Sadness is soaked into the fibre of every Greek song that isn’t trying to sound like an American or British song

Sadness is soaked into the fibre of every Greek song that isn’t trying to sound like an American or British song. Four centuries of Ottoman rule prior to the twentieth century would be enough to see to that, although we Greeks hardly needed any encouragement. Even at the peak of Greek civilisation 2,500 years ago, when things were going pretty well for us, we still made time to invent Greek tragedy.

P. Paphides, Broken Greek (2020), kindle loc. 889