Last Tuesday, Nana Mouskouri was honoured by the council of Vari in southern Attica by proclaiming her an Honourary Citizen and awarding her the City of Vari Gold Medal. Speaking to the media Mouskouri also revealed her battle with pancreatic cancer several years earlier.
During the ceremony Mouskouri thanked the municipality of Vari for the acknowledgement and said that “I have remained humble and shy all these years”, adding that she has been “humbled by a health adventure”.
“I am very moved and proud. Moved because this is something I know is of great value, moved for the trust I have been shown and it comes with great responsibility. At the same time I am proud for being chosen. We all have our dignity, our life, but that does not mean we are worth this [recognition]. This is a great honour for me,” she said while accepting the medal and title.
When asked about how she has managed to deal with worldwide success for over six decades she said: “I dealt with it very simply, because as I was selling records we were already talking about writing and releasing another record that had to be better than the one before. Staying true to our taste, so that our audience would not lose its trust in us. We did not want to go overboard or whatever and that’s how we kept on. My husband, thankfully, who I met when he was very young, is in the industry, he is my producer, and he kept me in check saying ‘be careful not to be carried away because there are many things that could take you off course'”.
Mouskouri recently celebrated her 88th birthday having released more than 200 music albums in 12 different languages — including Mandarin Chinese and Corsican.
Born in Chania, as Ioanna, on October 13, 1934, Greece’s best-selling recording artist of all time, Mouskouri has been singing from the age of six and has performed more than 10,000 shows at venues around the world, including the Royal Albert Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic and New York’s Lincoln Center.
Mouskouri was teased once again by reporters on whether or not she will ever part with her signature glasses.
Laughing, she said ironically that she didn’t even take them off for megastar Harry Balafonte when she was pursuing a career in the US.
“He begged me,” she said, “It’s not possible for you to go on stage with the glasses. I want you to take them off. I suffer seeing you on stage with the glasses on. No one wears glasses’, he’d say.”
She finally yielded and sang without her eyewear for three live shows but went back to him and said: “Look, I know what you think but I feel bad without my glasses. First of all, I can’t see well, I am myopic. Then, I want to be myself. I need to wear them. I will wear them. If you don’t like them, I will leave with them.”
Mouskouri said that she was determined to leave the show if she was not accepted for who she was and made it clear. Belafonte had to think about it with his team but finally decided to keep her on, with her glasses.
At the end of the interview the famous Greek singer revealed a dark health adventure that changed her perspective on life.
“In 2015, I had pancreatic cancer, I am still here. I also had peritonitis. I had a lot of things. Everyone is scared. When you are away from home, you are more sensitive, which made it very hard for me. But, I listened to my doctor, he was a very good doctor and I go to him to this day. My doctor, for me, was my salvation. When something is wrong with me, I go there to be taken care of by him. I have been through a lot.”
