THE “GUARDIAN-ANGEL” OF THE GREEK FOLK TRADITION
The neoclassical building on School Street in Plaka houses the wealth of our folk tradition. Dances, music, songs and traditional costumes from all over Greece, which with great effort and difficulties were rescued from oblivion, highlighted and presented all over the world by the great Greek Dora Stratou.
She herself, from the age of 19, lived a troubled life, “losing” her father, but always having his words engraved in her mind: “For something you believe in, the battle matters. And the battle never ends. The battle is life.”
He came from a bourgeois family with his father being the politician Nikolaos Stratos and his grandfather the well-known playwright Dimitris Koromilas. Her parents took care of her education and her musical education. Her tastes were mainly Western European; she loved Wagner and while learning the piano, she was introduced to the music of Bach. But when asked how she went from Bach to folk dances, she replied, “But didn’t Bach write a lot of folk dances, or is it because they have foreign names that they don’t count?”
Her first contact with Greek folk tradition was in 1932, but it was not until 1952 that her idea began to take shape. The occasion was initially a performance of Yugoslavian traditional dances in Athens and then the proposal of the then president of the Folklore Society, Mr. George Megas, on the need to create a traditional dance group to promote the unimaginable beauty and richness of our folk music, dances and dazzling costumes.
A year later, the Association “Greek Dances – Dora Stratou” was founded, known today as the Dora Stratou Dance Theatre. She travelled all over Greece and collected dances, songs, costumes and jewellery, creating the largest collection in the country. He sought to project the original. So he chose the best dancers and instrumentalists to accompany the band. In her performances in Greece and internationally she always brought genuine traditional music bands and locals in their traditional costumes from each region.
Dora Stratou made our traditional dances and our folklore wealth known all over the world. When she died at the age of 85, in 1988, Melina Mercouri said “You are travelling now, leaving behind a warm memory of a woman’s warm and manly memory”. Today a worthy successor of her work is Professor Mr. Alkis Raftis, under whose presidency, the Association contributed to the birth of the idea of celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Revolution, as a tribute to the heroes of 21, who wrote golden pages in the history of our Nation.
