ABSTRACT
Elias Petropoulos (1928-2003) was notoriously well known in Greece as an urban folklorist, but I am not alone among his friends in suspecting that he attached an equally great—perhaps even greater—importance to his poetry. Wasn’t Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis’s faithful (if turbulent) pupil a poet at heart, even in his folkloristic work? Wasn’t one of Elias Petropoulos’s main goals as a folklorist that of recovering and preserving what can properly be called, from our fin-de-siècle perspective (I am writing in 1993), the “poetic” vestiges of a now nearly vanished popular culture? Wasn’t his very methodology as literary as it was “scientific” or “empirical”? For although many prose writers (and even scientists) have versified on the side, Petropoulos’s case was different. Writing poetry for him was no pastime, but rather participated fully in the vision underlying his entire oeuvre.
