Theodorakis’ remains depart Piraeus for Crete
Hundreds of citizens gathered at Piraeus port on Wednesday evening to bid farewell to Mikis Theodorakis, whose remains departed on a ferry for Crete ahead of his burial on Thursday.
The ship containing the hearse and late composer’s coffin departed gate E2 shortly before 7 p.m.
As his remains were being taken onto the ship, Piraeus Brass Band played some of the late composer’s music.
The ferry is scheduled to arrive in Crete at 7.30 a.m.
His remains will then be carried to Hania Cathedral. At 1 p.m., his body will be taken to the Church of Aghios Nikolaos in his paternal village of Galatas, where a funeral service will be conducted.
Theodorakis will be buried in the village cemetery, next to his parents and brother, in accordance with his wishes.
Both the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and the leader of the opposition, Alexis Tsipras, have announced that they will be in attendance.
Earlier, at Athens Cathedral, where Theodorakis’s body had lain in state for three days, President Katerina Sakellaropoulou delivered a brief eulogy during a memorial service, describing the late composer, whose music and life were defined by Greece’s recent history and its struggle for democracy, as a “teacher and a paradigm.”
“Without you, we would have been different,” General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece Dimitris Koutsoubas told the service. Theodorakis was “impulsive, revolutionary, inflamed with passion, while his music is a resolution that our world needs to change, and can change,” he underlined.
