by Christos Zampounis

An impudent cat, one of those who rule the night on the island, approached the Adorno String Quartet, cast an inquisitive glance at the musicians, and then departed with the same grandeur as he had appeared. “Chamber music in my lairs? How strange people are all the time. Let’s go see my kitty who’s in heat,’ he might have thought. A strange Classical Music concert in Patmos. Hmm. Rather the opposite. Perhaps the divine island has the most lovers of serious music, as they used to call it, per square meter in the Aegean. We are about two hundred spectators, the Square of Mother of God the Saviour could accommodate so many, with strictly numbered invitations, that we responded to the invitation of Nanda Geroulanou, wife of the Professor of Medicine Stefanos Geroulanou. Nanda did not start the initiative alone. He was accompanied by the famous Italian pianist Roberto Pressedo and the artistic director of the Barga Opera Festival of the same name. Immersing those present in “the best way we have of digesting time,” according to W.H. Auden, was universal, as was the mental and spiritual uplift that Apocalypse Island causes anyway. With or without cats.