HYPSIPYLE AND THE FIRE OF MEMORY: KAREN MARTIN’S RECLAMATION OF A SILENCED QUEEN

 

In Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos, Karen Martin reanimates one of antiquity’s most shadowed myths. From the volcanic heart of Lemnos, she draws forth the story of Hypsipyle, the daughter who defied divine decree and human expectation to spare a life and, in so doing, condemned herself to exile. The novella unfolds with the solemn beauty of ritual, simultaneously fierce and meditative, lyrical and restrained. It extends the preoccupations of Martin’s earlier Dancing the Labyrinth, into a landscape where myth and conscience converge.

The opening sequence situates the reader amid celestial vengeance. Aphrodite, humiliated when Hephaestus exposes her union with Ares, seeks retribution upon his sacred island. Her wrath descends through the Erinyes, who hiss her malediction: “Let the hearts of Lemnos’ men turn cold to their wives… and when love’s fire burns for the foreign, may wrath bloom in the hearts of Lemnian women.” The gods are revealed in their familiar cruelty, capricious, immoderate, indifferent to the mortal wreckage they engender. Yet Martin renders this divine conflict with a psychological intimacy that transforms it from spectacle into allegory. The vengeance of Aphrodite becomes a metaphor for the contagion of shame, the humiliation of one woman visited upon an entire sisterhood.

When the narrative descends to the mortal sphere, the prose contracts into human cadence. The women of Lemnos, abandoned for Thracian captives, gather in fury. The elder Pollyx urges action: “Better to scorch the field than let the weeds take root.” The island becomes a forge of resentment, its air heavy with salt and silence. Hypsipyle, daughter of King Thoas, stands apart. She is the moral centre around which the story turns, a figure of compassion surrounded by the din of vengeance. Her choice to save her father: “If I save you, I betray my sisters. If I do nothing, I betray myself,” is the hinge upon which the narrative and her destiny turn. The line, delivered with devastating simplicity, distills the impossible calculus of love and duty that defines both the character and the human condition.

The very name Hypsipyle, meaning She of the High Gate, deepens Martin’s interpretation. It suggests both elevation and threshold: a liminal figure poised between worlds. In Martin’s retelling, the high gate is not a symbol of nobility but of conscience. Hypsipyle stands guard at the passage between vengeance and mercy, between the law of gods and the law of compassion. Her name becomes a quiet prophecy of her role: the keeper of the gate through which humanity must pass if it is to rise above divine cruelty.

The massacre scene, rendered with the austerity of tragedy, spares the reader no truth yet denies the indulgence of spectacle. “Knives sharpened by the men at the request of either their wives or concubines, sliced through flesh and bone.” In this brief and terrible sentence, Martin captures the communal complicity that haunts the act of retribution. The women’s liberation comes at the cost of their innocence, and Hypsipyle’s mercy isolates her from both camps: too tender for the victors, too guilty for the dead. Her coronation in the aftermath is stripped of grandeur. The sea is still, the island mute. Authority becomes penance.

The so-called Lemnian crime has long been a site where patriarchal thought locates the origin of feminine monstrosity. From Herodotus onward, the slaughter of the Lemnian men has been invoked as shorthand for unnatural female violence, a mythic rationale for the containment of women within civic order. Psychoanalytic readings, from Lacan’s notion of the woman as mirror of masculine anxiety to Foucault’s analysis of transgression as the boundary that defines normality, reveal how such narratives have functioned to police the limits of desire and speech. In the classical tradition the crime becomes a moral warning; in Martin’s hands it becomes a field of resistance.

Martin’s retelling dismantles what Derrida called the phallogocentric architecture of myth, the privileging of the male word as law and the female act as excess. By rendering the killings through the women’s collective consciousness rather than through divine or heroic commentary, she reverses the hierarchy of speech and silence. The women of Lemnos are no longer the abject objects of moral discourse but the narrators of its collapse. Their violence, reframed through trauma rather than pathology, exposes the structures that produced it. Hypsipyle’s choice to save Thoas becomes an ethical deviation that restores meaning to compassion within a world governed by vengeance.

