ARISTOTLE was born in the village of Stagira in northern Greece, in 384 BCE. At seventeen he moved to Athens and was a devoted pupil of Plato for twenty years. Then, he was summoned by King Philip of Macedon to tutor his son Alexander, who later became known as Alexander the Great. Upon Aristotle ’ s return to Athens, he started his own school, the Lyceum. He lectured there for twelve years and is believed to have…
Continue readingPlato (427–347 BCE) came from a wealthy, aristocratic Athenian family and, at twenty, became a follower of Socrates. He left Athens in 399 BCE on the death of Socrates and, following a sojourn in Megara, travelled to Egypt, Italy and Sicily. He returned to Athens in 387 BCE and founded his own school, the Academy. Lasting a millennium, it is considered the first university of the Western world. Plato ’s entire body of work has survived…
Continue readingStratis Doukas was born in 1895 on Moschonisi island,off the Asia Minor coast, and settled in Greece as a refugee after the Greek–Turkish war (1919–22). He served as a soldier in the Greek army in the First world war and in the ill-fated Asia Minor campaign. A Prisoner of War’s Story, published in 1929, established his reputation as an innovative writer of a new unadorned first-person narrative style. His writing encompasses lyrical prose, arts journalism…
Continue readingEpicurus was born in 341 BCE and was a pupil of the Platonist Pamphilus of Samos, and the Democritean philosopher Nausiphanes of Teos. He began to teach when he was thirty-two, first in Mitylene on Lesbos and then in Lampsacus on the nearby mainland. In 306 BCE he moved to Athens with his loyal disciples; he purchased a property with a garden and established his school there. The Garden, as the school came to be…
Continue readingStelios Kouloglou is a writer, journalist and director. He is the author of several books, including novels, memoirs and political history. He was a correspondent in Paris and Moscow during the perestroika era and, from 1992 to 1995, covered the war in the former Yugoslavia. His TV show, Reportage without Frontiers, for which he was editor-in-chief and presenter, was described as ‘the symbol of investigative journalism in Greece’. In 2008 he founded tvxs.gr, Greece’s first…
Continue readingMargarita Liberaki (1919–2001) entered onto the literary stage at a young age. Her first novel, The Trees, appeared in 1945, when she was still in her mid-twenties, and was followed shortly after by the acclaimed Straw Hats (published in English as Three Summers). Ιn 1946 she moved to Paris, where she wrote The Other Alexander. The book was first published in 1950 in Greek, followed by English and French editions which met with immediate success.…
Continue readingNikos Engonopoulos (1907-1985) was born in Athens with family roots in Constantinople on his father’s side and in Hydra on his mother’s side. In 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, his family moved to Constantinople where he attended a private school. He continued his education in Paris as a boarder at high school from 1919 to 1927. After returning to Athens and completing his national service, he enrolled in the School of…
Continue readingEmmanuel Roïdes (1836-1904) was born into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Syros, but spent much of his childhood and early life in Europe. In 1841, his family moved to Genoa, where he lived through the revolution of 1848. He returned to Syros in 1849 and completed his schooling there, before leaving once again to pursue his university studies in history, literature and philosophy first in Germany and later in Romania. From 1864,…
Continue readingHippocrates was born around the year 460 BC on the Greek island of Kos and legendary genealogy traces his paternal heritage directly to Asclepius and his maternal ancestry to Hercules. He was probably trained at the Asclepieion of Kos, and took lessons from the Thracian physician Herodicus of Selymbria. Throughout his life Hippocrates taught and practiced medicine, traveling as far as Thessaly, Thrace, and the Sea of Marmara. He died, most probably in Larissa, at…
Continue readingIlias Venezis was born in Ayvali, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) in 1904. Ιn 1922, when 1.5 million Greeks were displaced from Asia Minor, eighteen-year-old Venezis was taken prisoner and sent to serve as forced labour for fourteen months in central Anatolia. This experience informed much of his writing, including his novel Number 31328. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, histories, travelogues and more. His work has been translated in many languages. In…
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