What do Hitler and Mussolini, Ben-Hur, Charlie Chaplin, Theseus and the Minotaur, Romeo and Juliet, Salome, Antiochus and countless other real or fictional personalities have in common? They all appear as protagonists in the Greek shadow theatre repertory. In a nutshell, the Greek shadow theatre (called, like its central character, Karaghiozis) is an offspring of the Ottoman Karagoz; it was transported to the Hellenic peninsula towards the end of the Ottoman era and flourished from 1890 onwards; we can situate its golden age in the 1930s and, after a temporary death in the mid-1970s, it is currently being resuscitated, and is trying to regain some momentum, with the use of contemporary technology, including the ubiquitous social networks. Thanks to its very flexible plot structure and most hospitable cast, all kinds of mythical and historical events can be represented on its two-dimensional screen by its equally two-dimensional puppets, whose voices all come from the multi-tasking puppeteer's throat.

Space and time are indicated, as in many other theatrical and fictional genres, through a simple mention of the location and the era; the audience does all the work in their minds, completing the minimal settings and travelling gladly in time, in order to interact with characters and situations as distant from each other as they are (most of the time) from the viewer. In Karaghiozis performances, the Hellenisation of the genre was sealed with plays inspired by episodes of the Greek War of Independence, during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Thus history and real historical facts entered the plots early on and historical plays continued to represent a big part of the repertory, given the desire of the audience to relive legendary moments of recent and less recent Greek history. Tears and laughter blend together in all the ‘heroic’ (as they are called) plays of the repertory, from Athanassios Diakos (which includes the horrendous roasting of the hero on a spit, while Karaghiozis as a church warden keeps cracking one joke after another) to Karaghiozis the Chief Doctor of Hitler.