~~~~~~A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY.........

Melina Mercouri was a powerful and very beautiful woman, a goddess if you will. She was well-known as a film-star, a singer and a politician. Melina was born in 1925 and her family was quite famous because her grandfather was the mayor of Athens for several years. Although she was not a good student, Melina was*a very clever and outgoing person who had always known exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She managed to make a career as a singer and an actress, becoming an instant international star in 1960 with her Cannes winning, oscar nominated portrait of an effervescent, life-embracing prostitute who observed a scrupulous professionl moratorium: "Never on Sunday" The film was directed by Jules Dassin, a refugee from America's MaCarthyism, who later became her husband. Melina was an ardent foe of the right wing junta...a dictatorship... that ruled her homeland of Greece from 1967* to 1974. She was exiled but returned* to the new democracy and was* named Culture Minister in 1981 when* her friend Andreas Papandreau took the reins of government. She was elected to parliament as an MP* for the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement and fought relentlessly for the return of the friezes* and the statuary of* the Parthenon, known as the Elgin Marbles which still reside in the British Museum. She died on March 6, 1994 and her state funeral was an occasion of* great mourning. Tens of thousands of Greeks surged into the streets of Athens when the body of "the last Greek goddess" was returned to her native soil.

The author would like to dedicate this web site to her memory.....

A TRIBUTE TO MELINA MERCOURI 1924-1994

CONNECTIONS---(please use "back" button to return to this page)

The Sad Story of the Parthenon Marbles:
The Construction of the Parthenon:
The Stipping if the Pathenon:
The Elgin Marbles in London:
Contempoary Comments on the Looting of the Marbles:
British Views on the Return of the Marbles:
My Fairie Page: A Cool Meadow
Keavins Page: A Memorial to a Fallen MIA in Vietnam
My Home Page: See My Photo
Dedications: Two Special People Who Have Passed Over But Left an Indelable Impression on My Life

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~On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

~by Keats

~My spirit is too weak -- mortality ~Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, ~And each imagined pinnacle and steep ~Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die ~Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky. ~Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep ~That I have not the cloudy winds to keep ~Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye. ~Such dim-conceived glories of the brain ~Bring round the heart and undescribable feud; ~So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, ~That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude ~Wasting of old Time -- with a billowy main -- ~A sun -- a shadow of a magnitude.

~Verses by Roger Casement

~Give back the Elgin marbles, let them lie ~Unsullied, pure beneath the Attic sky ~The smoky fingers of our northern clime ~More ruin work than all ancient time. ~How oft' the roar of the Piraean Sea ~Through column'd hall and dusky temple stealing ~Hath struck these marble ears, that now must flee ~The whirling hum of London, noonward reeling. ~Ah! let them hear again the sounds that float ~Around Athene's shrine on morning's breeze -- ~The lowing ox, the bell of climbing goat ~And drowsy drone of far Hymettus' breeze. ~Give back the marbles; let them vigil keep ~Where art still lies, over Pheidias' tomb, asleep.

~Roger Casement was an Irish revolutionary who was hanged ~by the British during the First World War.

The Song Playing is "Kaiktsi"...a Greek Tune ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~