A video from the school years of Greek singer Giorgos Mazonakis, showing him singing a Yiannis Parios song at the age of 18, surfaced just hours after news broke of his sudden death.
Mazonakis died on Wednesday, September 9, at the age of 54, following a cardiac arrest. He had shown a love of music and singing from a young age, something captured once again in a clip shared on Thursday by a former classmate from Nikaia, the Athens suburb where Mazonakis grew up and went to school.
In the video, shared by a classmate named Apostolos Kazakidis, a young Mazonakis appears wearing a white shirt with a sweater draped over his shoulders. He holds the microphone with ease as he performs the song "San Trelo Fortigo," while another classmate accompanies him on piano.
The footage was recorded in 1990, during an event held for the five-day school trip of his Lyceum, the equivalent of the final years of Greek secondary school.
Kazakidis accompanied the post with a message intended as a farewell and a shared memory from their school days. He wrote that this was how his classmates would remember Mazonakis, describing the clip as footage from the event for their Lyceum's five-day trip in 1990.
Who was Giorgos Mazonakis
Mazonakis was a well-known figure in Greek popular, or laiko, music, with a career built on live performances across Greece. Yiannis Parios, the artist whose song the teenage Mazonakis chose to perform, is one of Greece's most established singers, closely associated with nisiotika, or island-style, folk songs.
Circumstances of his death
Mazonakis suffered the cardiac arrest on Wednesday afternoon while at the Stem Cell clinic in the Athens district of Kolonaki, where he had scheduled a session of plasmapheresis, a blood-filtering treatment. He reportedly felt intense chest pain while a venous catheter was being placed and then went into cardiac arrest.
The clinic notified Greece's National Centre for Emergency Care, known as EKAB, at 16:21. A paramedic arrived by motorcycle seven minutes later and immediately began cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
An EKAB ambulance then transported Mazonakis to the on-duty hospital, Elpis, where he arrived at 16:45. Despite resuscitation efforts by doctors, his condition proved irreversible, and his death was formally confirmed at 17:40.
