Na Thymithoume by DAVID BRUCE

I must admit, I felt daunted by the prospect of writing a piece to commemorate the horrific events that took place in Chortiatis in 1944. At the same time, I was deeply honoured and humbled that Simos Papanas, the Director of the TSSO, entrusted me with this responsibility. Simos gave me complete freedom, allowing the work to be either purely instrumental or to include a soloist. Initially, I was unsure, and my first instrumental sketches didn't seem to fully connect with the weight and gravity of the commemoration in the way I felt they needed to.

It wasn't until I encountered the profoundly moving words of Greek Resistance hero Manolis Glezos in the documentary Chronicle of an Extermination that I realized the piece needed a vocal element, with these words as the text. The poem begins humbly, listing the names of the youngest victims of the massacre - babies just 1, 2, or 3 years old. But then, with a powerful and sobering jolt, it reveals a greater truth: that the victims of such atrocities are not only those who perished, but also the generations that would have followed. "They would have had children, they would have had grandchildren."

My piece represents these 'lost generations' through a children's chorus, which at first softly echoes the names of the deceased children as though they were mourning lost school friends. Later in the piece, they join the soprano in a solemn call to 'ring the bells of memory' in honour of all the victims, so that we never forget them or the horrific events that extinguished their lives. Bells toll throughout the piece, one for each soul lost in fact, but in the final moments, a larger tintinnabulation of bells rings out - simultaneously offering a sense of hope for the future, as well as a defiant final tribute to all those who lost their lives.