by Christos Zampounis

For her he was a strong father figure and a release from the shackles of her previous marriage. For him, another trophy and an emotional connection with his Greek soul.

In February 1960, in a well-calculated move, Maria Callas, born Maria Kalogeropoulou, invited journalist Marlis Sefer to her suite at the Ritz in Paris for an interview. The next day, the French newspaper “France Soir”, with a circulation of 1,000,000 copies, headlined in capital letters on its front page: “CALLAS TOLD ME: I DON’T WANT TO SING ANYMORE. I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A CHILD.”

According to Nick Gage, aka Nikos Gatzogiannis, author of the exemplary book “Greek Fire”, Callas was worried about losing Onassis, and wanted to bring him before the “fait accompli”, by making the desire to have children, public. She eventually lost his child, following her hasty decision to give birth prematurely by caesarean section. The baby boy who came out of her womb developed breathing problems, and during his transfer from the private clinic, which did not have the necessary equipment to keep him alive, to another hospital, he passed. On the way, the nurse asked her what name she would like to give him and she answered without hesitation: “Homer”, after the beloved Onassis’s uncle. Over the next fifteen years, their relationship would go through a thousand waves, but the love they felt for each other would remain unquenchable. Even after the wedding union of the Greek shipowner with the widow of the President of the United States of America, Jackie Kennedy, he continued to visit her in the apartment he had bought for her on George Mandel Avenue and to stand by her in the deep depression that he had caused her . In the French capital, both were to take their last breath, the first in 1975, and the second in 1977. Just yesterday, on December 2, 2023, the “divina” or “assoluta” as it went down in history, would turn 100 years old.

It is customary for leading personalities, mainly of Letters and Arts, and less of Politics, to be honored in this kind of anniversaries. In the area of Business, a relative economy is created, even though they themselves, by creating institutions, take care, on their own initiative, of their reputation. It is surprising, for example, that the most famous Greek of the 20th century does not have a single street or square named after him. On the contrary, the Greek State took care, after much effort and suffering, to inaugurate, a few weeks ago, a museum in a three-story neoclassical building on Mitropoleos Street, dedicated to the Greek priestess of the Opera. The Municipality of Athens, which took the initiative, collected, through purchases and private donations, about 1,000 of her personal items, where the great love of her life is depicted in a single photograph. The same applies to the Museum of the “Alexander Onassis Charitable Foundation” with personal items of Aristotle Onassis, a few hundred meters further, on Aishynou Street in Plaka, which is not open to the public, however.

Christina is said to have disliked her stepmother, so on the one hand the omission is explained. On the other hand, however, it is unjustified, and we hope that together with the discrepancies in the dates and the mistakes in the Report, the historical truth will be corrected, because apart from being a soprano, Maria Callas had an interesting personal life, which is worth capturing. Let’s look at Cinema, Theater and biographies, which don’t have such a “museum” approach to myths, because that’s what it’s all about.