Dionysis Savvopoulos – The last of the greats

Prosineintelligent, eternal teenager who marked our youth, but also the Greek song. The reason for the great Dionysis Savvopoulos, the beloved “Nionio”, the last one of the great musical legends of Greece. The popular songwriter, who died on Tuesday at the age of 81, was hospitalized in a private clinic for the last few days, and his “escape” caused a pan-Hellenic sensation.

Dionysis Savvopoulos was one of the main shapers of modern Greek music, something that had been recognized by the Manos Hadjidakis, while he was a frequent interlocutor of Mikis Theodorakis. Composer, lyricist and pioneer of the school of Greek songwriters who characterized his generation and created a “school” in song with his inventive and subversive lyrics as well as with his musical combinations and his inspired productions, Dionysis Savvopoulos with his creative presence catalyzed all currents and musical trends, shaped popular culture, promoted new talents who are now well-known singers.

Nionios was also unyielding in his positions and ideals, straightforward in his political positions, and he did not hesitate to accept criticism for these positions.

He was born in Thessaloniki, on December 2, 1944. Having roots in Constantinople and Philippopolis, he was influenced at a young age by a more oriental culture. Growing up, he decided to study law at the University of Thessaloniki. Very quickly, however, he realized that such a thing neither expressed nor filled him. So, in 1963, he announced to his parents that he would give up his studies and take up music more seriously and moved to Athens. He met great success from his first days as a musician and soon became very popular in Greece, but also abroad.

In 1963, he first presented songs that he himself interpreted with his own lyrics and music. His songs are a cross section for Greek music because they established in recent years an ancient genre that before Savvopoulos was unclassified and unclassified, thus synchronizing the feeling of Greek traditional songwriting with contemporary world music trends. His interpretations and orchestrations are considered unique and unsurpassed, while his songs such as “Fortigo”, “Perivoli tou cherellos”, “Ballos”, “Dirty bread”, “Reserva” and “Tables out” no matter how many years pass, remain indestructible and always relevant. He also chose from the beginning of his career to direct his performances himself, which became reference points both for their theatricality and for the venues where they were presented. Savvopoulos discovered spaces that had another use, created musical scenes and configured them as he envisioned.

Historical for Greece are his concerts at the Olympic Stadium in Athens in 1983 (the stadium where the ceremonies of the 2004 Olympic games later took place, in which he led) and in the summer of 2017 at the Kallimarmaro Panathenaic Stadium with the participation of sixty thousand spectators. His songs are performed in the concerts of many of his contemporaries, they are taught in Greek schools, studies about his work are published and his lyrics are taught translated into Italian by the Department of Greek Philology of the Sapienza University of Rome.

Self-taught and gifted creator, an amazing performer and storyteller, Savvopoulos has released 14 song cycles on vinyl and radio, as well as live recordings of his performances. All his records are released abroad, everywhere there is Hellenism. He traveled a lot and wrote music for the theaters of Athens, for Epidaurus and also for the cinema where he won a music award for Happy Day in 1976 but refused to accept it. He presented in the discography, as a music producer, younger and first-time colleagues. He published 5 books of his lyrics, scores and texts. In December 2003 he released the compendium of all his verses, as well as two books dedicated to his life and work by Kostas Bliatkas and Dimitris Karabelas. He had his own series of shows from time to time, both on TV and radio. One of them was “Long live the Greek song”.

Dionysis Savvopoulos, in his speech during the ceremony of announcing him as an honorary doctor of the Department of Philology of the Philosophy School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in the Ceremony Hall of the AUTH, in November 2017, referred to his birth, in the “December of 1944”, where an ELASite with a motorcycle with a basket carried to the maternity hospital ready to give birth I carried him, his mother and how, as a toddler, before he even understood the meaning of the words he heard on the radio, he felt their musicality.

“The music of the words visited me before the words, then I heard nothing but phonemes, the meaning of which I understood little by little later … I have never written lyrics without music, nor do I know how to do that …. I write music and lyrics almost at the same time and in me the music and the rhythm are a little ahead… In my work, the lyrics and the music are one. And if there is poetry in what I do, it is not only in the words, but in the song, as a whole….I listened to completely different types of music, only that over the years, an insider I would say hidden, a craftsman sculpted them, uniting the different types creating a statue, a new form. Even I myself no longer know how to distinguish in my songs, which is the popular element, which is the light, which is the artistic, which is the old and which is the new” the well-known songwriter had said.

