Klavdia, the Quiet Storm: From “Let Them Get to Know Me” to Carrying Greece at Eurovision

Klavdia didn’t walk into the Greek national final expecting to win. She walked in expecting to be seen. A subtle difference, but an important one. Speaking on Studio 4, the Greek singer opened up about her Eurovision journey, from winning the national selection with Asteromata to securing an impressive 6th place for Greece in Basel, and the emotional whiplash that came with it.

“I went to the national final with the mindset of ‘I’m going so people can get to know me, especially the Eurofans,’” she admitted. Winning wasn’t the plan. Losing was. Or at least, it was the scenario she had mentally rehearsed.

So when she did win, reality hit hard. Very hard.

For two days, Klavdia locked herself in her room, shutting out the noise, the TV panels, the excited chaos at home. Not out of arrogance. Out of survival. “I work with mental boxes,” she explained. “I panicked. Everything was loud. I told everyone, ‘Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to hear what they said.’ I just needed time to understand what was coming.”

Eventually, the panic faded. The switch flipped. The so-called “robot mode” kicked in. Once she accepted it, there was no turning back. “From the moment we go, we go,” she said. Simple. Decisive. No melodrama.

“I Was Carrying a Country”

The semi-final was where the weight truly landed. Seconds stretched. Thoughts spiralled. Klavdia admitted she ran through failure scenarios in her head, imagining what the next day would look like if things went wrong.

But one thing never wavered: her confidence in herself.

“I knew I would go on stage and deliver,” she said. “The results, you can’t control that. People vote.” What she could control was her performance, her presence, her nerve.

And more than anything, she understood the scale of the moment. “I didn’t go there for myself. I was carrying a country.”

No fireworks. No slogans. Just a sentence that explains everything.

When Expectations Collapse (In a Good Way)

Klavdia went into Eurovision with modest expectations. Sensible ones. Eurovision, after all, has a habit of humbling even the most confident artists. Instead, what came back was something she hadn’t fully prepared for.

Love. Acceptance. Pride.

“I had set very different expectations for Eurovision, and it went much, much better than I imagined,” she said. After the contest, the response from the public was overwhelming. Messages poured in. Support followed. And one comment, repeated again and again, stayed with her.

“People told me: ‘The song is so beautiful, so Greek, that we feel proud, and we don’t even care what place it gets.’”

For Klavdia, that mattered more than rankings, points or graphics on a screen. The song wasn’t just competitive. It was embraced as a song. As something people wanted to own.

Sixth place looks great on paper. History will remember it kindly. But Klavdia’s Eurovision story doesn’t hinge on numbers. It hinges on something rarer: trust.

She trusted the song. Trusted herself. Trusted that being honest on stage could still work in a contest obsessed with spectacle. And Greece trusted her back.

Sometimes Eurovision isn’t about winning. Sometimes it’s about carrying a country, putting it down gently, and hearing it say: yes, that was us.

Source: flash.gr