Dimitrios Vikelas

Dimitrios Vikelas (1835-1908). Dimitrios Vikelas was born in Ermoupoli, Syros, in 1835, into a prominent commercial family with roots in Veria and originally named Bekela or Bikela. His father was the merchant Emmanouil Vikelas, and his mother was Smaragda, daughter of the merchant Georgios Melas and sister of Leon Melas. At the age of four, he spent a year in Nafplio with his family, which then moved to Constantinople. He learned the basics of reading and writing from his educated and inquisitive mother, although his education was generally unsystematic due to the family's frequent relocations. He spent nine years in Constantinople until 1849, when he returned to Syros with his mother and attended the Lyceum of Ch. Evangelidis. He was a classmate of Emmanouil Roides, with whom he published the handwritten student magazine Lyceum Melissa. In 1851, at the age of sixteen, he translated Racine's work Esther, which was performed in a school play and published in Ermoupoli. Vikelas credited this translation to his Swiss teacher Weiss in Odessa. The following year, he moved to London, where he spent 24 years of his life engaged in commerce, working as an employee at the Nephews of Mavros company and as a partner in the Melas Brothers firm. He also attended University College, but due to limited time, he only obtained a Diploma in Botany. However, he maintained his interest in literature, studying philology and history, and writing verses and translations (from Homer, Theocritus, Goethe, Alfieri, etc.). In London, Vikelas also advocated for preserving the Greek character of the diaspora, promoting, for example, the establishment of a Greek school there. In 1855, he visited his family in Constantinople and participated for the first time in a poetry competition (the Ralleios with the poem Memories of Prinkipo). He subsequently published poems, sometimes in Katharevousa and sometimes in Demotic Greek, in Pandora and other literary magazines, while in 1862, he published the poetry collection Verses in London. In 1859, he met Alexandre Dumas during a steamboat trip to England. In England, he married Kalliopi Geralopoulou, also from a prominent merchant family. Together, they traveled throughout Europe until 1876, when the pan-European economic crisis of that period led to the dissolution of his partnership with the Melas Brothers company, and the couple attempted to settle in Athens. However, the worsening of Kalliopi's already troubled mental health forced them to return to Paris the following year. There, Vikelas resumed translating (his translations of Shakespeare's works were performed in Athens), giving lectures, and writing articles, while he also wrote the work Loukis Laras, which established him in the field of modern Greek literature. Loukis Laras was first published in Estia in 1879 and was released as a standalone book the same year, soon being translated into many Slavic and European languages. Until 1897, he traveled continuously between Paris, Athens, and Constantinople, while his wife was confined to the Ivry asylum. His short stories Philippos Marthas, Ugly Sister, Remembrance, and Papa-Narcissus date back to 1886. In 1893, he published the volume "Lectures and Memories," which included 23 of his essays from the period 1860 - 1893, and he was a leading member of the committee for the organization of the 1896 Athens Olympic Games. From 1897, he settled in Athens and devoted himself primarily to philanthropic works until the end of his life, most notably founding the Society for the Dissemination of Useful Books, in collaboration with Georgios Drosinis. Under the auspices of the Society, over one hundred book titles on various subjects were published, the School Museum and School Library were established, along with a collection of visual teaching aids, and in 1907, the magazine "Study" was launched. In 1904, on the initiative of Vikelas and the cultural association Parnassos, the First Greek Educational Conference was held in Athens, with the participation of educators and institutions from Greece and Europe. In the last period of his life, he focused on writing his memoirs titled "My Life. Childhood Memories," published in 1908, the year of his death. He died of liver cancer in Kifisia, having managed to lay the foundation stone for the Sevastopouleio Vocational School, the last in a series of philanthropic projects carried out under his care. Vikelas possessed a very rich library, which he bequeathed to the municipality of Heraklion, Crete (known as the Vikelaia Municipal Library). The literary output of Dimitrios Vikelas is limited compared to the extent of his overall written work. His poetic production consists of forty poems, in the tradition of the romantic poetry of the First Athenian School, for which he himself did not seem to have much appreciation. His metrical translations, especially those of Shakespeare's works, are of particular interest. However, his most famous literary work is "Loukis Laras," a historical novel based on the testimony of a real person, focusing on the life of a Greek merchant during the flames of the Greek Revolution of 1821, with particular emphasis on the episode of the destruction of Chios. Critics placed it at the crossroads between the mature phase of the romantic prose of the First Athenian School and the beginnings of the ethnographic and realistic prose production of the 1880s generation, while also noting the author's influences from contemporary European production. Indicative of these elements are the choice of an anti-hero as the central figure of the work and Vikelas's linguistic expression, which gradually transitions from simple katharevousa to a language approaching the vernacular of the time (the work was initially published in ten installments in the magazine "Estia," and although it was completed before the publication of the first installment, the author intervened with corrections and improvements). Many of his works are published in the magazines "Chrysallis," "Pandora," "Klio" (Trieste), and others in Greece and abroad. For more biographical details on Dimitrios Vikelas, see Ditsa Marianna, "Dimitrios Vikelas," Our Older Prose E΄ · 1830-1880, pp. 382-409. Athens, Sokolis, 1996, Sperantzas S.G. "Vikelas Dimitrios," Great Greek Encyclopedia Z΄. Athens, Pyrsos, 1929, Terdimou Maria, Chronology of Dimitrios Vikelas. Heraklion, 1991, Fouriotis Angelos, "Vikelas Dimitrios," Great Encyclopedia of Modern Greek Literature 3. Athens, Haris Patsis, n.d., and Chatzigeorgiou - Chasioti Viktoria, "Vikelas Dimitrios," World Biographical Dictionary 2. Athens, Ekdotiki Athinon, 1984. (Source: Archive of Greek Authors, National Book Centre of Greece).