Martin thus engages with what Foucault described as the productive nature of transgression, the point at which violation reveals the hidden mechanics of power. The Lemnian crime ceases to be an indictment of women and becomes a mirror held to patriarchal fear itself. Her prose refracts the symbolic order through which myth has long criminalised female autonomy and replaces it with a discourse of responsibility and renewal. In this sense, Martin’s approach also recalls Hélène Cixous’s Castration or Decapitation?, which argues that patriarchal myth severs women from language and authority. By allowing the Lemnian women to speak their crime, Martin restores to them what Cixous calls the right to “speak in tongues,” to reclaim a multiplicity of meaning that resists the singular logic of punishment.

Lemnos, scarred and smouldering, becomes both setting and symbol—the physical manifestation of psychic ash. Through its windswept desolation, the reader feels the weight of moral aftermath. The novella’s rhythm is meditative, shaped by pauses and breaths, its lyricism disciplined by ethical inquiry.

When the Argonauts arrive, the narrative widens again into myth. Jason and his companions, weary from voyage, confront an island ruled by women who have known the extremes of wrath and repentance. Pollyx, ever pragmatic, counsels Hypsipyle to meet violence with reason: “We choose the winners. We set the rules. We give them what they desire, while we take what we need.” Hospitality becomes strategy; seduction becomes statecraft. Martin reinterprets this episode, often trivialised by earlier poets, as a study in negotiation between trauma and renewal. Hypsipyle’s union with Jason, rendered in sparse, elegiac tones, produces twin sons sent away to Thrace, an act that repeats the motif of separation and survival. Every gesture of love in this novella carries an aftertaste of exile.

Martin’s Hypsipyle stands in quiet conversation with her literary foremothers: Antigone, Medea, and Cassandra. Yet unlike them, she does not perish for her defiance nor seek to justify her rage. She endures. This ethical deviation, first embodied in her rescue of Thoas, deepens into a vision of feminine power grounded in conscience rather than revolt.

The novella’s feminist strength lies in its restraint. Martin avoids the declarative didacticism that mars many modern mythic retellings. Instead, she allows moral clarity to emerge through ambiguity, as if the text itself were a ritual of purification. The voice of the Lemnian women is rendered collectively, often in choral refrains: “We gathered. All of us. Not with rage, but with resolve.” Their unity, fragile yet deliberate, speaks to the enduring need for solidarity amid the fractures of guilt.

The prose of Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is a study in cadence. Each sentence moves with sculpted precision, balanced between fire and restraint. The diction is elemental; sea, ash, flame, wind, and every image serves the architecture of emotion. The style evokes both the austerity of ancient lament and the lucidity of modernist prose poetry.

As in Dancing the Labyrinth, Martin’s writing merges archaeological consciousness with psychological excavation. Both works are meditations on the endurance of women through the erosion of time and myth. Yet Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos reaches further into the moral terrain of culpability and grace. In Dancing the Labyrinth, the discovery of the Minoan cave restored a lineage of forgotten women; here, Hypsipyle’s solitary mercy becomes the cave itself, a vision of compassion painted upon the blackened walls of retribution.

The significance of reinterpretation lies in its challenge to the permanence of mythic authority. As Adrienne Rich observed in When We Dead Awaken, revision is an act of survival, the refusal to inhabit stories written against one’s existence. In reclaiming Hypsipyle, Martin participates in a feminist lineage that views the reimagining of myth as both creative and reparative. It is a form of counter-memory that exposes how myth’s sacred aura has served to naturalise systems of domination. The ethical force of Martin’s retelling lies precisely in its refusal to sever the myth from its trauma; she transforms inherited violence into moral insight.

In its scope and sensibility, Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos stands beside the mythic reclamations of Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, and Madeline Miller. Like Barker’s Silence of the Girls, it strips away the heroic veneer of epic to expose the moral exhaustion beneath conquest; like Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, it restores to the chorus of women the collective dignity of witnesses and survivors; and like Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, it gives lyric voice to those exiled from power yet fluent in endurance. Martin, however, writes from a distinctive vantage as a philhellene whose reverence for the Hellenic world deepens rather than domesticates her critique. Her Lemnos breathes with volcanic immediacy, her moral vision tempered by compassion. Hypsipyle and the Curse of Lemnos is therefore a fierce lyrical reclamation of one woman’s struggle to shape her destiny in the wake of divine retribution, a work that transforms myth into moral meditation and restores to Hypsipyle the autonomy that time and tradition denied her.

