Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha: The windmills adventure

Item

Title

Creator

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

Spatial Coverage

Online

Athens See all items with this value Athens->Searchculture.gr

Relation

Faces of the hero

Subject - keywords

Novel

Date

7 February 2021

Date Issued

2021

Abstract

In a Spanish village in the early 17th century, a middle-aged nobleman, Alonso Quixano, becomes obsessed with reading chivalric novels, until he eventually loses his mind and decides to become a knight errant himself. He changes his name to “Don Quixote”, digs out a rusty ancestral suit of armour from his storeroom, christens his exhausted horse “Rocinante”, convinces a naive neighbour, Sancho Panza, to follow him as his squire, and sets off “to seek adventures, setting wrongdoings to right, exposing his life to difficult situations and dangers that, once he has overcome them, will make his name and his reputation immortal”. In Don Quixote, one of the fundamental – and funniest – novels of European literature, Cervantes creates a delightful parody of the heroes of chivalric romance. His daydreaming hero comes into head-on conflict with reality, and decides to replace it with the ideal. He may be doing battle with windmills, but in his mind they as huge as those of the epic hero. In a world where the gods are abandoning him, the hero desperately seeks to lose himself in a myth that can instruct him what his next step and his next phrase will be.

Yiannis Niarros, Thanos Tokakis and Galini Hatzipaschali interpret, under the direction of Ektoras Lygizos, part of the novel of Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, The Adventure of the Windmills.

(Edited description from organiser’s website)