biography

Famous people

Nikos Kazantzakis

Biography

How shall we love God?		Πώς πρέπει ν' αγαπούμε το Θεό;
By loving the people.		Αγαπώντας τους ανθρώπους.
And how shall we love the people?		Και πώς πρέπει ν' αγαπούμε τους ανθρώπους;
By working at leading them into the right road.		Μοχτώντας να τους φέρουμε στο σωστό δρόμο.
And which is the right road?		Και ποιος είναι ο σωστός δρόμος;
The road upwards.		Ο ανήφορος.
		Quotation from "The Greek Passion"

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Iraklion on February 18th 1883. He was the son of Michalis Kazantzakis, a dynamic trader from the village of Varvari, who one year earlier had married Maria Christodoulaki from the village of Asyroti in Rethymno County.
The couple had three more children: Anastasia (1884), Eleni (1887), and Giorgos (1890) who died in infancy.
	Kazantzakis' parents

During the rebellion in 1889 the family fled to Athens but returned immediately after to Iraklion, where Nikos began his school attendance. But in 1897 the family fled again because of the wave of violence from the Turks, which affected especially the Iraklion area. This time the family went to Naxos, where Nikos was admitted to the school: Ecole Commerciale Ste Croix. Here he among other things learned French and Italian and had his first meeting with the West European culture. The involuntary stay lasted for two years after which the family returned to Iraklion.
The young Kazantzakis went to Athens in 1902 to study law, and he graduated in 1906. One year later he went to Paris to continue his studies, and here he got into contact with the philosopher Henry Bergson who together with Nietzsche, whom he was greatly interested in, should become of great significance to his philosophic development.
Through Florence and Rome Kazantzakis returned to Crete in 1909, where he published his dissertation on Nietzsche in his own name. Until then he had published all his books and articles under various pseudonyms such as Karma Nirvami, Akritas or Petros Psiloritis.
The following year he moved to Athens, where he earned his living translating philosophic and scientific scriptures.
In 1911 he married Galateia Alexiou in Crete, but immediately after the wedding the couple moved back to Athens.
During the Balkan Wars Kazantzakis served at the Prime Minister's Special Office.
In 1914 he got acquainted with Angelos Sikelianos, and together they made "a pilgrimage and mental development journey " to the monastic society of Agion Oros (The Holy Mountain) in Northern Greece. The year after the inseparable friends travelled about Greece in the pursuit of "an awareness of the earth and our race".
In 1917 Kazantzakis tried vainly to run a coalmine at Prastova on Peloponnese together with Giorgis Zorbas, who later became a source of inspiration for his novel about Zorba the Greek.	Kazantzakis and Angelos Sikelianos
The following year he was in Switzerland, where he among other things went to see the places, where Nietzsche had spent his time.
In May 1919 Venizelos appointed him leader of the newly established ministry of health, but two months later he was already the head of the Delegation for the Repatriation of Greeks in the Caucasus. Repatriating the 150.000 Greeks was not always exactly easy, as it appears from his notes from August, where he describes the co-operation with Venizelos as "cold, unfriendly, hostile" and the work itself as "terrible and feverish".
When Venizelos' liberal party the following year lost the election, Kazantzakis left the ministry of health and went to Germany. A few months later he returned to Greece and spent the summer in Crete.
In 1922 he wrote his "Askitiki" (The Saviours of God: Spiritual Exercises) - his philosophical creed - in Berlin. Here he furthermore heard of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, which affected him greatly. In Germany he was inspired by various revolutionary principles, which put his earlier aristocratic way of thinking to the test.
In 1924 he returned to Crete, where he got acquainted with Eleni Samiou (who should later become his second wife). In the summer of the following year he left Crete, and after a visit to the Cyclades he went on to the Soviet Union as a delegate for the newspaper Eleftheros Logos. The same winter Galateia applied for a divorce, and in spring they were divorced, while Kazantzakis was in Palestine with among others Eleni Samiou. Kazantzakis returned to Greece in May 1926, where he and his travelling companions edited their travel experiences in the newspaper Eleftheros Typos. In autumn he went to Spain and Italy, where he among others interviewed Mussolini. In winter he met Pandelis Prevelakis for the first time, and this meeting turned out to be the start of a lifelong friendship.
After having gone to Egypt in January and February 1927, he settled on the Greek island of Aegina in the spring to work on "The Odyssey". He finished it in September but left it for three years before he worked through it again.
Later that year he travelled about the Soviet Union, where he got acquainted with Panait Istrati. They went to Greece together, and at a big arrangement in the Alhambra Theatre in Athens they both made speeches about the Soviet Union, with the result that he and Istrati were forced to end their political work. But the appointed lawsuit of Kazantzakis never took place, so instead he went back to the Soviet Union to meet Istrati again. They travelled about the Soviet Union together until the end of the year, when they parted and Kazantzakis continued the journey alone. In April he went to Berlin, where he wrote travel literature about the Soviet Union for the newspaper Köelnische Zeitung.
The same year (1929) he and Eleni Samiou settled in Gottesgab in Czechoslovakia, to which they returned several times throughout the following years. At that time the Greek Church tried to accuse him of atheism on account of his book "The Saviours of God", but the lawsuit - which was supposed to take place on June 10th 1930 - was cancelled.	Istrati and Kazantzakis
During the spring of 1931 he worked on a French-Greek dictionary, which he and Prevelakis were commissioned to write by a Greek publishing company. After some months on Aegina he, Eleni and Prevelakis went to France to see the large exhibition about the colonies. Then he and Eleni returned to Gottesgab, where Kazantzakis tried to write himself through his grief over his mother's death in March 1932.