The final chapters return to the goddess whose wrath set the cycle in motion. Aphrodite does not reappear; her silence is the most eloquent of verdicts. The absence of divine closure leaves the reader suspended between justice and forgiveness, mirroring Hypsipyle’s own condition. The women of Lemnos rebuild their world without divine sanction, discovering in their own labour the only form of grace the gods will ever grant. The novella closes not upon redemption but upon endurance, the quiet persistence of life after ruin.

Martin’s achievement lies in the precision of her moral imagination. She neither revises myth for modern sensibility nor venerates it as untouchable relic. She listens to it. Through Hypsipyle she teaches the reader to listen to the muted histories that survive in the pauses between epic lines, to the small voices that outlast the roar of heroes. In doing so, she restores to myth its oldest power: the power to reveal the divine within the human act of remembrance.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 November 2025

KONSTANTINOS ARGYROS, GARGOYLES AND OUR FUTURE

 

Every year when I would deliver the Pontian Genocide Memorial Lecture, a boy and a girl, invariably chosen for their poise and docility, would be stationed at either side of the podium, dressed in full Pontian costume, to stand motionless throughout my address. For over an hour they would endure my droning in funereal silence, their faces fixed in expressions of exquisite suffering. I used to gauge the length of my lecture by their torment: when their eyes began to glaze and their knees to tremble, I knew it was time to close my mouth. No clock could have kept better time than the quiet desperation of those children.

The scene never failed to remind me of my own initiation into communal life. My childhood memories of Greek functions are a catalogue of pathos and heatstroke: standing in stifling halls while elders intoned patriotic platitudes; lined up in national dress at doxologies; clutching bouquets for visiting dignitaries from Greece who rarely met our gaze, but brushed past us in search of the buffet table. Afterwards, the same organisers would complain bitterly about the apathy of the νεολαία. Given the early damage done to their tarsal and phalangeal bones, it is a wonder that they had any feet left to vote with.

From these small rituals of discomfort, a peculiar pedagogy is born. The first lesson: to be a Greek youth in Australia is to suffer beatifically and in silence. The second: pride is something declared by others while you stand beside them holding a flag, preferably while clad in a foustanella. What we call participation is in fact choreography. The children, if they could give it a name, would call it captivity, and they would be right. We array them like mannequins, exquisite in form and utterly immobile, beautiful but enslaved. They become Caryatids of our self-regard, carved into the architecture of our communal vanity. Their smiles are rehearsed, their presence ornamental. They are our gargoyles, visible, still, and soulless, warding off the evil of indifference even as we manufacture it. Culture, in our hands, has become a test of endurance masquerading as belonging, a silent liturgy in praise of ourselves.

Pierre Bourdieu observed that culture lives through habit, through gestures and rhythms absorbed in the intimacy of life rather than the glare of ceremony. Where such habit fades, culture becomes theatre. Our functions have mastered this art of display: every year the same speeches, the same applause, the same photographs, all confirming that the body of Hellenism still moves, even if the soul has quietly departed. We confuse visibility with vitality. What was once lived has become something performed, and our children, cast as its silent extras, learn early that their heritage exists only for the camera, never for them.

In this theatre of heritage, power also performs. Michel Foucault would recognise in our ceremonies a machinery of discipline: bodies arranged, gestures prescribed, voices contained, all in the service of order. The child becomes the subject of what Jacques Lacan called the paternal law, spoken for and spoken over, yet never permitted to speak. Even the language of tradition is guarded, its meanings circumscribed by those who claim authority over it. Jacques Derrida might say that our proclamations of continuity conceal an unease about control. We repeat ourselves to prove that we exist. In isolating the young, we seek to affirm mastery. In defining their role, we deny their authorship. Preservation becomes possession, and the lineage we claim to defend becomes the cage in which we keep it.

Identity, however, resists preservation. Stuart Hall described it as a process of becoming, a conversation between inheritance and invention. Yet our institutions cling to the fantasy of fixity. They treat Greekness as a finished monument, polished and untouchable. The young approach it reverently, but find no door through which to enter, forced instead to linger in its portico, assuming neo-classical attitudes dictated by others. Reverence soon turns to detachment. When the living are forbidden to add their fingerprints to the marble, they will simply walk away.

