Veteran Greek actress Irene Papas passed away on Wednesday at the age of 96, following a long battle with Alzheimer’s.
Beyond her long and distinguished career in Europe and Hollywood, where, among others, she appeared in Michael Cacoyannis’ landmark “Zorba the Greek” and the WWII classic “The Guns of Navarone,” Papas will be remembered for her chanting of the moving and emblematic Ti Ypermacho Stratigo hymn, at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
Papas accompanied a Greek public television crew to the Bosporus metropolis shortly before Easter in 1983, and chanted the hymn in the greatest basilicas of eastern Christendom, in the face of then prohibitions against religious services at the cathedral-turned museum by Turkish authorities.
