Tourists landing in Crete and boarding transfers from Heraklion Airport may be unaware of the “real” name of the airport: “Nikos Kazantzakis International Airport”. Those who do, however, may wonder exactly who it is named after. They will no doubt be interested in learning more about the island’s number one literary son and the airport’s namesake.
Perhaps Heraklion’s most famous ‘export’, along with Renaissance painter and sculptor El Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis is best known for his masterpiece, Zorba the Greek, a novel that some of the tourists who come to the island may even have picked up. as preferred reading for your transfers from Heraklion airport. A greater number of those who travel to the island may know this work better from having seen its film adaptation, released in 1964. Kazantzakis’s ties to film were further expanded when Martin Scorcese adapted his book The Last Temptation of Christ to the great screen in 1988. .
early life
Kazantzakis was born during the period when the city (then known as Kandiye) was under Ottoman rule, a decade before the city was included in the state of Crete and some fifty years before its eventual merger with the Kingdom of Greece. The early years of the author’s life were uneventful: he left for mainland Greece in 1902 to study law at the University of Athens, then moved to Paris in 1907 to study philosophy. At the end of his course, he returned to Greece and found work as a translator, then finally took a two-year period off to travel to the main pockets of Greek Orthodox Christianity with a friend.
It was also during this period that the author published his first two literary works: a novel in 1906, under a pen name, then a stage comedy (simply called the Comedy) in 1909. In 1910, he wrote another stage play, this time a tragedy. .
Famous
However, it was not until 1924 that he published what he considered his most important work, a poem of 33,333 words that took no less than 14 years to complete and perfect. As its name suggests (The Odyssey-A Modern Sequel), this epic ode was intended as a modern sequel to Homer’s Odyssey, and was largely considered successful in this endeavor.
Kazantzakis’s career as a novelist began in earnest in the 1940s, with the publication of Zorba’s The Greek. The 1946 title would catapult the author to fame within literary circles and launch a series of world-renowned Cretan novels, culminating in 1956’s San Francisco. During this 10-year period, Kazantzakis published no fewer than five novels, establishing himself as a prolific author particularly fond of religious subjects. In 1957, just a few months before his death, he lost the Nobel Prize in Literature to Albert Camus by a single vote.
Also during this period, the Cretan became involved in politics, assuming the leadership of a small left-wing party in 1945 and entering the Greek government as a minister, a position in which he lasted only a year before resigning. His vocation was literature, and it is in this capacity that most tourists arriving on Heraklion airport transfers will know about him. He excelled in this field, as led to his Nobel Prize nomination; Visitors to the city wanting to get into the right frame of mind could do worse than read one of his novels during their transfers from Heraklion airport to his hotel!