Between past and present lies what Homi Bhabha called the third space, a fertile ground where cultures meet and new meanings arise. Our children inhabit this space effortlessly, moving between languages and worlds, forging a Greekness that is supple and creative. Yet our events rarely venture there. We organise them as spectacles for ourselves, not as laboratories for our children’s imagination. We deny them an essential role, as if we deliberately wish to keep them at a distance, fearful that their spontaneity might disturb our polished order. We distrust the in-between. We equate mixture with dilution, experimentation with betrayal. We forget that all culture, at its beginning, was an act of hybridity. Until our gatherings make room for play, art, and creation, we will go on mistaking performance for continuity. In defending purity we deny growth, and in denying growth we prepare extinction.

If Bhabha reveals the space our children could inhabit, Vygotsky shows how they might learn within it. The classroom of culture begins in play. Lev Vygotsky saw in the child’s imagination the seed of learning, the way the world becomes intelligible through movement, touch, and creation. Through play, meaning enters the body. When our communal life forbids play, it forbids comprehension. A child who stands for an hour at a doxology will learn endurance; a child who transforms paper and ink into the image of a saint will learn devotion. Through play, inheritance becomes experience.

Memory, too, requires imagination to survive. Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory describes how descendants inherit the emotional texture of events they never lived, through images re-created in the mind. Our children cannot recall the exodus from Asia Minor or the killing fields of Pontos, yet they can feel their pulse if we invite them to imagine. Instead, we rehearse mourning in tones so formal and stifling (literally: children have fainted at interminable wreath-laying events) that empathy suffocates. The children see sorrow displayed without knowing its cause. Memory becomes performance, and emotion drains away, leaving behind the wax mask of remembrance: flawless, cold, lifeless and completely unrelatable.

Into this malaise comes singer Konstantinos Argyros. With a breathtaking act of vision and sensitivity, he donates $150,000 to the Hellenic Museum for the creation of a Children’s Gallery. In a community awash with self-congratulation, his gesture possesses the quiet audacity of insight. He sees what our committees, with their decades of meetings, fail to see: that the future of Hellenism depends upon restoring the imagination of its children. His philanthropy is a supreme act of pedagogy. Through generosity, he articulates a truth that policy has never managed to formulate; that the child’s curiosity is our only guarantee of continuity.

A Children’s Gallery may appear a modest enterprise, yet its implications are quietly revolutionary. It confirms that the Hellenic Museum is not a mausoleum where the relics of Hellenism are embalmed for occasional inspection, but a living workshop of wonder. The exhibits will cease to be mute witnesses behind glass and will instead become companions in discovery: instruments of play, objects to be touched, stories to be inhabited, riddles to be solved. History will no longer whisper from a distance; it will breathe through the senses. In that space, Hellenism will reveal itself not as an exclusive inheritance to be guarded against parvenus, but as a living language of creation, enacting what Vygotsky understood and Bourdieu only hinted at: that to learn is to participate, and that culture survives only when it is re-experienced anew.

Argyros’ munificence also exposes a wound. Why did it take a visiting artist to discern what was missing from our institutions? Why, among many of our federations and associations, is there no real space dedicated to the active participation of the young? We boast of preserving language and culture, yet where are the plans, the measurements, the evaluations? Who leads, who dreams, who is accountable? We have energy without direction, sentiment without strategy. Our committees meet; our minutes lengthen; our purpose diminishes. The most common phrase in our discourse is “keeping the culture alive,” though few seem willing to define what that life consists of.

If we listen closely, the theorists who mapped the nature of culture whisper warnings directly to us. Bourdieu would remind us that living traditions require the renewal of everyday practice. Hall would insist that identity cannot be embalmed without dying. Bhabha would point to the creative potential of our hybridity. Hirsch would plead for imagination in remembrance. Danforth would urge ritual to evolve or lose meaning. Vygotsky would call for play as the foundation of understanding. Argyros, without citing any of them, has embodied all of their insights in one luminous act. His gallery is their theory made visible.

The implications reach far beyond the museum walls. Argyros’ gesture calls for the transformation of every institution into a place where creation is valued above display. Festivals, schools, and parishes must give children room to build, to question, to interpret for themselves. Numbers and speeches no longer suffice; the true measure of success is the spark of agency in a young mind that dares to shape meaning. Continuity begins when children are trusted with the tools of making, when heritage becomes something they handle rather than admire.

