Traveling the globe to spread the word of Kazantakis

Giorgos Stanisakis is a tireless globetrotter but it’s not business or leisure that has taken him to more than 90 countries in the past 27 years; it’s his passion for the celebrated Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis and his mission, as president of the International Friends of Nikos Kazantzakis Society, to make the writer’s work known all around the world.

“I’ve been all over, from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which Kazantzakis visited in 1929, to Paraguay, New Zealand, Korea and Iceland,” he says as he prepares for a tour of Mexico, Costa Rica and Argentina on the occasion of celebrations dedicated to the writer all over Latin America.

Stanisakis pays his own way and only travels to places where he has been invited to speak by representatives of the society – which currently boasts more than 6,000 member in 122 countries – or Greek diaspora groups and universities, among others.

“I am pleased because we have succeeded in making people who had never heard of Kazantzakis fall in love with him and also spreading interest in his work to different parts of the world,” says Stanisakis.

Based in Geneva, the 70-year-old Stanisakis can still recall when he first encountered the writer’s work.

“In the 1950s and 60s, Kazantzakis was seen by many Greeks as a godless communist, the antichrist. I had an uncle who was a high-ranking priest and Kazantzakis was banned in our home. He was also banned in my school, a religious school in Piraeus. They didn’t exactly say, ‘Don’t read him,’ but they were very cautious,” remembers Stanisakis.

“In 1960 I left for university studies and went to Bordeaux. ‘Report to Greco’ was the first thing I bought to read and it was in French too. I was fascinated. It satisfied me in every respect and I could see that it was opening new horizons to me.”

In 1968, while in Geneva, he met Kazantzakis’s wife, Eleni, at a gathering to protest the dictatorship in Greece. He wept during the encounter and soon the two became fast friends. That was when he first got the idea of starting a society of friends of Kazantzakis, because he was concerned that 11 years had gone by since his death and he seemed to have been forgotten.

The idea came to fruition 20 years later. Stanisakis, meanwhile, after completing a degree in law and political sciences, got a job in Geneva as an assistant to the dean of the local law school. He later went on to serve as legal counsel to CERN, from which he retired in 2005.

The society was founded in 1988 in the presence of Eleni Kazantzaki and has since become the most active ambassador of the writer’s work.

“I have been to some wonderful places and had some unforgettable experiences,” says Stanisakis. “Like in Azerbaijan, where I came across the graves of thousands of Black Sea Greeks at a cemetery in Baku, and saw poetry carved into the tombstones. I was awestruck. We also met with a Greek woman from the Black Sea – who had been exiled to Baku – and she sang Greek songs for us. In Chile, at one event, a man, a Jew from Drama, northern Greece, hounded to Chile by the Nazis, began to cry because it had been so long since he had heard anyone speaking Greek.”

Stanisakis believes that the Greeks living overseas are thirsty for their culture. He also says how moved he has been by the interest shown by many philhellenes in his work.

On his next round of conferences, academics will speak on Kazantzakis’s ties to Japan and the Middle East, while at the University of San Jose, California, the Greek writer’s work is being studied at great depth.