ATHENS, Greece — Popular Greek singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos was buried Saturday at Athens\u2019 First Cemetery in a state-sponsored funeral, four days after his death at age 80. <\/p>\n
Savvopoulos had died of a heart attack after battling cancer since 2020.<\/p>\n
Thousands came to pay their respects to a well-beloved, if sometimes controversial, artist as he lay in state at a chapel of the Athens Metropolitan Cathedral Saturday morning. Hundreds made the nearly 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) walk behind the hearse to the cemetery.<\/p>\n
The presence of a Greek navy band playing mournful music was indicative of the change in Savvopoulos\u2019s status, from someone lionized by anarchist-leaning leftists in the 1960s and 1970s and dismissed by the establishment as a long-haired freak, to a figure embraced by the same establishment and cultural mainstream.<\/p>\n
Savvopoulos never changed his musical style \u2014 a blend of rock, folk-rock, jazz and Greek popular music \u2014 to conform to mainstream tastes. Always a political animal, he didn’t shy away from criticizing the left and its illusions, especially on his 1989 album \u201cThe Haircut,\u201d whose sleeve showed him beardless with long locks. A few of his songs drew the enmity of some of his longtime admirers. The beard grew back but his politics remained moderate.<\/p>\n
Conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the first of many who eulogized Savvopoulos during the funeral service, used the lyrics of the 1972 song \u201cMessenger Angel” to portray the artist as a speaker of uncomfortable truths that many did not want to hear. \u201cIf he had no pleasant news to tell\/better tell us none,\u201d he quoted the song’s ending.<\/p>\n
Others who joined in eulogizing Savvopoulos were former President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, fellow musicians, artists and literary figures, some from his hometown of Thessaloniki, and one of his two grandsons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATHENS, Greece — Popular Greek singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos was buried Saturday at Athens\u2019 First Cemetery in a state-sponsored…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[65031,127,146,65030,122,85,46,409,126],"class_list":["post-97669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-65031","tag-article","tag-entertainment","tag-funerals-and-memorial-services","tag-general-news","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}