Later that summer Kazantzakis and Prevelakis moved to Boulogne-sur-Seine to have better co-operation conditions. The work made slow progress, but they did succeed in making some translations. Simultaneously Kazantzakis translated Dante's Divine Comedy. In autumn he went to Spain alone, and here he was informed in December of his farther's death. This time he chose to travel through the whole of Spain to get so many impressions that he would be able to forget his feelings.
	Kazantzakis and Prevelakis
In the spring of 1933 Kazantzakis went back to Greece, where he rewrote "The Odyssey" for the fourth time, while he simultaneously wrote and published his impressions from Spain. He spent a great deal of the year 1934 writing school textbooks.
In February 1935 Kazantzakis travelled by freighter to the East, but in June he was back already in Aegina, where he had bought a plot of land in order to build a house. Most of the winter he was occupied by the fifth rewriting of "The Odyssey". The following spring was spent with various writings and building activities, but in the autumn he went to the Spain, which was ravaged by civil war, as a delegate for the newspaper Kathimerini.
In the spring of 1937 he was back on Aegina and rewrote "The Odyssey" once again. In September he travelled about Peloponnese for the newspaper Kathimerini.
He spent most of 1938 finishing the final version of "The Odyssey", which was published in December. The next year he went to England for three months and did not return to Aegina until December, when his tragedy "Protomastoras" (The Master Builder) was published with music by M. Kalomoiris. The following year he wrote about his journeys to England and travelled about Crete.
During the first year of World War II Kazantzakis was occupied by writing the first draft of his book about Zorba the Greek. The next year he succeeded in getting a travel permit from the Germans in order to make a small trip to Athens, where he met his old friend Sikelanos. He spent the rest of the war on Aegina occupied by his many projects.
After the outbreak of the civil war, he tried in 1945 to gather various socialistic groups, which resulted in the foundation of the Socialist Workers Union. The same year he spent a month in Crete as a delegate for the government in order to register the Germans' war crimes. It was a sad sight, which he described in this way in a letter for Eleni:
We are still in Chania! Our car has broken down, and we are struggling to find other tires or to make the English give us a new car. But there are not any more cars in Crete, so we are in serious difficulties. Yesterday we borrowed the bishop's car and went to some villages. Crete is in great need. In one village we were met only by women dressed in black, because the Germans had shot their husbands. Whole villages have been burnt down, everything lies in ruins. People have neither forks, glasses clothes nor wine, and they are crying, because they are unable to treat us. It goes straight to one's heart.
In the autumn he married Eleni with Angelos and Anna Sikelianos to perform the wedding. Shortly after he was appointed minister without portfolio in the Sofoulis government, but as early as in January the following year he withdrew from his post and went to England to discuss the post-war problems with representatives of the English world of literature and art. Then he went to Paris, invited by the French government, and here he decided to live abroad permanently. One year later he was appointed literary adviser for UNESCO, a job he kept for only one year, as he realized that it was impossible for him to concentrate on his writing too (in the meantime he had started to translate some of his works into French). In summer he went to Southern France and began to write "The Greek Passion". The following year the couple settled permanently in Antibes, and Kazantzakis began to write his many novels, which soon after their publication were translated into other languages.
At the beginning of 1953 Kazantzakis was admitted to a hospital in Paris, where the doctors found a disorder in his lymphatic system. Though weakened from sickness he continued the rewriting of his earlier books.
In Greece the Church planned to excommunicate Kazantzakis because of "The Last Temptation of Christ", but many people from various social classes took his side. The following year the Pope condemned the book, which caused him to write:
I am always surprised over people's narrow-mindedness and hard hearts. This is a book I have written inflamed with a deep religious feeling and with a burning love for Christ. But Christ's representative, the Pope, understands nothing, he can not feel the Christian love it is written with, but condemns it. But it is in complete agreement with the present poverty and slavery that I am being condemned.
Kazantzakis spent the whole month of December in the university hospital in Freiburg, where his condition was diagnosed as leukaemia. When he in January the next year returned to Antibes, he was told that the Greek Church had given up its persecution of him. At the same time the film company Fox asked him to write a manuscript for a film about Greece. The finished script however was not accepted.
In summer the couple went to Italy and then to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Here Kazantzakis started "Report to Greco". When they returned in August he was working on Jules Dassin's scenario for "The Greek Passion", which was shot under the title of "He Who Must Die" the following year and shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957.
In 1956 he received the Peace Prize in Vienna, and the following year he made his last journey - to China and Japan. The flight home was via Copenhagen, where Kazantzakis received treatment in Rigshospitalet. Three weeks later he was transferred to the university hospital in Freiburg, but his condition deteriorated, and on October 26th 1957 at 10:20 p.m. Nikos Kazantzakis died.
His coffin was taken to Greece and flown on to Iraklion. On November 5th the funeral ceremony took place in the Agios Minas Church, and his coffin was buried in the Martinego Bastion on the Venetian town walls.


From the ceremony in the Agios Minas Church		The funeral procession arrives at the Martinego Bastion
	The coffin is lowered into the grave

	The pictures are from Mr. Giorgos Anemogiannis' book
	"Nikos Kazantzakis 1883-1957 Eikonografimeni viografia"