25 Facts About Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher.

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote plays, travel books, memoirs, and philosophical essays, such as The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises.

Nikos Kazantzakis's fame spread in the English-speaking world due to cinematic adaptations of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ.

Nikos Kazantzakis translated a number of notable works into Modern Greek, such as the Divine Comedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Origin of Species, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in the town of Kandiye in Crete, with origins from the village of Myrtia.

From 1902 to 1906 Nikos Kazantzakis studied law at the University of Athens; his 1906 Juris Doctor thesis was titled.

Nikos Kazantzakis's 1909 doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne was a reworked version of his 1906 dissertation under the title Friedrich Nietzsche dans la philosophie du droit et de la cite.

Nikos Kazantzakis married Galateia Alexiou in 1911; they divorced in 1926.

Nikos Kazantzakis never became a committed communist but visited the Soviet Union and stayed with the Left Opposition politician and writer Victor Serge.

Nikos Kazantzakis witnessed the rise of Joseph Stalin, and became disillusioned with Soviet-style communism.

In 1946, Nikos Kazantzakis became the head of the UNESCO Bureau of Translations, the organization which promoted translations of literary works.

Camus later said that Nikos Kazantzakis deserved the honour "a hundred times more" than himself.

Late in 1957, even though suffering from leukemia, Nikos Kazantzakis set out on one last trip to China and Japan.

Nikos Kazantzakis's gangrene was cured but he had contracted a severe form of Asian flu in China, which eventually led to his death.

Nikos Kazantzakis died on 26 October 1957 in Freiburg, Germany, at age 74.

Nikos Kazantzakis is buried at the highest point of the Walls of Heraklion, the Martinengo Bastion, looking out over the mountains and sea of Crete.

Nikos Kazantzakis's image is on the obverse of the coin, while the reverse carries the National Emblem of Greece, with his signature.

Nikos Kazantzakis's first published work was the 1906 narrative, Serpent and Lily, which he signed with the pen name Karma Nirvami.

In 1907 Nikos Kazantzakis went to Paris for his graduate studies and was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, primarily the idea that a true understanding of the world comes from the combination of intuition, personal experience, and rational thought.

Nikos Kazantzakis began writing The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel in 1924, and completed it in 1938 after fourteen years of writing and revision.

Furthermore, Nikos Kazantzakis felt that it was important to record the vernacular of the everyday person, including Greek peasants, and often tried to include expressions, metaphors, and idioms he would hear while traveling throughout Greece and incorporate them into his writing for posterity.

Several critics have argued that Nikos Kazantzakis's writing was too flowery, filled with obscure metaphors, and difficult to read despite being written in Demotic Greek.

Bien asserts that, since Nikos Kazantzakis was trying to preserve the language of the people, he used their local metaphors and phrases to give his narrative an air of authenticity and preserve these phrases so that they were not lost.

Nikos Kazantzakis was anathema to the right-wing in Greece both before and after World War II.

Nikos Kazantzakis was distrusted by both the Communist Party of Greece and the Soviet Union as a "bourgeois" thinker.