From his first works “Fortigo” and “Perivoli tou cherellos” Savvopoulos stands out for the purely personal and original style with which he attempts to renew, conceptually and musically, the Greek song. 1971 saw the release of the LP “O Ballos” – where the 18-minute title track covers the entire first side of the 33-rpm record. In 1972, the album “To Vromiko Psomi” was released, from which the twelve-minute long “Mavri Thalassa”, “Zeibekiko”, “I Demosthenus Lexis”, “Elsa se fobamai” and “Aggelos hexagelos”, i.e. Bob Dylan’s song, “The wicked messenger” in a translation and extended arrangement by Savvopoulos, stand out.

In September 1983, Dionysis Savvopoulos, celebrating his 20 years in Greek singing, turned the Olympic Stadium into a concert venue. The concert that gathered over one hundred and fifty thousand people was the culmination of the “20 years road” tour that started in June of the same year and was recorded a little later. In the same year, “Tables outside” were released, with timeless songs and frontispiece the famous “Let the dances last.”

In 1997, Dionysis Savvopoulos again found a way to shake up the waters of the Greek music scene, presenting an album dedicated to those great artists he admired and inspired him in his (up to then) thirty-year career: First of all, Bob Dylan and Lucio Dalla, but also Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Van Morisson, Cream, Jethro Tull, Spencer Davis Group, Talking Heads and Quicksilver Messenger Service. A total of twelve songs were hosted by Savvopoulos in his “Hotel”, with an All Star band next to him, consisting of Yannis Spathas (guitars and mandolin), Stavros Lantsias (keyboards and percussion), Gioti Kiourtsoglou (bass), as well as a group of elite singers for vocals (Vassilis Papakonstantinou, Orfeas Peridis, Alcinoos Ioannidis, Nikos Portokaloglou, Argyris Bakirtzis, Nikos Ziogalas, Eleni Tsaligopoulou, Lavrentis Mahairitsas, Dionysis Tsaknis, etc.) and up close the finest session musicians of the Greek studios.

In 2023, Dionysis shocked when he spoke to SKAI about the health problem he faced:

Dionysis Savvopoulos tackled “Plutos” by Aristophanes, as a music composer, in the summer of 1985 in the performance of the National Theater, directed by Luca Ronconi, in Epidaurus. In July 2013, he returned with the same play to the Argolic theater, taking over the direction, as well as the leading role in his own, new translation.

He was politically active throughout his music career. During the Junta he was imprisoned twice for his political beliefs, in August and September 1967. Of his time in prison he stated: “I have been in a cell for too long. I may have been depressed, but a light inside me was writing songs. The song “Demosthenous lexis” was written there. In fact, the first title of the song was “Passport for a temporary prisoner”. I shuffled Demosthenes after the fact to trick telecensorship. I worked them normally! I was not affected by narrowness or restriction, I was flying within myself. I always brought what happened then and lived it in the now. I wasn’t going to the past. I was bringing the past into the present.”

With his book “Why the years go by”, Pataki editions, 2024, Savvopoulos celebrates his eightieth birthday by recounting how he turned from a troubadour for “children with hair and black clothes” into a national bard.

With his autobiography, he addresses, among others, those whom he displeased at times or those who resented him for telling everyone “water and salt”. Having already passed into eternity, Dionysis Savvopoulos recalls the 1960s and the Post-colonialism to reach his maturity. As he writes, “what we call Savvopoulos does not exist. Savvopoulos is a role that I slowly developed over the years: The guy with the round glasses, the braces, later the beard, who comes on stage, makes these songs, makes comments and tells stories. He is “Savvo”, as the forgiven Tasos Falireas used to call him. It’s another one. I am me. Many times I get into that other person. It’s mine. Without me it would be a breeze.

But now I need him, because I grew up and I would like to see how I was as a child, how I behaved in my professional life, how I was as a husband, father and grandfather, and also how I was as a citizen, as a friend and as a son. Savvo is good at that.”

Let’s not forget that in 2025 it will be 50 years since the television screening of the documentary “I’m so glad Savvopoulos”, by EIRT, produced by Cinetic (Papastathis-Hatzopoulos) and directed by Laki Papastathis. It was an attempt to introduce Savvopoulos to the country’s television audience. Lakis Papastathis, with the support of the Cinetic team in the production, directed a documentary in which important performances are recorded, but also special cinematic elements indicative of the music and aesthetics of both Savvopoulos and Papastathis. It was discovered in the last months of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, by the director Ilias Giannakakis and the people of the ERT Archive and it was screened on May 14, 2025, in the atrium of the Benaki Museum / Piraeus 138, in the presence of D. Savvopoulos.

He was married to Aspa Arapidou with whom they had two sons, Cornelios and Romanos, while he also had two grandchildren, Dionysis and Andreas.