The Reference Point for Alexis Zorbas is coming to Palaiochori of the Municipality of Aristotle in Eastern Halkidiki! Did you know that the Kazantzakean hero lived in Palaiochori for 22 years? Did you know that the Municipality of Aristotle is restoring a house dedicated to his life and relationship with Nikos Kazantzakis? What?! You didn’t? Then read his true story below and organize a trip – experience to Eastern Halkidiki next Spring! You will tour the lush green area, see the house that functions as a digital historical flashback, follow his magical mountain routes (trekking), go biking, eat “Alexis Zorbas' mezeklikia”, i.e. appetizers, in the village taverns, visit the wineries of Megali Panagia, take part in the revival of customs, visit monasteries, and do so much more!
You can find hotels here: Link
And let’s go!
A native Macedonian, Zorbas was born, according to one source, in the mountainous Katafygi, a village built at an altitude of 1,450 m in the Pierian Mountains, when the country was still under Ottoman rule. Today, the village belongs to the Municipality of Velventos, Kozani. Others claim that
his place of origin was Kolindros, near Katerini, from where his father, Fotis, an owner of a herd of sheep and goats, moved to Katafygi, along with his wife, Evgenia, and Giorgos’ siblings, Giannis, Xenofon and Katerina. From a young age, Giorgis herded his father's sheep and goats, while, from the age of 15, he took on the entire responsibility of the herd. When a disease struck that decimated the animals, he was forced to move for survival reasons. He set off on foot for Mantemochoria in Halkidiki to find work in a mine. He arrived in Lismporo (present-day Stratoniki) and was immediately hired as an unskilled laborer by a French company that was exploiting the rich in iron pyrite, silver, zinc, and lead mine of Madem Lakkos. There he met the mine's foreman, Giannis Kalkounis, and married his daughter, Eleni.
He worked in the kilns of the neighbouring village of Sidirokafsia (commonly known as Siderokapsa), in Liaregkova (Arnaia), in Novo Selo (Neochori), and in Machalas (Stagira). Meanwhile, he started a family and had twelve children with his wife, eight of whom eventually survived. Among those who did not make it, was his fourth son, Alexis. Amid the world-changing events in Macedonia brought about by the liberation war of 1912-1913, his beloved Eleni died. The mine then closed down due to the Balkan Wars, leaving him without a job and with a bunch of underage orphans. The despair of the grief-stricken father, however, was no match for his pride, which was comparable only to Zorbas’ height. To support his family, he returned to Eleftherochori in Pieria, outside Kolindros, close to his brother, Giannis, where he did whatever odd job he could find (blacksmith, woodcutter). After traveling around Southern Russia, he returned as a worker at the Pravita mine in the Taxiarchis region of Polygyros, Halkidiki. On nearby Mount Athos, he then met Kazantzakis, who lived with Sikelianos in the cells of various monasteries, reading Dante, Buddha and the Holy Gospels.
When, in May 1919, Kazantzakis was appointed by Eleftherios Venizelos as director of the newly established Ministry of Welfare, he was assigned to travel to the Caucasus Mountains to repatriate thousands of Greeks who were in danger of being exterminated by the hardships due to the turmoil that
followed the Bolshevik revolution. He then sent a letter to Giorgos Zorbas inviting him to take part in the expedition. The haughty and daring heart of the impulsive Giorgis Zorbas fluttered with the message. He gave up everything and rushed to Athens.
The expedition began in the middle of July 1919, led by Kazantzakis and his compatriots, Iraklis Polemocharakis, Giannis Konstantarakis, and Giannis Angelakis, to reach Tbilisi, Kars, Kuban, as well as Baku and Yerevan with the aim of transporting fellow-national refugees. As modern Argonauts of the Black Sea in the disintegrated yet vast former Tsarist empire, they devoted themselves entirely to the humanitarian struggle for the salvation of the Greeks. They managed to bring approximately 150,000 Greeks to Thessaloniki by ship, who took root in the lands of Thrace and Macedonia.
And this was Kazantzakis' last live contact with his eternal friend, Giorgos Zorbas. After the end of the mission, they were separated forever. But they were never forgotten. The expedition to the Caucasus Mountains was Zorbas’ last great expedition. A few years later, he settled in his own magnesite mine in Nis, Serbia, from where he telegraphed to his litterateur friend: “I have found a green rock of great beauty, come immediately”. And when the author, then in his most artistically productive period, replied to him between his numerous trips, sometimes from Italy and sometimes from Berlin, that he could not go, Zorbas would tease him by dictating to the assistant writing his letter: “Boss, please forgive me, but you are a bookworm. For once in your life, you poor thing, could see a beautiful green rock, and you didn’t”. Perhaps with some regret, Kazantzakis later wrote that he would choose Zorbas as his spiritual guide. “Because he had everything a bookworm needs to be saved […] to give new breath to the eternal everyday elements, the air, the sea, the fire, the woman, the bread; the confidence of the hand, the coolness of the heart, the bravery to mock his own soul”. These poetic words did not reach Zorbas. Since 1926 he lived in Skopje where he managed a mine.
