Legendary Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, whose music has touched generations of people in Greece and abroad, died on Thursday, 2 September, aged 96. In 2019, he had been hospitalised after suffering from heart problems.

The great composer is known for uplifting music scores, such as Zorba the Greek (1964) for which he won an Academy Award, Z (1969) and Serpico (1973). He also composed the Mathausen Trilogy, described as the “most beautiful musical work ever written about the Holocaust”.

Apart from being Greece’s best-known composer, he was also known for his politics and long-standing ties to the Communist Party of Greece for which he stood as an MP from 1981 to 1990 though in 1989 he stood as an independent candidate within the centre-right New Democracy party so as to help establish a large coalition between conservatives, socialists and leftists to put an end to the political crisis caused by the numerous scandals of the government of Andreas Papandreou.

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Politically, he has been tied to numerous periods of Greek history, and always spoke up when it came to defending leftist causes, whether in regards to the Greek junta which imprisoned him and banned his songs through to commenting on Greek-Turkish-Cypriot relations and against the War in Iraq.

The Chios-born composer spent his childhood years in Greek cities such as Mytilene, Cephallonia, Patras, Pyrgos and Tripoli. His father was a lawyer and civil servant hailing from the small village of Galatas, Crete, and his mother, Aspasia Poulakis, was from a Greek family from Cesme, located in modern-day Turkey.

His flare from music showed from a young age, and he talked about becoming a composer from childhood.

He taught himself to write his first songs without access to musical instruments and took his first lessons in Patras and Pyrgos in the Peloponnese. In 1943, he went to Athens and was a member of a Reserve Unit of ELAS, leading a troop in the fight against the British and the Greek right in the Dekembriana.

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He was arrested during the Greek Civil War and sent to exile in Ikaria and later deported to the island of Makronisos where he faced torture and was twice buried alive.

He studied music from 1943 to 1950 at the Athens Conservatoire under Filoktitis Economidis. In 1950, he finished his studies and took his last two exams “with flying colours”. He went to Crete, where he became the “head of the Chania Music School” and founded his first orchestra. At this time he ended what he has called the first period of his musical writing.

Throughout his life his political activism and compositions have been interconnected and he remained outspoken through to his old age.

One cannot separate Theodorakis’ political activism from his compositions, because one is the reflection of the other. Even in his nineties, his creative spirit was strong, and he remained active in both fields.

As recently as 4 February, 2018, he rallied against the use of the term “Macedonia” to describe Greece’s northern neighbour.