Thus we had come to Chania, where we spent the night in a harbour-front hotel. So we transformed our disappointment into advantage, and continued our expedition, mostly on foot but also by donkey-back, and by various vessels, until we’d criss-crossed Crete end-to-end and shore-to-shore. Love usually overcomes all, but this would not be the time. There was, however, one catch: for him to perform the service, we would have to be full-immersion baptized into the Greek Orthodox faith. Such a man, our friends reasoned, would look kindly upon our petition. The wedding was as explosive-with gunshots being fired into the air-as it had enraged the authorities, civil and ecclesiastical. A few years earlier the abbot of a mountain monastery had married a young lady who’d been abducted by her suitor. “You should get married,” they said, “in Crete.” My-our-friends make a convincing argument. This was the young man Ingeborg encountered when we met in Athens two years previously, and with whom she gradually formed a powerful and enduring bond.

Their self-appointed task: to rip me from my adolescent American self and make not of me only a Greek, but a Cretan. By then, I’d been living in Greece for nearly three years and had fallen in with Cretan students at the University of Athens. We’d gone to Crete to carry out our plan to be married.

We had arrived there the previous evening, on our “honeymoon’ project to circumnambulate the great island, our means of transport a tramp steamer that carried us along the rocky northern shore from the port town of Rethymnon to Chania. The snow-capped peaks of the White Mountains loomed over Chania, a graceful city that still bore the imprint of the Venetians, who had ruled over Crete for several centuries before surrendering to the Ottomans, only becoming a part of Greece in 1912. That was when my life-companion-to-be Ingeborg and I met Mikis, already widely known throughout Greece by his first name, at his family home. This short memoir, devoted to the memory of an extraordinary man, begins nearly sixty years ago, in the spring of 1963. But he had lived more lives-and certainly helped change far more lives-than most mortals could ever dream of. He was ninety-six years old at the time of his death. On August 8 composer Mikis Theodorakis was laid to earth in the city of Chania, in western Crete. Mikis Theodorakis, “Fabrik” Hamburg, 1971.

Mikis theodorakis guitar pdf