Galery

3

2

1

QUESTION: Karaghiozis combines the spectacular and carnival element, it has something in common with the so-called 'grand spectacle'. In his essay ‘Karaghiozis’ the Greek surrealist poet and artist Nikos Engonopoulos detects similarities between him and the Italian comedia dell'arte, with the Italian folk hero Bertolodo and Nasreddin Hodja (in the same essay Engonopoulos mentions that somewhere in the Greek mountains in Arcadia, an old woman confided to him: “Nasreddin Hodja was one of us, my boy, Stratis Hodja” ....) Maybe what they have in common is that the protagonists exchange thoughts, witticisms and obscenities, that the action is very dynamic. But entirely Greek characters also appear - like the heroes of the liberation uprising of 1821 - Katsandonis and Diakos, or ones from ancient times like Alexander the Great, but also Ali Pasha of Yannina and his beloved Kyra Vassiliki, and even Othello and Desdemona. I wonder if the motley troupe of Karaghiozis does not reflect the different influences on today's Greece.

KIOURTSAKIS: Let me repeat that Greece of today is far from Greece which created Karaghiozis. Therefore, it is difficult to say that this theatre reflects our present society that has undergone profound transformations. But this spectacle inevitably contains elements which reflect with devastating preciseness some more permanent, diachronic, structural features of the Greek. A good example is the hut of Karaghiozis: this permanent decor that symbolically and tangibly embodies not only the gap between the poor and the rich (as it sticks out against the magnificent and imposing seraglio of the pasha), but also something deeper: the uncertainty, instability, lack of self-confidence and incoherence, I would say even the mess in our collective life. At the same time, however, the unexpected resistance of this eve- ready-to-collapse building, as is our society - consequently, “the imminent resistance of modern Greek history”, to quote the famous Greek historian Nikos Svoronos.

QUESTION: Last year’s decision of UNESCO Karaghiozis to be awarded Turkish “citizenship” put an end to the dispute between Turkey and Greece about to which of the two countries this favourite character of the shadow theatre belongs. The origin of the shadow-puppet theatre is rooted back in ancient times - it comes from Java and China and from Persia, passes to the Ottoman Empire, and reaches Greece. With respect to what is the Greek theatre of shadows autonomous compared with its predecessors?

KIOURTSAKIS: It’s a pity to witness how a significant international organization the purpose of which is protection of cultural heritage, such as UNESCO, ignores in such an impressive way the verbal folk art: creativity that knows no boundaries, because it is and multinational, and local: it is transformed everywhere it roots. As for the “autonomous” nature of Greek Karaghiozis from its ancestor, I would only say that if its Turkish paradigms are identifiable to the researchers, they have become unrecognizable to the average viewer, as they have undergone radical changes in Greece. This is evident in every aspect of its art: repertoire, major types and minor characters, set design, picturesqueness, music and speech.

QUESTION: Russian avant-garde from the beginning of the century comes to the forefront of theoretical thought in the 1960s again. So-called Russian formalists are presented brilliantly by the then young Tzvetan Todorov in the classic French edition of 1965 with a preface by Roman Jakobson. By that time Julia Kristeva reinvents the also forgotten Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) for the West. Bakhtin’s monograph on Rabelais and Folk Culture During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is published in 1965 and makes the author the name of the day in scientific circles. What are the views you received from this theory and used for your studies of the carnival phenomenon? 

KIOURTSAKIS: Bakhtin’s book about Rabelais revealed to me that multinational nature of the symbolic language of the carnival and its live presence in the "high-grade" literature as well as in the "low" folk genres and firstly in all folk spectacles – in the East and the West. So, it helped wholesale to decode, enlighten and interpret every aspect of today's Karaghiozis, starting with his “grotesque” characters and his language of gestures and going on to his speech - even in his most foolish or, apparently, utterly nonsensical pun. This was one of the goals I set for myself in my research “The Carnival and Karaghiozis”. Beside the theoretical approach to carnival, however, for me Bakhtin has become a teacher, deeply penetrating - completely unconsciously for me at first - into my literary work with his amazingly fruitful reflections on dialogic nature of literature and language itself.

QUESTION: The issue of continuity of tradition has been your concern for a long time. There is often the assumption that tradition is something static, frozen in the past, rigid and conservative. In your essay “The Problem of Tradition” you write that the crisis in the tradition of a country is a crisis of identity, of genuineness, an existential crisis. What do you think is Greece’s perception of the issue of tradition, its continuity and renewal?