ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Well-liked Greek singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos was buried Saturday at Athens’ First Cemetery in a state-sponsored funeral, 4 days after his dying at age 80.
Savvopoulos had died of a coronary heart assault after battling most cancers since 2020.
Hundreds got here to pay their respects to a well-beloved, if typically controversial, artist as he lay in state at a chapel of the Athens Metropolitan Cathedral Saturday morning. Tons of made the practically 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) stroll behind the hearse to the cemetery.
The presence of a Greek navy band enjoying mournful music was indicative of the change in Savvopoulos’s standing, from somebody lionized by anarchist-leaning leftists within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies and dismissed by the institution as a long-haired freak, to a determine embraced by the identical institution and cultural mainstream.
Savvopoulos by no means modified his musical model — a mix of rock, folk-rock, jazz and Greek common music — to adapt to mainstream tastes. All the time a political animal, he did not draw back from criticizing the left and its illusions, particularly on his 1989 album “The Haircut,” whose sleeve confirmed him beardless with lengthy locks. Just a few of his songs drew the enmity of a few of his longtime admirers. The beard grew again however his politics remained reasonable.
Conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the primary of many who eulogized Savvopoulos through the funeral service, used the lyrics of the 1972 music “Messenger Angel” to portray the artist as a speaker of uncomfortable truths that many did not want to hear. “If he had no pleasant news to tell/better tell us none,” he quoted the music’s ending.
Others who joined in eulogizing Savvopoulos have been former President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, fellow musicians, artists and literary figures, some from his hometown of Thessaloniki, and one in all his two grandsons.
