The shadow puppet performer and builder Sotiris Evgenios Spatharis (1887‒1974) is the first Greek folk artist who wrote extensive texts about his life and art. These texts, distinct, enjoyable, and useful in many ways, have a particularly interesting history of their writing, along with a great adventure involving the manuscripts that preserve them.
Spatharis wrote his "memoirs" three times: once in 1944, once from 1950 to 1955, and a third time from 1957 to 1959. The last version, written because the previous manuscripts had been lost, was published in the early 1960s, though it was "censored" and underwent many linguistic alterations. Now the lost manuscripts have been found, and this volume presents, for the first time, the two older and much more valuable forms of this significant work.
This is a "different" Spatharis: the language differs, a longer period is covered (e.g., 1894‒1953), previously unknown episodes appear, while others, familiar, are described more vividly and extensively. This charismatic and honorable but also difficult and harsh man appears as a sincere and honest storyteller, as he speaks about his weaknesses and failures with the same clarity and vividness with which he presents his virtues and successes.
Apart from their value as a significant source for the history of Greek shadow theater, as well as for the way a representative of the poor popular classes of the capital experienced the "great history," Spatharis' memoirs, published here unabridged and without linguistic interventions, are an extraordinarily important monument of language.
How many bearers of oral tradition, who could not read and struggled to write, wanted and managed to compose such lengthy autobiographical texts in our country and elsewhere? In the introduction by the editor of the edition, Giannis Kokkona, beyond the absolutely necessary biographical details of Spatharis, the reader will find the story of the writing of the texts, the efforts for their publication, and the fate of the manuscripts.
Several supplementary texts and variations of certain narratives that have been preserved, along with other texts by the author published in magazines and newspapers from 1945 to 1965, have been included in four appendices. Explanatory comments, a glossary, and an index complete the volume, while the scattered illustrations from various sources visually support the narrative.
