Miltos Paschalidis

From Kalamata to the Cretan workshop

Miltiadis Paschalidis was born in Kalamata on 31 July 1969 and grew up in Athens, where he studied classical guitar at the Hellenic Conservatory under Charalambos Ekmektsoglou. He was not, on paper, headed for a stage. Between 1987 and 1992 he read mathematics at the University of Crete in Heraklion, and from 1993 to 1995 he did postgraduate work in philosophy at Rethymno. Crete, rather than Athens, is where the music took hold.

His first appearance on record came in 1991 with Chainides, the Cretan group whose self-titled debut fused island tradition with the singer-songwriter tradition of the mainland. In 1993 he helped set up the Nearchou Paraplous music workshop, which produced an album of the same name. Those years explain the instrumentation he still carries on tour today: a lyre and mandolin sit in the band alongside the electric guitar and drums, and one of his later albums, Xenios, i Kriti entos mou from 2010, is explicitly about the island he calls his internal homeland.

The solo records

The solo career began in 1995 with Paramythi me lypimeno telos, a fairy tale with a sad ending, produced by Manos Xydous of Pyx Lax. Kakes synitheies followed in 1998 and Vythismenes agkyres, orchestrated by Nikos Grapsas, in 2001. In 2003 came I moni mou patrida einai o chronos, with Sokratis Malamas among the guests. Those four albums supplied the songs that his audiences still sing back at him, and the titles of the first two are woven into the way his current shows are advertised.

He has marked his anniversaries at the same venue. Echoun perasei chronoi deka, released in 2005, was recorded live at Theatro Vrachon to mark ten years as a solo artist. In 2015 the double live album O,ti agapas den teleionei came from two sold-out twentieth-anniversary nights at the same theatre. Between them he released Psomi kai efimerida in 2007 and, in 2012, Xenoi se ena topo pou allazei, a collaboration with the lyricist Odysseas Ioannou.

Perseides, released by Ogdoo Music Group, is the record he describes as a study in loss. The title song appeared in October 2016 and the whole album was written in a single burst between 14 and 23 August that year. He said at the time that when one universe dissolves the only way to survive is to build another to live in, and that the songs were written from a clear heart rather than from a safe distance. Sti chora ton athoon followed in 2020. Alongside the music he has published four books of prose: Dyo nychtes sto Saranti in 2010, Agyristo kefali in 2017, Epoptis in 2021 and Xenodocheia in 2022.

Singing other people's songs

Paschalidis has spent as much of his career as an interpreter as he has as a writer. In November 2017 he released Tragoudia pou zoune lathraia, ten songs with music by Marios Tokas and lyrics by Alkis Alkaios, two of them previously recorded by Dimitris Mitropanos. Giota Nega and Babis Stokas took duets on it, and the sole Paschalidis composition on the record is Kalokairi stin Amorgo. The project had grown out of Stis xerolithies, a Tokas and Alkaios song he had been performing on stage for three years before he committed the collection to tape.

That side of his work was gathered up in 30 Chronia Miltos Paschalidis: Parallili Diskografia, a double LP and double CD on Ogdoo Music Group that collects 36 of his guest appearances on other artists' albums, among them tracks with Giorgos Dalaras, Vasilis Papakonstantinou and Evridiki. He has said that being called in by colleagues to sing their songs counts among his favourite working moments, and that he feels both the singer's responsibility and the writer's nerves for them.

The relationships behind that record run deep. He shared a stage with Mitropanos at the Alsos in 1999, toured Greece and Cyprus with Papakonstantinou in 2001 and 2002, and played around seventy concerts with the composer Thanos Mikroutsikos across Athens, Thessaloniki and the provinces in 2008 and 2009. In a television interview with the Cypriot broadcaster Tasos Tryfonos, reported on 1 May 2026, he said that when Mikroutsikos died he felt he had lost the last wise man in his life. He still writes with the composer in mind, he said, asking himself whether Mikroutsikos would have liked a new song. He also revealed that he had known about the composer's illness from the first day, that the diagnosis gave six months, and that Mikroutsikos lived almost three years, with the two of them celebrating the small victories together.

Where he stands in 2026

The 2026 season was built around Theatro Vrachon, the open-air theatre in the Vyronas quarry that has hosted his summer concert for years. The show was announced on 2 March 2026 for Friday 12 June, framed around thirty-one years of records, collaborations and friendships, with a promise of landmark songs, newer hits, stories and the lesser-known material that, in the venue's own phrase, lives furtively. By 24 April the first night had sold out and a second was added for Saturday 13 June. The festival's own listing eventually carried three consecutive nights, 12 to 14 June, all starting at 21:00 with doors at 19:30, priced at 17 euros in advance and 20 on the door.

The autumn brings the northern date. On Wednesday 30 September 2026 he plays the Theatro Dasous in the Seich Sou forest above Thessaloniki, as part of the Forest Festival, with the singer Pavlina Voulgaraki as special guest. The listing gives a running time of 135 minutes, presale from 17 euros, free entry for children under ten with an adult, and the usual warning for that venue that a ticket does not guarantee a seat.

He has also been more visible than usual in interviews this year, talking to Cypriot television in May and to Greek outlets through the spring and summer about songwriting, his children and politics. The through-line in all of it is the same as the one on the records: he writes when something is missing, and the audience that has followed him since 1995 turns up to hear those songs in the open air.

The band and the shape of the night

The line-up on both the June and September bills is the same seven musicians. Thymios Papadopoulos plays winds and writes the arrangements. Paris Perisynakis handles lyre and mandolin, the Cretan thread that runs back to Chainides. Niki Grana plays accordion and sings, Giannis Belonis is on piano, Lampis Kountourogiannis on electric guitars, Antonia Tsolaki on bass and Ilias Doumanis on drums. Paschalis Kolentsis and Sotiris Papakos mix the sound and Manolis Bratsis lights the stage.

That instrumentation is why the shows are advertised as combining rock energy with something gentler. The set draws on every era: the songs from the first two albums whose titles double as section headings in the publicity, the Alkaios and Tokas material, the Perseides songs and newer pieces. It is a long evening. The Thessaloniki listing gives two and a quarter hours, and the Vrachon nights run under the same summer-festival format of a single act, no support, and a crowd that treats the theatre as a meeting place rather than a seated concert hall.