She spent all her fortune for his sake and devoted herself like few to the effort to promote and spread his work, but she was not exactly his other half, nor did she fall irreparably in love with him
She was born in the USA, but spent a large part of her life in Greece, where she breathed her last. She married Angelos Sikelianos, spent all her fortune for his sake and devoted herself like few to the effort to promote and spread his work, but she was not exactly his other half nor did she fall irreparably in love with him. He fought passionately to make the Delphic Feasts and the Delphic Idea of ​​her husband (a sermon of universal fellowship through the mystical revival of the ancient Greek spirit and the universal meeting of the arts), but did not identify with him when he himself leaned towards the totalitarian tendencies of the European interwar period, which lined up behind the chariot of the ancient Greeks for the purpose of politics manipulation. She believed in the Delphic Festivals and their ancient Greek background, but always maintained her own conceptions of the language, music and textiles of antiquity. She had a child with the Sicilian, Glaucus, but she was always moved by women and the struggles they fought to establish their gender. This was the Eva Palmer-Sikelianou, the first wife of Angelos Sikelianou, as studied and biographed by Artemis Leonti in her hearty book “Eva Palmer-Sikelianou. Weaving the myth of a life”, published in a juicy and extremely inventive translation by Katerina Schina from Pataki publications.
Artemis Leonti is of Greek-American origin and a professor of Young Greek at the University of Michigan, and her research work is based on Eva Palmer’s love letters to her partner Natalie Barney with whom they shared a love for performances of works by Sappho, the leader of ancient Greek lyricism, as well as the female gatherings and fellowships, which sought through the reading of poetry and artistic association to form a new and free female community. Speaking about her book and about Eva in APE-MPE, the author notes regarding the issue of women: “My archival work sought to follow the traces of lost voices, tracing women’s engagement with art, searching for their gender identity while searching for another expression, seeking to hear their voice and feel their words». Leonti’s research is also based on Eva Palmer’s work “Holy Panic” (her poetics about ancient Greek culture), as well as on a number of documents found in the Historical Archives of the Benaki Museum and in correspondence in the Archives of the Center for Asia Minor Studies or in private archives in Greece, in France, where Eva lived for long periods, and in the USA.
Born in 1874 in New York, actress and heiress to riches, Eva will die in Greece in 1952, almost immediately after Siciliano’s death in 1951. Acting, theater, literature, dance and Isadora Duncan, with her brother Raymond Duncan, who will build the first loom on which they will begin to learn , Eva and his wife Penelope (sister of Sikelianos, whom Eva had as a role model), prepare, strengthen and ultimately establish contact with ancient weaving and the loom, as well as with Byzantine monophonic music, which with the its eastern, even Turkish, roots, opposes the western polyphony under the constellation of Constantinos Psachos, professor of Byzantine music at the Athens Conservatory and Eva’s teacher. All this will form the armament for the Delphic Festivals, an armament much heavier and more sophisticated than that of the Sicilian, in an imaginative revival, where ancient Greece constitutes a drive and an infusion of life (in the manner of Nietzsche), projecting itself as a radically renovated artistic vision. Leonti points out in this regard to APE-MPE: “Eve was not looking for ancient Greek correctness. The goal was the aesthetics and performance consistency of the moment, the modern world as an entrance to the ancient, without, however, reconstructing the ancient. Here, too, there are ties to tradition, but through experiments and lessons that open up to an alternative past».
Eve’s attitude towards ancient civilization it was not general and neutral, as we can easily infer. The technique with which she made her ancient costumes (she used them as everyday clothes all day long), the way she understood Byzantine music and directed at the Delphic Festivals, all her spiritual and material pursuits were identified with an established critique of the West, capitalism and the industrial world. Leonti confirms this in our conversation: “Eva wanted a corner to stand in the climate of the First World War and the interwar period. He did not adopt the right-wing style of the Sicilian, he was against industrialization. And in this sense, it was not only by chance that her relationship with the Indian musician Korshid Naoroji joined Gandhi’s movement, claiming her national independence and the self-reliance of her cultural identity.».
RES-EMP
View the news feed and get the latest news.
