Patrick Comerford
Two statues outside the town hall on Kountouriotou street in the centre of Rethymnon celebrate two of the leading literary figures in the cultural life of the city, the writer Pantelis Prevelakis and the linguist Georgios Nicolaou Chatzidakis. And they face a large statue of perhaps the most important 20th century politician from Crete.
A statue of Pantelis Prevelakis shows the writer seated by the corner with Kallergis street, facing the mountains and with his back to the sea. He was a novelist, poet, dramatist and essayist, and one of the leading writers associated with the ‘Generation of the ‘30s’ movement in Greece. His best-known work, The Tale of a Town, which I first read in the 1980s, celebrates Rethymnon in a way that could be compared with the way in which James Joyce celebrates Dublin.
Pantelis Prevelakis was born Παντελής Πρεβελάκης in Rethymnon on 18 February 1909. He studied law, philosophy, literature and art in Athens Paris and Thessaloniki and became known for his poetry, prose, drama and essays. Most of his works are set in Crete.
From about 1930, Prevalakis was a friend and agent of the writer and poet Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), who was born in Iraklion, and eventually Pantelis wrote a biography of Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis and His Odyssey. A Study of the Poet and the Poem.
His best-known book, Το χρονικό μιας Πολιτείας (The Tale of a Town or The Chronicle of a Town), was published in 1937 and is a nostalgic depiction of life in Rethymnon from 1898 to 1924.
Prevalakis published an historical novel, The Death of the Medici, in 1939. After World War II, he published Wretched Crete: a chronicle of the rising of 1866 (1945). This was followed by his trilogy, The Cretan (1948-1950), which refers to events in Cete between 1866 and 1910 and introduces historical characters such as Eleftherios Venizelos (1864-1936).
Venizelos, whose statue faces the town hall, the statues of Prevalakis and Chatzidakis, and the sea, was also born in Crete and was a towering figure in Greek politics at the end of the 19th and in early 20th century.
Other works by Prevalakis include The Sun of Death (1959), in which a boy comes to terms with human mortality. He also wrote four plays, all based on historical themes.
His biography of Kazantzakis was translated from Greek into English by Philip Sherrard, with a preface by Kimon Friar, and was published in 1961, four years after Kazantzakis died.
In academic life, Prevelakis was a professor of art history in the Academy of Arts in Athens from 1939 to 1975. He died in Athens on 15 March 1986. However he was brought back to Crete and was buried in Rethymnon in a churchyard near the top of the hill on Kazantzakis Street.
The second literary sculpture on the terrace in front of Rethymnon Town Hall is a bust of Georgios Nicolaou Chatzidakis (1848-1941), the philologist who is celebrated as the father of linguistics in Greece.
Georgios Nicolaou Chatzidakis was born Γεώργιος Νικολάου Χατζιδάκις on 23 November (OS 11 November) 1843 in the small mountain village of Myrthios, 20 km south of Rethymnon. The family took part in the many Cretan revolts against the Ottoman Empire, and his grandfather Kyriakos Chatzidakis was a captain in the uprising in 1821.
Georgios Chatzidakis went to school in Rethymnon, and at the age of 18 fought alongside his father in the uprising of 1866-1869. After three years further education in Athens, he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy of the University of Athens to study classics and philology. A scholarship enabled him to study linguistics in Germany at the University of Leipzig with some of the most famous specialists of the day.
After returning to Greece, Chatzidakis was first a grammar school teacher in Athens and then received his doctorate with his thesis on the history of the Greek language. He was the first chair of Linguistics and Indian Philology at the University of Athens in 1890-1923. His book in German, Introduction to the Grammar of Modern Greek (1892) brought him to the attention of academic circles throughout Europe.
Chatzidakis was a 50-year old in the University of Athens when he enlisted again as a volunteer in the new Cretan uprising in 1897.
Chatzidakis was also a successful academic administrator, and in 1925 he became the first President of Greece’s second university, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Chatzidakis is best-known today for his contribution to the serious study of the history and morphology of the modern Greek language. He put to rest older theories that modern Greek derives from the ancient Dorian and Aeolic dialects, and showed instead that modern Greek evolved from the Hellenistic koine Greek.
He opposed advocates of the archaïzousa, in effect an artificial form of Attic Greek promoted by extreme conservatives. However, Chatzidakis was a lifelong supporter of the katharévousa, the archaically tinged formal Greek used by many scholars and government officials.
Unlike progressive political radicals at the time, he did not approve of dhimotikí, the vernacular form of Greek spoken everyday outside official contexts.
He died on 28 June 1941 in Athens, but he is remembered with pride in his home town with the sculpture outside the town hall in Rethymnon.
Another member of the Chatzidakis family from Myrthios near Rethymnon was the composer Manos Hatzidakis (1925-1994). He is often associated with the title song of the film ‘Never on Sunday’ … so, perhaps, his story is more appropriate tomorrow on Sunday afternoon.
