Greek singer-songwriter Aphrodite Manou has hit back at critics who condemned her earlier remarks about the death of fellow singer George Mazonakis, accusing them of "functional illiteracy" and "envy" in a new social media post published on Wednesday, September 16.
In the post, Manou said her original comment had been misread. She repeated that she had never personally known Mazonakis or been familiar with his music, and said she did not believe he personally bore responsibility for the state of the country's cultural life that she had been describing.
She wrote that her upbringing, character and sensitivity would never have let her attack a man who had died so suddenly just two days earlier, and whose work she said she had made clear from the start she did not know. She said she had nothing against Mazonakis, but that what she called functional illiteracy, envy, degeneration, fanaticism, ideological blindness and years of hostility from some people had read her words differently. She added that Mazonakis would be the last person she would blame for the decline of Greek cultural life, saying others had seen to that "successfully" since soon after the fall of the military junta.
She said her only two experiences of what she called a "popular pilgrimage" had come during the dictatorship, at the funerals of the poet George Seferis and former prime minister George Papandreou, and that this remained the yardstick against which she judged others. She wished the artist a good send-off, offered condolences to his family, and thanked friends for messages of support amid what she described as a renewed flood of insults directed at her. She said the photograph in the post was taken at Seferis's funeral on 22 September 1971, and that she had been present in the crowd.
George Seferis, a Greek poet and diplomat, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963. George Papandreou was a former Greek prime minister and founder of the Center Union party. Both men's funerals, held under the 1967 to 1974 military junta, became mass shows of public defiance against the regime.
The original comment
Manou's first post, published on the day of Mazonakis's funeral, said she had nothing against him personally and had never known him or his work, but she described the public pilgrimage to his body as "the last nail in the coffin of the dreams of a generation of artists who imagined things differently." She ended the post with "Goodnight."
Backlash from fellow artists
The remarks drew dozens of negative comments beneath Manou's post, along with criticism from figures in Greece's entertainment world, including director Giorgos Tsalikis, actor and comedian Giannis Aivazis, and film director Sotiris Tsafoulias.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, September 15, Tsafoulias wrote that the problem was not that Manou hadn't known Mazonakis or his work, but that she had rushed to judge the emotion of hundreds of thousands of people who did know them. He said the public's affection did not need anyone's approval to be genuine, and that calling a nation's mourning "the last nail in the coffin of a generation's dreams" said nothing about the man who had died but a great deal about her inability to accept that art belongs to the people who live it, not to an elite.
He added that the public had not made a pilgrimage to a musical genre but had said goodbye to a man who had accompanied them through joy, breakups, friendships and loneliness, and who never tried to divide or rank anyone. He said trying to diminish others' grief simply because it did not match one's own taste was not culture but arrogance, calling her remark, for an artist who describes herself as a singer-songwriter, at best misjudged and at worst regrettable.
Mazonakis's death and funeral
Mazonakis died on Wednesday, September 9, at the age of 54, after suffering a cardiac arrest. He had gone to the private Stem Cell clinic in the Athens district of Kolonaki for a plasmapheresis session when he suffered the arrest. He was taken to Elpis Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
His funeral was held on Monday, September 14, at the Church of Agia Triada in Nikaia, with burial following at the city's Third Cemetery. The day before, thousands of fans joined relatives and friends at a public wake to pay their final respects.