Renewal demands humility. It asks us to confront how often our ceremonies serve pride instead of purpose. The time has come to trade the safety of repetition for the risk of invention. Only through that risk can our heritage regain its dignity. The Greeks of the diaspora have mastered survival; it is time they learned creation.

Every civilisation is revealed by how it treats its children. They are its conscience, its proof of sincerity. For too long we have placed them before us as decorative witnesses to our nostalgia. Argyros’ generosity restores them to their rightful place as collaborators, entrusted with the work of shaping what will follow. If we take his cue, the weary choreography of our communal life may at last move again with purpose and grace.

The next time a boy and a girl stand beside a podium, perhaps they will do so to speak. Perhaps their faces will shine with understanding, not endurance. And when that day comes, we shall have Konstantinos Argyros to thank, for reminding us that the surest way to preserve culture is to give our children the power to recreate it.

For this, Konstantine, our gratitude is profound.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

dean@tooraklaw.com.au

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 November 2025

KAPETAN MIHALIS AND THE CRISIS OF GREEK CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION

 

To adapt Kapetan Mihalis to the screen is to attempt the impossible. Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, part epic and part metaphysical treatise, is among the most difficult works of modern Greek literature to transpose into visual language. Its conflict is neither purely historical nor political,  is eminently ontological, the struggle between freedom and necessity, body and spirit, the inhibited and uninhibited self, Eros and Thanatos, an inner drama articulated through external revolt. The 2023 cinematic adaptation directed by Kostas Haralambous, though clearly motivated by reverence for its source, fails to render that interiority visible. What emerges is a lifeless transcription, a film paralysed by its self-conscious devotion to the text.

From its opening sequence, a panoramic sweep of a sunstruck Cretan landscape accompanied by sombre strings, it is evident that the film aspires to solemnity rather than vitality. The mise en scène is composed with painterly care yet devoid of movement or moral tension. The island of Crete, which in Kazantzakis’ prose breathes, trembles and suffers as a living organism, is here a decorative surface. The camera contemplates rather than explores the topography of conflict. In the sense used by André Bazin, who saw film as the ontology of the photographic image, this adaptation confuses representation with revelation. The world is shown yet never truly disclosed.

The problem here is both aesthetic and structural, with the film’s narrative appearing fragmented and curiously static. Dialogues are woodenly declaimed rather than spoken, drained of subtext and rhythmic variation. In one of the central scenes, Mihalis stands before a candle and delivers a solemn reflection on Crete and the meaning of freedom, a passage composed in Kazantzakis’ idiom but not quoted directly from the novel. The moment, intended to be epic, collapses under its own theatrical weight. There is no tension between the man and the idea; only an actor reciting a line. The camera remains reverent, unwilling to question or interpret. In adaptation theory, this constitutes what Linda Hutcheon calls a hermeneutic deficit, a failure to translate not just the content but also the mode of meaning of the original. There are no new insights to be gained here.

Kazantzakis’ writing burns with ambivalence. Every gesture of faith conceals doubt, every act of heroism contains futility. This film offers certainty in the place of struggle. Its tone remains uniformly exalted, with its visual grammar governed by symmetrical compositions, diffused lighting and choreographed solemnity. The result may be rhetorically grand but at the same time, it is emotionally inert. Battle sequences, intended to evoke the collective sacrifice of Crete, are staged with illustrative literalism, clumsy camera movements, abrupt edits and digitally augmented imagery that adds scale without therequisite emotional immediacy. There is no spatial logic, no sense of danger or contingency. Montage, as Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein taught, should think; here it merely records.

Regrettably, the film’s performances are undermined by an absence of psychological nuance and tonal modulation. The actor portraying Mihalis oscillates between stoic detachment and exaggerated fervour, never quite discovering the inner rhythm of Kazantzakis’ protagonist, that fusion of moral torment and ecstatic defiance. Supporting cast also display a limited emotional palette that remains confined to archetype: the grieving wife, the tragic lover, the zealous priest. The characters function as emblems rather than beings. In semiotic terms, they are signs emptied of referents, images that signify a localised type of Greekness, sacrifice and honour without generating new meaning. The acting is stilted, measured in diction rather than emotive. Even in moments of supposed passion, gestures are rehearsed, gazes fixed and movements appear curiously weightless. There is no sense of inner life beneath the dialogue, no fissure through which humanity might escape. Instead, the viewer is left with posture and arrangement, actors placed before the camera like figures in a static frieze or a tableau vivant. This absence of vitality accords with Vrasidas Karalis’ observation that Greek cinema often oscillates between didacticism and paralysis under the weight of national symbolism, where emotion can lapse into quotation and performance into simulation. The tragedy of such acting lies in its lack of necessity. Nothing in it feels compelled, urgent or true.

