The article describes the performance of Kostis Palamas' play Trisevgeni at the National Theatre of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki in 1963. It reviews the position of this crucial staging in the overall history of the performances and perception of the play, and it disputes the characterization of a "milestone for a first successful phase" used today for this particular staging. The paper is based on a thorough new study of the criticism, evidence, and testimonies of the time. The article investigates the choice of the director, Socrates Karantinos, to stage the play according to the will of the author, verbatim, without a single word of its text cut out. It also tries to integrate this staging within the general theatre atmosphere of the 1960s. In addition, it attempts to study the case of Karantinos as a key factor in the National Theatre, a person who determined the nature of many of the new theatre's performances, if not its entire identity. Τhe paper further examines the relationship between the director and progressive academic circles at the University of Thessaloniki, the perception of Palamas' poetry and literary work, and, finally, the conservative director's turn to totally outdated practices.
The paper contains the publication, for the first time, and the critical examination of four Theatre Review numbers by Antonis Kosmatopoulos, which were presented in Thessaloniki during the Nazi Occupation (1941–1944). Through an analysis of their subject patterns and ideological features, it became obvious that the tensions followed by Theatre Review's playwrights during the interwar period, which had been interrupted because of the country's participation in WWII and the theatre's patriotic mobilization, continued during the Occupation, though with some diff erentiating characteristics.
Antreas Kordopatis, the main character in Thanasis Valtinos' novel Synaxari Antrea Kordopati, Vivlio Proto: Ameriki (1972 [1964]), emerged as an eminent literary figure in Greek post-war literature, especially due to his oscillation between fiction and reality. The aim of this paper is to examine the construction of Kordopatis' character as well as the methods and literary devices that are used for it. Valtinos' blurring of the lines between the real elements of Kordopatis' story and the fictional ones manages to achieve a twofold effect; firstly, he constructs a fluid literary persona that is constantly transforming to conquer its dream, and secondly, he subverts the reader's reception.
The present article deals with humour in the surrealist works of Nikos Engonopulos and Andreas Embirikos. The first part provides a methodological framework based on classical views of authors such as H. Bergson, L. Pirandello, S. Freud, and A. Breton. In addition, the basic forms of humour are specified. The classification is based on the work of the Czech literary theoretician V. Effenberger and is complemented by the characteristics of black humour as identified by M. Winston. In the second part of the article, examples of humour from the works of Engonopulos and Embirikos are analyzed. I quote examples based on plays on words, poems using surrealist metaphors, and parodies of tradition literary forms (texts of an ecclesiastical or informative character), which surprise and amuse by their unusual combination of traditional forms and non-traditional content. The irony and the auto irony with which the poets identify themselves with mythical (Neoptolemos) or historical (Ermolaos, Bolivar) heroes are directed against the uncritical adoration of tradition, national heroism, and the conventional values of bourgeois society. The humour of both authors belongs to the category of absurd humour; black humour occurs only rarely in a moderate form (absurd black humour) without the intensive morbid character known from works of French or Czech authors.
Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke attempts in her poetry to achieve a pioneering revival of female mythological figures, revising well-known myths. This paper examines how such a revision serves the structuring of a post-surrealist poetic discourse, experiential and body-centered, which liberates the female poetic subject from the dictates of patriarchal poetry, presents a feminine perspective, and redefines female identity and women's stereotypical gender role. Such an approach also includes a comparison of her innovative use of female mythological figures with the way the same figures have been treated by other Modern Greek and European poets. The paper explains how the subversive review of specific mythical symbols (Iphigeneia, Helen, the Sphinx, Magdalene, Penelope) allows the expression of a multidimensional female psychosynthesis facing the issues of love, life and death, war and peace, poetical art, and tradition, which constitute the main thematic axes of her poetry. Most of the selected mythical symbols function as the poet's alter ego in a meta-feminist era, driving her to attempt t he reconstruction of herself. The re-evaluation of mythical elements in her poems reveals internal processes that respond to the need to project a subjective biotheory, reflecting the poet's personal struggle to balance opposing forces while trying to define and interpret the world. Taking into account the elements that contemporary feminist theory identifies as constituents of "écriture feminine", the investigation focuses mainly on analyzing within several of her poems the experimental attitude towards mythical context and meaning. It also reconsiders the response of specific features of myth to an ambiguous and timeless poetic speech and presents how Anghelaki-Rooke rewrites mythology as a means of challenging dominant male discourses and redefines the mythical method in the context of post-surrealism.
These short notes discuss the specific names of the disguise and mask rituals of the Greek folk calendar cycle, their probable etymology, and theories elaborated thus far on their origin. In particular, they discuss the dodola/perperuna-ritual, the rite of kalojan/scalojan, both proclaiming the onset of rain, the rituals linked to rosalia (rosaliile, rusalki, neraides), the quête procession on Lazarus day, carnival masks and midwinter disguise rituals such as the rugatsia and kalikantzaroi.