![]() ![]() Karagiozis puppet, courtesy of the Haridimos Shadow Puppet Museum. Here, it was regarded by one source as a force of struggle, a new socialism of the Greek people that had infected the nation, Karagiozitis. The Greek church and political authorities under King Otto, following Greek Independence from the Ottomans in the War of 1821, censored and even banned the performance well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, until Karagiozis finally reached its majority in the 1890s. More substantially, an actual performance was viewed by the English traveler John Hobhouse in 1809 in Ioannina, Epirus, in northern Greece.įrom its first sighting, Karagiozis had to contend with a reputation that linked it to what in Greek lands was regarded as a vulgar Asiatic influence that was indecent and thereby unfit for women and children. The first reference to the Turkish performance was likely by Evliya Chelebi in the seventeenth century and the first reference in Greek lands was at the very end of the eighteenth, 1799, in Tripolitza (Tripoli), in the Morea, southern Greece, by the Frenchman Francois de Pouqueville. Karagiozis puppet, courtesy of the Haridimos Shadow Puppet Museum.Īlong a more direct and demonstrable route, theater historian Walter Puchner has argued persuasively that Karagiozis originated in the Ottoman Empire, which had spread its power and influence throughout the Middle Eastern territories defined by the boundaries of the empire, and that it arrived in Greece through the Balkan countries from Constantinople. Their connections include the parade of character types and loose sequences, the anarchic disrespect for authority, both religious and political, identification with the common class and its oppression, the comic statement, stock scenes and coined language, and the bald-headed, hunch-backed, bare-footed, phallophoric anti-hero typology that led to the Karagiozis figure itself and to the Greek performance that bears his name. ![]() Kakridhis have argued for and against a continuity through pre-classical mime, Aristophanes, Commedia dell’Arte, Byzantine mime, and Pulcinella, to the Turkish Karagöz performance and then to the Greek form of that performance, Karagiozis. Karagiozis puppet, courtesy of the Haridimos Shadow Puppet Museum.Ĭlassicists, theater and drama historians including Allardyce Nicoll, Hermann Reich, Cedric Whitman, Alex Solomos, Athanasios Fotiades, Metin And, and P. Going forward, Karagiozis spawned a comic tradition that served Greece well up to modern times - through epitheorisis, or review performances, Karlos Koun’s theatrical renditions of Karagiozis, and satiric comedy on the stage.* Karagiozis as doctor. Karagiozis, Greek shadow puppet theater, has a history in Greece that links conceptually with one line of development that goes back to pre-classical times, and with a second, more direct connection, that positions the form in Greece from 1799, the earliest date at which the term shows up in a documented source. ![]()
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