This literal approach stems from a misunderstanding of fidelity. Film adaptation is translation across media and across ontologies. As Robert Stam observed, obsession with faithfulness often leads to paralysis, since the film medium must externalise inner states. Kazantzakis’ theological and philosophical meditations, his fusion of Nietzschean struggle and Orthodox asceticism, resist direct visualisation. To reproduce them verbatim annihilates their ambiguity. The director, unwilling to reinterpret, confines himself to reverence. The result honours Kazantzakis’ text while betraying his spirit. Karalis has argued that Greek cinema frequently bears the burden of its own national symbolism to the point of immobility, a pattern confirmed here. Rather than confront the metaphysical audacity of Kazantzakis’ vision, the filmmakers retreat into solemnity, equating stillness with depth. The film’s inertia, physical and emotional, may be symptomatic of a deeper anxiety about interpretation itself, a fear that to reimagine the sacred is to profane it.

This failure belongs to the larger condition of Greek national cinema. Since the decline of the New Greek Cinema of the 1970s, with its daring experimentation and political allegory, contemporary Greek filmmaking has alternated between minimalist existentialism and heritage spectacle. Kapetan Mihalis belongs entirely to the latter. Its imagery, from the meticulously arranged costumes to the sentimental orchestral score, aligns it with the French “tradition of quality” derided by Truffaut and with what contemporary criticism often labels heritage cinema: works that replace artistic inquiry with aesthetic piety. It is a cinema of preservation, not discovery.

Such films arise from a culture that venerates the past yet seldom interrogates it. Greece’s literary and historical inheritance becomes a monument to be maintained, never a dialogue to be renewed. In this sense Kapetan Mihalis exemplifies a broader malaise, a reluctance to risk meaning or to offend the canon in order to transform it. The fear of irreverence produces homages that erase.

Even in technical terms the film reveals such conceptual exhaustion. The editing is languid and the pacing inert. Scenes linger long after their emotional climax, mistaking duration for profundity. The lighting, alternately overexposed and funereal, drains the landscape of vitality. The score, insistently melancholic, dictates emotion rather than accompanying it. There is no space for silence, that essential dimension of cinematic time which allows the viewer to think and to breathe and the overall impression is one of suffocation through absence. As Karalis observed, the Greek screen often mirrors a society exhausted by its own symbols. Kapetan Mihalis becomes such a mirror, a film unable to believe in the reality it depicts.

Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the movement image and the time image is instructive in understanding the film’s failure of dynamism. Kazantzakis’ novel is movement, a relentless ascent toward spiritual liberation. This film represents time without becoming: motion arrested, meaning immobilised. It is a cinema of repetition rather than revelation.

The tragedy of Kapetan Mihalis lies in its renunciation of struggle, the essence of Kazantzakis’ vision. The novel’s protagonist is consumed by an inner fire, a holy restlessness that defies both God and death. The film, by contrast, is marked by passivity. The camera watches where it should wrestle, venerates where it should question. What could have been an titanic existential confrontation becomes a museum exhibit, polished and silent.

The boredom the film induces arises not so much from pacing as from ontology: the weariness of an art form that no longer believes in its transformative power. Until Greek filmmakers recover the courage to interpret rather than preserve, to risk sacrilege in the service of truth, their images will remain trapped in the endless rehearsal of a history that no longer believes in itself: the art of a nation circling its own reflection, unable to move beyond the echo of what it once was.

Kazantzakis once wrote, “Reach what you cannot” (Askitiki, 1927). This latest adaptation reaches for nothing. In its failure to strive, it exposes a deeper cultural crisis, a society that venerates its past precisely because it has forgotten how to imagine its future, the very negation of Kazantzakis’ Kapetan Mihalis. Nonetheless, as a symbol of a creative cul-de-sac, it is compelling viewing.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 November 2025