You're listening to Mikest of the rakis remembered on the BBC World Service. I'm Maria Margaronis.

You could walk into a Greek tavern'Averna almost anywhere in the world and hear this music playing.

If you're Greek, you might roll your eyes.

It's become a kind of cliche, a bit of musical kits.

But it's actually a brilliant piece of writing.

Listen to the way it builds, drawing you in with that rising semiturn

like a musical question. Wind winding you up in its rhythms.

Zorbestin is what the composer Mikiz-O-Rikis is best known for now outside his native Greece.

But in his time he was a figure on the world stage, rubbing shoulders with poets, politicians and artists like Pablo Neruda, Olov Palmer and Salvador Dali.

His most powerful music evokes a spirit of heroic rebellion that resonated with liberation movements

and their supporters from Greece to Latin America. But he was more than that too, a

composer of classical symphonies, ballets and operas, and of popular songs, as light as a sea breeze.

His music addresses all moments of human experience.

Personal nature, love, resistance and revolution, solidarity.

I won't forget these moments that his music accompanied me in solitary moments of my life and also in collective

moments in the streets with my fellow students fighting fascism.

Theodorakis himself happened to be students fighting fascism.

Theodorakis himself happened to be six foot four tall,

which in Greece was an extraordinary height.

And he also had a mop of hair that gave him another two inches I would say. So he would stride onto the platform and people would go berserk.

And I sometimes said it was like touring with Mick Jagger and Che Guevara combined.

He was not only a musical anarchist, he was also a political anarchist. I love his free spirit. He was like a time capsule of Greece and of Greek history and he was like a piece of the DNA of Greece.

...