© ELEFTHERIOS K. VENIZELOS MUSEUM, ATHENS
WELCOME LEGAC Y
T
hanks to the musicologist Melpo Merlie and her collection, an aural trace, undefeated by the ravages of time, will always remain of Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936). Generation after generation will be able to hear his voice singing “Digenis” and “Death,” including the stirring lines from the latter: “Late last night, I passed by Death’s house and heard his wife nagging, ‘Haven’t I told you, Death, time and time again? Where there are five take three, where there are three, take one, but where there are two, don’t take anyone at all.’” It wouldn’t be fair to talk about Venizelos, arguably the most influential Greek politician of the 20th century, without mentioning his extraordinary (and revealing) involvement with Greek folk songs and with the people who continued to create work in this genre. In addition to his own enjoyment of folk music, both as a listener and a singer, 72
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Venizelos also figured in its more contemporary songs: a hero, praised above all in Cretan songs – but also a negative figure, decried in dirges from Mani, where mothers steeped in grief at the loss of their sons at the front censured him with the candor of incurable sorrow. That split in how the folk song tradition treats Venizelos reflects the fact that he is a historical figure. In other words, it separates him from the space of ideal or idealized heroes, of legends which admit no criticism, and depicts him instead as a historical subject, and therefore something that can be controlled. In the case of Nikos Kazantzakis (18831957), too, it would be inconceivable, in the attempt to compose even the most cursory biography, to overlook or underestimate his exceptional relationship with folk song: Kazantzakis apprenticed himself to the genre and drank insatiably from its wellspring, just as he fed insatiably from every spiritual
ELEFTHERIOS VENIZELOS
1864-1936 Hania-born Eleftherios Venizelos left an indelible mark on the political landscapes of both his island and his nation from the late 19th century onwards. The leader of his generation’s struggle for the liberation of Crete from foreign control and its unification with Greece, he served as prime minister for more than 13 years and is considered the man who most shaped modern Greece.
or intellectual realm he encountered. His first substantial contribution to letters, the tragedy “The Master Builder” (1910) was a retelling of the famous folk song “The Bridge of Arta.” His volume “Tercets” and his “Odyssey: A Modern Sequel” (which he insisted on spelling with only one “s” in Greek), which is to say the entirety of his poetic production, is diversified and enriched with words borrowed from rhyming folk compositions (Cretan compositions above all) but also with his