Costas Hardavellas has passed away – The historical broadcasts and the difficult childhood years

When television still had strong doses of romance, in the 1980s, I remember as a child watching a gentleman on the screen who, although I felt that he was somehow looking at us watching him from the living room of our house, deep down I believed that he wanted us to listen to him more and watch him less. He was calm and animated simultaneously, talked a lot but politely gave the floor to the other gentlemen, and always gave a lot of information. This is how the first messages of journalism from a TV pulpit were. Starring a great journalist, Costas Hardavella was then one of the three hosts of the legendary show “Reporters”.

The tragic irony is that this voice that invited us to listen to the reports, the narratives, the interviews, and discover the world of journalism, is the one that Kostas Hardavella sadly lost some time ago due to his battle with carcinoma…

Identified with reporting and the good life, a gentleman in all of it, in his final hours, his former colleagues and friends described him as a charming blend of a man who lived life and investigated it in the background by looking into the camera and sharing information with the world.

His death has plunged his family into mourning, his wife Maria and his son Constantine, who have stood by him throughout the years and given him everything he was deprived of as a child by his family. It is no coincidence that Maria said goodbye to him: “You left as you lived: victorious! Rest now, close to the people that life deprived you of when you were a baby and you always longed for, Mama Calypso and Papa Constantine. Farewell, my Giant…”

Together for 32 years, they traveled miles of love and companionship, breaking the tradition that wanted Hardavella to stay for more than 1.5 years at his marriage. Two marriages preceded it, but Maria was destined to be the woman of his life. The day they held each other’s hand they knew…

“The calendar read September 26 of the (leap year) year 1992. We arrived together at the Holy Metropolis of Athens, the groom at the wheel, the bride a passenger, and my best friends and my bridesmaids in the back seat. Vassilis Terlegas was playing loudly on the radio. The wedding ceremony was scheduled for 19.30 but Kostas had made a mistake in the time and we had printed invitations that said 19.00. On arrival at the church, we met the previous bride and some people thought it was bad luck. Hundreds of guests barely fit in the church. Cheerful most of them, they did not stop making noise during the sacrament but the priest did not for a moment remark on them. He too joined in the joy, smiling constantly at the groomsmen, the late and only Kakia and George Genimata. Five months pregnant myself, I wore a tight and short wedding dress and when it came time for the (long!) “greeting”, I was left barefoot to endure the standing. We were almost finished when we saw a group of Japanese tourists arriving. Fascinated by the way the sacrament was performed, they too stood in the long line to greet us, backpacks slung over their shoulders. They wished us well (in Japanese!) and presented us with a set of coffee cups he bought from a tourist shop to commemorate the custom. At the party that followed we chose the song “I did it my way”, changing the lyrics to “We did it our way” and that is exactly what we practiced in the years that followed. We celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary by continuing to defy the laws of probability, in the easy and the hard. Perhaps, because as our Constantine says, “Growing up I realized that other people are normal, we are not.”

The traumatic childhood years

At a young age, Kostas Hardavellas lost his mother and father. As he had mentioned in an interview: “I have erased the word mother from my life because my mother left when I was five years old. The things that hurt you, you erase them. It’s what I often say, it’s a photographic film that you burn so it doesn’t hurt. So, the word mom for me has been erased since I was five years old. I never said it, I never used it, and it’s not a word I use. The loss of my father when I was 2 months old and my mother when I was 5 years old has scarred me. To this day I have an insecurity, of acceptance, does the other person like me?”

In some interviews he gets more revealing: ‘It’s an open wound that hurts you until the end of your life. Father and mother cannot be replaced, not by a woman, not by a child, not by a friend, nothing. It is a bitterness that I have carried all my life. I am a person who never had a caress from my parents in my life, so I have always sought care and love from the people around me.”

The historic “Reporters”, the much-discussed “Gates of the Unexplained” and the controversy with Angeliki Nikolouli

A phenomenal show with pure journalistic content that premiered on 13 December 1981 on the then YENED (and a year later ERT2) was “The Reporters”, with hosts Kostas Resvanis, Kostas Hardavella and Yannis Dimaras.

Three reporters from “Neon”, dealing with free and cultural reporting. Resvanis was replaced in the second show by George Lianis, with the trio establishing themselves on television sets for seven seasons.