He made money and squandered it because the riches were sudden and he had never had them before, but mainly because he knew he wouldn't take them with him to the grave. He had taken his daughter, Katina, with him, who married the Serb Jovan Janda there. But just as he felt liberated from the pressure of necessity, with Serbia's entry into World War II, the seizure of the mines by the German occupiers, the hunger, and Nazi slavery, Zorbas could not withstand all this. He died there in 1941 and was initially buried in the old cemeteries, south of the city. Years later, his grandchildren on Katina's side, the architect Anna Geiger, who, until her death in 2002, was president of the Yugoslav branch of the International Society of Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis, and her brother, the merchant Vangelis Janda, transported their grandfather's bones and placed them in the family grave at the “Butel” cemetery in Skopje. His grave was located many years later by a Greek journalistic mission to Skopje. In fact, Mikis Theodorakis visited it in 1997 after his magnificent concert with his project “Zorba the Greek”, in the presence of the then president of the country, Kiro Gligorov, in the opera hall of the People's Theatre of Skopje.
In the two decades that elapsed from the separation of Nikos Kazantzakis and Giorgis Zorbas until the latter's death, the author did not cease to be interested and concerned about the course of his old friend and collaborator’s life. The year 1941, amidst the hardships of the German occupation, found the world's most translated Greek writer isolated on the island of Aegina. That was where the bitter news of Zorbas’ death reached him. In one of the most beautiful pages of the Report to Greco he wrote: “At home there was a letter with a mournful envelope waiting for me; the stamp was Serbian, I realized. I was holding it, and my hand was shaking. […] I closed my eyes and felt hot tears slowly roll down my cheeks. […] What should I do, I pondered all night, what should I do to exorcise his death? […] Memories are thrown at me, pushing each other, rushing and girding my heart in fury; they open and
close their mouths, they yell at me to pluck Zorbas from the earth, from the sea, from the air and resurrect him. Isn't this the duty of the heart? Isn't that why God created it? To resurrect loved ones? Resurrect him!”. And that's what he did. The following day, after a sleepless night, he took a piece of paper, laid down on the sun-baked tiles of the terrace of his house in Aegina, which overlooked the bare mountains of Salamis, and began to write a few lines of this “synaxarium” about Zorbas. The project was completed after two years, in May 1943. However, the Zorbas who made it into the pages of the book titled Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas was not the Giorgis Zorbas of Prastova and Caucasus. Kazantzakis changed his name, probably inspired by the ancient Greek prefix “alexi-” (as in alexikeravno, i.e. lightning rod, or in alexisferos, i.e. bulletproof) to create a character who resists with “the demonic rebellion of man to defeat weight and matter, the ancestral curse”.
He shifted the plot from Mani to his greatly praised homeland, Crete, and transformed the hero by endowing him with invincible strength that embodies the very essence of life in all its manifestations. In moulding his hero, the narrator-author contrasted the light-filled Dionysian spirit of the ever-active Zorbas with the inaction of Kazantzakis, who was once influenced by Buddhist Zen, which eliminates the “ego”. Several scholars of the work of the great Cretan writer consider the impetuous influence of the elderly worker sincere and beneficial, and the liberating charm he exerted on Kazantzakis’ spirit fateful. In the spring of 1957, a few months before he died, Kazantzakis received in Antibes, Southern France, where he was living, a letter from Zorbas’ eldest son, then Lieutenant colonel, Antreas, who protested strongly because the book had supposedly disgraced his father and had allegedly insulted his entire family. The old and sickly but intellectually evergreen Kazantzakis responded immediately with a brief letter in which he noted: “Rarely have I loved and honoured someone the way I have Zorbas. I presented him in my writings as a superior free man and he is now glorious for thousands of people in Europe, in America”. No more words were needed for the complaining son, obviously emboldened by the author's myriad spiteful enemies. Besides, if it weren't for the uncompromising creator Kazantzakis, who triumphantly bestowed immortality on the memory of readers and delivered Zorbas to art with a new autonomous, eternal existence, who would remember the real, everyday, tortured Giorgis Zorbas
today? A heartfelt fighter for life who never considered his real trials as a mythical feat? Even if he had never set foot in the swain-bearing island of Crete.
SOURCE: Link
