of the place such as the l unforgettable Christos Vachliotis, Giorgos Theodosiadis and Grigorori Grigoriou, his great masters all three. They teach him to think and write, to see a theater that he loves so much. Listening to the national school and seeing Paxinos, Minot, observe their movements, he admired their splendid spirit. To live, he was doing footwork, mainly in the cafes of central Athens, where he cared to hide the conversations and to inspire people of the word. He dares and has not yet gone to the army to give his first poems to Angelos Terzakis and he recognizes the obvious talent. The stone is there: the letters, the theater, the icons, the great reasons of the Russian existentialists and the clbadics are nested in his mind. He leaves for the army, and there, in front of an old typewriter, in his Ioannina comes the epitaph: he wants nothing more in his life than to write.

"How Fate and the Years / Not Hearing a Poet" confesses in a verse that could water the vein or be the inscription of his feelings and experiences rich in life. At the age of 24, he wrote his first poetic collection, which he published with his own money. The melodious poetry, that is to say, the high verses of Seferis and Elytis that fuels the crowd through the musicals of Theodorakis, give the mark of what must be his identity and his direction since : the crossroads of speech where every day meets the noble and the high. And that's all his work: by the infamous Markiza, who considered his best song until Hamlet wrote about George Cheimonas, his news and his songs about Kafka, his lyrics for lonely fans. who was finally the same in the Mickey Train song, leaves at eight, or The Cure who began writing it during the Junta period: "In fact, Theotra, it was an opera for Gregory Lambrakis , "he says typically. "I went to the funerals of Lambrakis, but also to George Papandreou and Sotiri Petroula, Peter was sitting somewhere in the Academy Plato, we were walking in meadows, we were cooking and we were going home at night, he was his mother, I remember with women, her sisters with burning candles, and I remember her mother saying in an instant, "I'm the rod of freshness, and all that is good for me." J & I missed, I was crazy.Now, fresh water, in which the stem, the plant, gets into the water, the Almyros of the region, who knows "ended up describe the moment one of the most shocking moments in the history of the song.

He accurately described these verses, taken from the most painful truth of reality that he alone knew to transmute in such a unique way into experience. Almost all the lyrics are so drenched with pain or blood: Even "the other in the Syrah crowds, blood and tears that they drink" was inspired by the Syrah Smyrnists, who on 8 000 were finally only 1.50. What can you get from all those masterpieces that have sung all over Greece, people of different ages and directions? "Who is my life"? the famous Songs of Struggle, eternal symbols of resistance and endurance, democratic freedom and revolution, or "Troparia for murderers" in music of Thanos Mikroutsikos and again with words that represent the whole time of the Greek Resistance . Even the "Malamate words", while they look like a tender child, actually speak to all those who "rushed off the beaten track / from the midst of the four winds / took them for a moment / and they have found the flame that does not tremble / "

As his composer describes in all respects Thomas Korovinis, who has completely treated his work:" Eleftherios is the poet – rhapsod with a capital II of the Greek song, the closest in the Gatsu's spirit, without it imitating him without being the successor, but he was certainly instructed by him.Indirectly.And from another street, of course, the close relative of the aforementioned artisans of the popular language. With Papayannopoulou, perhaps, more.Eleftherios is the author of the poetic speech in the song, which today expresses the quintessence of successful coupling and the harmonious combination of poetry and folk lyrics as a leader like that. "He has ab Absolutely right: his poetic quality could never be separated from his ability to put up all sorts of lyrics, thus reducing a glamorous art to a literary moment. It's the same with his little diamond stories or novels that reveal to him what he likes most: the theater and his favorite island. Syros is the permanent protagonist in almost every book The Chrysanthemums, which has been awarded the State Prize for Literature at Black Eyes for Syros's lead composer, Mark Vamvakaris.

In the chrysanthemum, time reveals the story of Evangelia Paraskevopoulou, arrived in Ermoupolis at the end of the nineteenth century and at this farewell dinner she had to give all the secrets of the capital and the capital. A glorious theatrical will be the protagonist of the "Woman who has died twice" telling the true story of murdered badbadin Eleni Papadakis. Whoever was on the left side knew the opposite side – and that is why he was excluded from party games, even though he was asked to get involved in politics. And because he was pbadionate about what he was doing, he also took over the record of the famous actor telling him that he could never let his mind play the last role as Hecuba. Always in his mind, the fantastic identified with the real and the theater with that of the daily life.

Moreover, if you were predictable, you may not have been in his world at every step, with theatrical elements: from his tiramisu dress and carefully chosen vests, the mango carved wrists angry. , his poetry full of poetry. Manos Eleftherios was the glorious chapter of the Greek folk soul grafted into the arts and freedom. Or again, as Thomas Korovinis puts it: "Eleftherios is the lover of the unexpected, the devotee of the ready-made, the lover of loneliness, the corrector of congested chopsticks and the collector of unpretentious pleasures. The "pain of people and things" determines his art and goes back to the sources of Papadimandeia's humility, which he uses to preserve his humanity and transpose his values.