How Zorba invented Greek identity

You may not have seen Zorba the Greek, but a look at its closing dance scene will make you feel an unmistakable sense of Greekness. The arid Cretan landscape; the Aegean sea in the background; Zorba and his British buddy dancing a popular sirtaki to an evocative tune of Mikis Theodorakis. You can almost smell the aroma of freshly roasted gyros emanating from your laptop screen.

Yet for a Greek person living in 1964, the year the film was released, the whole thing might have looked pretty odd. Sirtaki is today considered the quintessential Greek dance: you can see it in every other taberna, or even performed by national orchestras. However, the dance didn’t exist at all prior to the movie. Choreographer Giorgos Provias, who was sometimes referred to as “the Nureyev of popular dance,” invented it specifically for Zorba’s last scene, grabbing inspiration from different Cretan dances. (Here you can see him dancing a traditional zebekiko).

Even though it was directed, composed and choreographed by Greeks, Zorba the Greek catered to a foreign audience. Not only is most of the dialogue in English; Anthony Quinn, the actor who plays Zorba, is not even Greek. Quinn was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and the three Greek words he utters throughout the movie betray his unfamiliarity with the language. The result comes off almost as awkwardly as the supposedly Mexican cartel members in Breaking Bad, whose Spanish was so lousy it made you want to tear your ears off. Quinn was also allegedly a terrible dancer, to the point that in Zorba’s grand finale a substitute had to perform in his place.

Based on the homonymous 1946 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek is an existentialist bromance set in a frozen-in-time Cretan village. The main character is a British intellectual suffering from writer’s block who travels to Greece to retake some family business. On the boat to Crete he meets Alexis Zorba, a life-affirming, reckless sexagenarian who ends up becoming his cook, business partner and all-purpose sidekick.

The two characters represent two opposed world views, the eros and the logos of the modern world. The Brit is a Harry Potter type, a point-of-view character who stumbles through life and has little influence in the development of the plot; he is self-contained and self-conscious, a cerebral being detached from his natural impulses. Zorba is his freer alter ego, all about improvising, following his instinct and having as much sex as possible. “If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men,” he says in one scene.

This whole scheme — the rational North-European, the sensual Mediterranean — was very much a product of its times. The 1960s were the golden age of Mediterranean anthropology, an academic trend that attempted to establish a societal paradigm suitable to the whole sea-bordering region. Anthropology as a discipline had come to fruition in the days of empire, when the protection of colonialist rules in faraway countries allowed Western scholars to freely analyze native (uncivilized) tribes in African or Asian domains. After the decolonization movements, these anthropologists had to look for work elsewhere.

Mediterranean countries offered a good alternative, but they also posed a challenge: the people these Northern European scholars were now supposed to observe were too similar to the scholars themselves. Thus these early Mediterranean anthropologists resorted to analyzing small, isolated communities in the hinterlands of Greece, Spain, or Italy; they made sure to decontextualize their subjects and portray them in absolute terms that revealed little about their relation to the modern state. Their research established that honor and shame were the defining elements of Mediterranean societies. Honor dictated men’s lives, shame defined women’s, all of them living in a pre-civilized stage where natural impulses are king.

All of this transpires in Zorba the Greek. In one scene, the Cretan locals brutally murder a beautiful widow because she dared lay with a foreigner (and most importantly, because she dared not lay with any of them). The murder is merely a subplot, but it showcases the irrepressible, honor-driven bravado that drives every Mediterranean man’s life, in the view of John Campbell and other like-minded Northern European anthropologists. Almost every dialogue between Zorba and the Brit contain references to the latter’s lack of “madness,” or to Zorba’s boundless vitality.

The film was an absolute success in Greece. Greeks embraced Zorba’s vitalist worldview as their own, as they did with the sirtaki dance and with Theodorakis’ tune. All of this played a role in Greece’s growing tourist industry; the country succeeded at projecting itself as the morally laid-back destination where one could loosen up from the restraints of civilization. But of course, this narrative backfired when the time came to blame Greece for all the negligence and economic mismanagement that lead to the financial crisis. After all, how does Zorba react when the mining project he’s been working on for weeks collapses spectacularly? He laughs, takes off his jacket, and dances.