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KVA

“FROM MY GRANDPA’S
FLOBERT I ENDED TO
FLAUBERT AND I BECAME
AN AUTHOR'”

re-war Kavala where I was
born was for me as a child
a heavenly place. Even
when they jailed my fa-
ther for participating at
the Movement of 1935,
when they get me to pris-
on, the day before his ex-
ecution, I was no more
P than one year old, smiling
widely at the camera as he holds me in his arms
behind the bars. (Eventually the execution was
called off for the political members of the move-
ment and was in effect only for the military ones.
And in early 1938 he became the first Member
of Parliament for the Prefecture of Kavala with
the party of Alexandros Papanastasiou, who fol-
lowed Venizelos’ policy.)
Everything changed suddenly with the invasion
of the Bulgarians. (For the Bulgarian occupa-
tion of the city I wrote in 1949 the book “The si-
los” which was first presented in the Municipal
Library of Kavala after an invitation of the May-
or, Dimitra Tsanaka.) In 1941 we left Kavala for
Thessaloniki and we came back in 1945, when I
went to the primary school of the Kariotakis Ly-
ceum. (Later on, Kostas Kariotakis became my fa-
vourite poet.) In 1947 I was given a scholarship
for the American College “Anatolia”, from where
I graduated. But every summer we returned to
the city with my sister Elsa, to see the grandfa-

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