Patrick Comerford
I always thought it was a school. For over 30 years, I thought the large building on Igoumenou Gavriil Street in Rethymnon was a large second-level. It stands across the street from the Church of Saint Constantine and Helen and close to the KTEL bus station in Rethymnon. It has been there since 1992, and I walk past it on my way to and from the city centre and the bus to Chania or Iraklion, or stand opposite it waiting for the bus to Panormos.
But I have been wrong all these years.
The building is, in fact, the Melina Mercouri Indoor Hall, or Rethymno Municipal Indoor Hall, an indoor sporting arena with a capacity for 1,600 spectators and the home venue for basketball games played by Rethymno Cretan Kings in the Greek Basket League.
The arena was opened in 1992, is named after the Greek actor and politician, Melina Mercouri and is owned by the Municipality of Rethymnon.
The arena’s seating capacity in was increased from 1,100 to 1,600 when Rethymnon competed in top-tier Greek basketball for the first time in the 2007-2008 season, and there are plans to expand the arena again.
Melina Mercouri (1920-1994), who was one of the potent figures in resistance to the colonels’ junta in Greece more than half a century ago, had once spoken of Rethymnon as a place of ‘exquisite beauty’ (kallos). She met her husband Jules Dassin in Crete in 1957 while they were filming He Who Must Die, based on the novel Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis.
Three years later, she gained international acclaim for her role in the film Never on Sunday (1960), directed by Jules Dassin. Never on Sunday (Ποτέ Την Κυριακή, Pote Tin Kyriaki) is a Greek black-and-white romantic comedy film starring in which she sang the song ‘The Children of Piraeus’, written in Greek by Manos Hatzidakis as Τα Παιδιά του Πειραιά (Ta Pediá tou Pireá).
The original song title Τα Παιδιά του Πειραιά is usually translated as ‘The Children of Piraeus’. But in Greek the word παιδιά (paidiá) can also have the same meaning as kids, guys or men.
The title song of the film won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1960, a first for a foreign-language picture. The song won Manos Hatzidakis an Academy Award for Best Original Song and became a worldwide hit. But Hatzidakis, whose family was from Rethymnon, did not attend the Academy Award ceremony in 1961, and refused to collect his award, saying the film with a prostitute as its protagonist reflected negatively on Athens and misrepresented Athens.
The original Greek lyrics by Hadjidakis, as well as the foreign translations in German, French, Italian and Spanish, sing of the Children of Piraeus, the port city of Athens – they do not mention ‘Never on Sunday’, which is only found in the English lyrics. The lyrics to the English version of the song were written by Billy Towne, with five versions reaching the UK Singles Chart.
In the original song, the main female character of the film, Illya (played by Melina Mercouri), sings of her joyful life in Piraeus:
If I search the world over
I’ll find no other port
Which has the magic
Of my Port Piraeus.
Although she earns her living as a prostitute, she longs to meet a man who is just as full of joie de vivre as she is. A love-smitten American, Homer Thrace (Jules Dassin), and a handsome Greek-Italian dockhand, Tonio (George Foundas), compete to win her heart and find they are learning lessons about the secret of happiness and life itself.
The film made Melina Mercouri an international star, won her an Academy Award and introduced Greek bouzouki music to the rest of the world. In the original soundtrack, the bouzouki solo sections were played by Giorgos Zampetas, one of the greatest bouzouki artists of the rebetiko era of Greek music. He began his career as a songwriter in 1952, and was popular in Greece throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Melina Mercouri was also an acclaimed classical actor. She played the title role in Phaedra (Φαίδρα), an adaptation by Margarita Lymberaki in1962 of Hippolytus (Ἱππόλυτος), the tragic drama by Euripides about how the wilful actions of parents can have devastating and deathly consequences for their children.
The film is set in Paris, London and the Greek island of Hydra. The music was composed by Mikis Theodorakis and her recording of Αστέρι μου φεγγάρι μου (Asteri mou, Fengari mou, ‘My Star, My Moonlight’) remains a popular song in Greece.
Melina Mercouri sings ‘My Star, My Moonlight’, composed by Mikis Theodorakis for ‘Phaedra’
Speaking about her family’s long tradition of political activism over the generations, Melina Mercouri once said her grandfather, Spyridon Merkouris (1859-1939), a left-wing politician and Mayor of Athens, had been jailed by King Constantine I, and had spent part of that time in jail in Crete, where he was sentenced to death.
She became one of the potent figures in resistance to the oppressive junta of the colonels in Greece following their coup in 1967. Melina and Jules fled Greece and in 1970 they were accused of financing a plot to overthrow the regime. The charges were dropped but the interior minister, Colonel Stylianos Pattakos, revoked her Greek citizenship and confiscated her property.
When she was stripped of her citizenship, she said: ‘I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. Pattakos was born a fascist and he will die a fascist.’
Later, she was a founding member of PASOK and became a prominent politician. She was elected to Parliament for Piraeus, became Minister of Culture in Andreas Papandreou’s cabinet, and devoted much of her career to demanding the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Athens.
The title of her autobiography, I was born a Greek, comes from her celebrated riposte when her Greek citizenship was revoked by the colonels.
In the streets on the slopes leading down from the Fortezza, Melina is a restaurant the offers beautiful views of the old town at night, and the name ‘Melina’ is carved in stone at the entrance.
I have wondered at times whether the restaurant is named after Melina Mercouri – but then, if I thought mistakenly for the past 30 years that a basketball arena was a school, I may be wrong about this too.
In his poem ‘Athens 2005’, the Cappoquin-born poet Thomas McCarthy writes of
… Melina Mercouri’s dream, her idealised place
Where a child might grow tall with European-ness, at home and in love
From the Shannon river to the Danube Volga, or Vistula; consoled
By culture for all the horrors of war and exile …
In this dark days of global violence, it is important to continue to dream Melina Mercouri’s dream of an ‘idealised place where a child might grow tall with European-ness, at home and in love’ and be ‘consoled by culture for all the horrors of war and exile.’
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