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Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Isolated in this house, facing Athens during the years of WW2 and the German occupation of Greece, the widely acclaimed author wrote there some of his most iconic works.

By Desolation Road

October 9^th, 2020

At the crack of dawn every morning, Nikos Kazantzakis climbed the stone staircase that led to his office, in the attic of the house where he lived for a decade (1936-’46) on the island of Aegina opposite of Athens. His daily ascent was nothing short of a profound symbolism: the ascent, scattered throughout his literary work, was a symbol of the constant hard struggle of the fighting man.

On the roof, the stones of the small rocky cape where the house is located reflected the sunlight. The splashing of the waves of the Aegean Sea on the rocks was the only sound this peaceful place was emitting. Beyond them stretched the sea of the Saronic Gulf, ending at the port of Piraeus and Athens - clearly visible on a clear day.

However, the light and the tranquility of this cape may have seemed like a bitter contrast in the eyes of Kazantzakis, with everything that was happening on the opposite shore: the oppression of the Athenians by the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, then (April '41) the German invasion to the capital, the great famine of the winter of 1941-'42 that left tens of thousands dead, the bloody battle of Athens in December 1944. "We will go through difficult years after the war," Kazantzakis said to his wife, Eleni. "There will come a time when human freedom will count for nothing."

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Entering his office, isolated on the upper floor from all the domestic activities of the house below, Nikos Kazantzakis managed with the inexhaustible energy he had at almost 60 years of age to keep his passion protected from the horrors of the time, to divert his thinking from what was happening across the sea. "I would have done nothing, and been nothing, without solitude," he said.

He worked until noon, isolated and completely dedicated to the work that would establish him as one of the most globally renown writers of the 20th century. In this office he would write "Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas" (Zorba the Greek), his seventh draft of "The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel", "The Rock Garden", the first draft of "Captain Michalis", and would translate Homer's Iliad and works by Dante, Shakespeare, Cocteau, Ghoete, Pirandello.

At noon Nikos Kazantzakis would come back down, to rest; when the weather was good, he was sitting in the dry yard surrounded by cacti and the stone walls of the house. In winter, he was resting in the plainly decorated living room, surrounded by books and frames of strange Asian gods between the small square windows that, however, penetrated the abundant light of the Aegean.

He would soon return to his office, studying again until late in the afternoon. Just before sundown, he used to go for a walk on the deserted beach and hills, or ascending again the "serene and good-hearted mountains" that rose on the south side of the house, always friendly and cordial with anyone he rarely met. As he later wrote, in the meadows and mountains of Aegina he used to catch butterflies in his hands; their wet wings, he was saying, were symbols of the human soul.

Some nights, mainly of 1942, the veranda of the house of Nikos Kazantzakis in Aegina became the moonlit backdrop of biblical moments for Greek literature - as Nikos and Eleni Kazantzaki welcomed some of the most important writers in the country: Angelos Sikelianos, Pantelis Prevelakis, Ioannis Kakridis, among others. The late Historian Georgia Koulikourdi remembered Kazantzakis talking those nights "about Homeric problems and our folk songs, about old and modern art, narrating the tales of his long journeys or those beautiful Cretan stories he later wrote in his novels" .

Nikos Kazantzakis on the terrace of his house in Aegina, 1937 (photo © Kazantzakis Publications / kazantzakispublications.org)

Having returned from his constant travels and from Czechoslovakia in 1933, Nikos Kazantzakis searched and found in the peace of Aegina a place to lay his roots, away from his beloved Crete. He left his house on Livadi only to travel: to Japan and China, to Spain and England.

In 1952 he wrote to Tasos Athanasiadis from Antibes, France: "I don't know when I'll return to Greece, but I'm going to sell the house in Aegina and uproot myself. On my desk there, I have a large clod of soil from Crete."

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

[Sources]

-Nikos Kazantzakis Museum, Heraklion, Crete (kazantzaki.gr)

-Georgia Koulikourdi (Historian-Arcaeologist), Kathimerini 1997

-Thanasis Papathanasopoulos, “Nikos Kazantzakis’ house in Aegina”, Αιγιναία periodical, January-July 2010.

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Nikos Kazantzakis’ Aegina hermitage

Footnotes

Copyright © Desolation Road / Panos Diamantis

FootNotes

Copyright © Desolation Road / Panos Diamantis

© 2026 Desolation Road

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