Ioannes G. Papaioannou (23 January 1915 - 3 February 2000). Resquiat in pace.

John Papaioannou died four years ago this month, and I just found out about it today. Five years ago we were in Greece, living in a small apartment in a villa in Kalithea, a subdivision on the outskirts of Drepano, a 10-minute drive east of Nafplio, which Dr. P. had found for us. He was 84 then, a stooped over little man on whom the professor from Futurama could have been based. A remarkable man, he was a musicologist, a pianist of international reputation, a promoter of contemporary music and especially Greek music and composers, as well as an architect and city planner. After World War II he was instrumental in the rebuilding of much of urban Greece. In his youth he was a tall, strapping man who hiked and did sports, so different from the man I met who shuffled around his apartment in a dressing gown with a wool cap on his nearly hairless head. He was bent double, his spine having collapsed into a painful-looking dowager�s hump. But he was still active in his promotion of Greek music.

One evening he treated us to a meal at his favourite restaurant in the Piraeus, the port of Athens. The menu unvaried, consisting of a series of bite-sized portions (mesedes) of many, many courses. We started off with a hot lemon soup, and worked our way through salads, shrimps, chicken legs (I actually ate one [it was delicious] and then couldn�t look a pigeon in the face for days), and various other tidbits until we finished with enormous oranges for dessert. It took all evening and Dr. P. and hubby conversed about music all the time. Dr. P. was a little old-fashioned in his attitude to women. He had never married and was a little uncomfortable with me, I think. When Hubby was around, he conversed exclusively with him, but when alone in my company, as when Hubby went to get the car, he only made the briefest responses to my commentary.

One time we went to pick Dr. P. up at his apartment so that we could take him to the electronic music studio he had established. The residential streets in his particular suburb of Athens were largely one-way, and we had been forced to park across the street from his place, which would entail him crossing it to get to the car. He moved so slowly that I couldn�t bear the thought of him shuffling across the street and getting hit by a Greek motorist (they are terrible drivers), so I took it upon myself to turn the car around. Unfortunately, I got caught in the one-way street maze and ended up in rush-hour traffic trying to get back to his quiet boulevard. This was just six weeks after my horrendous crack-up in our Volvo and I had not driven a car since. Talk about a baptism by fire! Eventually I made it back to his apartment building, facing the right way, with Dr. P., Hubby and the kids waiting for me on the curb, wondering what had happened.

Anyway, after we left Greece Hubby sent him a letter which was never answered, and we lost contact with him. Just this morning he said, �I wonder what became of Dr. P.� and I said he should do a Google search. That�s how we know that he passed away from an abstract of a musicology periodical. He will be remembered by Greece for his architectural contributions and for his promotion of Greek composers. We will always remember him for his kindness to us.

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