In 1953, Theodorakis married Myrto Altinoglou. He went to Crete, where he became the "head of the Chania Music School" and founded his first orchestra. In 1950, he finished his studies and took his last two exams "with flying colours". ĭuring the periods when he was not obliged to hide, not exiled or jailed, he studied from 1943 to 1950 at the Athens Conservatoire under Filoktitis Economidis. During the Greek Civil War he was arrested, sent into exile on the island of Icaria and then deported to the island of Makronisos, where he was tortured and twice buried alive.
He led a troop in the fight against the British and the Greek right in the Dekemvriana. He went to Athens in 1943, and became a member of a Reserve Unit of ELAS. He took his first music lessons in Patras and Pyrgos, where he was a childhood friend of George Pavlopoulos, and in Tripoli, Peloponnese, he gave his first concert at the age of seventeen. His fascination with music began in early childhood he taught himself to write his first songs without access to musical instruments. He was raised with Greek folk music and was influenced by Byzantine liturgy as a child he had already talked about becoming a composer. His father, a lawyer and a civil servant, was from the small village of Galatas on Crete and his mother, Aspasia Poulakis, was from an ethnically Greek family in Çeşme, in what is now Turkey.
Mikis Theodorakis was born on the Greek island of Chios and spent his childhood years in provincial Greek cities including Mytilene, Cephallonia, Patras, Pyrgos, and Tripoli. 5 Internationally available CD releases.He was a key voice against the 1967–1974 Greek junta, which imprisoned him and banned his songs. He continued to speak out in favour of leftist causes, Greek–Turkish–Cypriot relations, and against the War in Iraq. In 1990 he was elected to the parliament (as in 19), became a government minister under Constantine Mitsotakis, and fought against drugs and terrorism and for culture, education and better relations between Greece and Turkey. He helped establish a large coalition between conservatives, socialists and leftists. Despite this however, he ran as an independent candidate within the centre-right New Democracy party in 1989, in order for the country to emerge from the political crisis that had been created due to the numerous scandals of the government of Andreas Papandreou. He was an MP for the KKE from 1981 to 1990. Politically, he was associated with the left because of his long-standing ties to the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). Up until his death, he was viewed as Greece's best-known living composer. He composed the " Mauthausen Trilogy", also known as "The Ballad of Mauthausen", which has been described as the "most beautiful musical work ever written about the Holocaust" and possibly his best work. He scored for the films Zorba the Greek (1964), Z (1969), and Serpico (1973). Michail " Mikis" Theodorakis ( Greek: Μιχαήλ "Μίκης" Θεοδωράκης 29 July 1925 – 2 September 2021) was a Greek composer and lyricist credited with over 1,000 works.