Do we really need another book about Karagiozis?… Certainly not, if it is yet another glossy album designed to bring a colorful touch of graphic folk art into our urban salons. Certainly not either, if it is yet another pompous study aimed at revealing the origins of the caricatured figures of the shadow theater from Aristophanic comedies or from the Eleusinian Mysteries.
What we definitely need, however, are some different kinds of studies that will care to investigate the phenomenon of the unexpected blossoming of shadow theater in 20th-century Greece, which will attempt to unravel the mystery of the invasion and spread of a pre-modern artistic institution in the lands of a society wholeheartedly surrendered, from a certain point onward, to the visions of urban modernization and Europeanization.
The reasoning developed in the pages of this volume precisely seeks to place domestic folk theater within the broader historical context of the Eastern Question and the Ottoman reforms of the Tanzimat, the restructuring of the southeastern borders of Europe in the years that were pregnant with the two World Wars.
And it attempts to trace step by step the journey of a people that moved from laboratory to factory production of entertainment for the classless masses of spectators and readers of a market that was now leaning toward the phenomenon we usually cover with the inelegant but so useful term of "globalization".