The show aimed to make revelations and through its seven seasons touched on topics such as child labour, Agias Athanasia of Egaleo, Nikos Koemtzis and the order, Theodoros Venardos, the Palestinian issue, the Cypriot issue, the Greek-Turkish issue, the Huda and the assassination of Sotiris Petroulas, etc.ά. At the end of 1988 the show completes its cycle and several years later the three journalists will meet to do their own retrospective.

Speaking about “Reporters” in interviews, Hardavellas will say “All three of us, George Lianis, Yannis Dimaras and I, loved this show. The ratings were huge because it was the first TV show dealing with social issues. Reporters lasted until 1989. We were cut at one point because we were interviewing with Stelios Kazantzidis talking about the Jewish lobby. When the problem was over, we resumed the show and did a lot of assignments in Lebanon, in wars. It was a different kind of television. A woman from Patras called me and said “Save me, I have my heart, I’m dying and they won’t operate on me because I’m not on an insurance fund.” I took the camera with me and we left for Patras. I took the woman from her house and we drove her to the Evangelism and I asked her to go into surgery immediately. This woman went into surgery and was saved and every Christmas she sends me a card saying ‘thank you for being alive’.”

Kostas Hardavellas entered the magical world of journalism during the Junta period when he was hired as a journalist at the newspaper Ethnos. His first television appearance was in 1977, presenting the show “Invitation to the Studio” on ERT. He participated in the entertainment show “Saturday Morning, Sunday Night” in 1978, to be followed by “Reporters” with his friends and colleagues Lianis and Dimaras.

In 1993, after the opening of private television, Kostas would find himself on Mega, with a double presence: the “60 Minutes Without Editing” and “Reporting in the Fog”. Transfers followed, in 1994 to SKAI and in 1995 to Star, where he remained until 1999. Then he started with the show “Premiere”. In 2000 he went to ANT1 and presented the news show “9th Commandment”, and the following year he returned to state television, specifically ERT1.

In 2002 the journalist decided to move to a channel that no longer exists, Alter, where he presented three newscasts: “Unseen World” (2002-2011), “No Editing” (2003-2004), and “The Gates of the Unexplained” (2004-2010).
“The Mysteries of the Unseen” (2004-2004).

“The Mysteries of the Unseen” (2004-2004)

“The Mysteries of the Unseen” (2004-2004).
Despite his long television career, Kostas Hardavellas, speaking to Studio 4 and Nancy Zambetoglou and Thanasis Anagnostopoulos, had revealed that the show that was “unfortunately still” chasing him was “The Gates of the Unexplained”. “Unfortunately, the Gates of the Unexplained is still chasing me. It’s the only show that when people see me on the street they ask me when I’m going to do it again. It’s left in the world. It was very hard to keep a balance of not being graphic, it’s very easy when you’re talking about aliens and ghosts. We struggled to put in elements that made you reflect and that it wasn’t all a fairy tale.”

Unforgettable shows in which the whole country watched Yuri Geller doing magic and bending spoons. “Yuri Geller had requested that we have broken clocks, transistors, and televisions. He told the audience to concentrate on these objects and say ‘It worked’ and after a while, they all worked. I still don’t know how it happened… That show was getting crazy ratings and everyone was calling to ask how to fix their broken items.”

The closure of the Alter station would cause one of the biggest earthquakes in the media business with employees literally left “on the air” and him describing the unpleasant experience the way he did all the reporting in his life: realistically and truthfully. “The first spontaneous response I get when asked ‘how do you feel about what’s going on at Alter’ is that I feel like a b@l@k@. My contract with Alter has expired since August 2011, of course without any financial obligations to me being met on the part of the station’s management. I worked normally like all of us without being paid, and the few times that salaries were paid, I agreed to opt out and wait since – of course! – people who had survival problems had to be paid first. When I was asked to continue the shows and in September I did so, unpaid and no longer part of Alter’s staff, because I had hoped that if we kept the station “on the air” maybe something would change. Unfortunately, none of the promises made at the time were kept. I feel cheated, deceived, I feel like an asshole, but now for me the loss is final. This is a tragedy that leaves behind human victims and shattered lives.”

In 2013 he joined the staff of GR TV, where he presented “Unseen World”. Shortly afterward, she “moved” to Extra 3, with the same show, followed by Epsilon TV, where she remained until 2016, presenting the station’s main bulletin and two shows for a short time: “Developments” and the entertaining “All the Good Ones Fit”.

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