Madre Salonico

Lead Donor of the GNO

For a second consecutive year, the Greek National Opera is travelling to Thessaloniki to participate in the 60th Dimitria Festival – the city’s most historic cultural event – with remarkably successful productions. As part of the GNO’s programme agreement with the Ministry of Culture and other Thessaloniki institutions, five opera, dance, music theatre, and musical productions will be presented there in October 2025, offering a diverse and high-quality artistic programme for all ages.

Who still speaks “Ladino”, the mother tongue of the Thessaloniki Jews? Who still sings Sephardic songs? The successful music theatre production Madre Salonico, written by the distinguished author Leon A. Nar and directed by the experienced director Victor Arditti, showcases a language on the brink of extinction, along with songs from Jewish communities in the Mediterranean, intending to bridge the present with the past as a gesture of memory.  The work is presented in a blend of “Ladino” (the Spanish-Hebrew language of Sephardic communities) and Greek.

The central characters of the work are Ido, a third-generation immigrant living in New York, and Zana, his grandmother and a once-famous singer. The two of them share experiences, memories, and concerns, focusing on the historical journey of the Thessaloniki Jews, which is intertwined with the city’s collective memory. Grandmother and grandson reminisce; Zana reflects on her successful career as a singer, performing Sephardic songs on stage while searching for her childhood love, who survived the Nazi concentration camps.