Nikos Kouris recalls with clarity the balmy summer night in Corfu fifteen years ago when his mother pulled up a chair, looked him in the eye and told him that he was not, in fact, the son of a construction worker — he was the product of her affair with Greece’s most celebrated contemporary composer.
“It was a bombshell,” recalls the now 55-year-old jeweller and radio producer, of the moment he was told that Mikis Theodorakis, who wrote the scores to Zorba the Greek and Serpico, was his father. “I took it calmly, though. I did not go off the rails.”
Theodorakis’ heirs, however, refuse to believe his story. After the composer died aged 96 early last month his children, Margarita and Giorgos, launched