Georgios Psychoundakis

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Georgios Psychoundakis ( Greek Γεώργιος Ψυχουντάκης ; born November 3, 1920 in Asi Gonia on Crete ; † January 29, 2006 in Chania ) was a Cretan resistance fighter during the Second World War . He was a shepherd, war hero, and writer. He served as a reporter behind German lines, first for the Cretan resistance movement and later from 1941 to 1945 for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). After the war he was accidentally locked up as a deserter. While in captivity, he wrote down his war memories, which became a worldwide success. Later he also translated classical Greek works into the Cretan dialect .

Early years

Georgios Psychoundakis was born in Asi Gonia ( Greek Αση Γωνιά ), a village of a few hundred inhabitants in the mountains around the Mouselas Valley, in western Crete. Until the 1950s there was no road into the village. He was one of the four sons of Nikolas and Angeliki, one of the poorest families in the village. They lived in a one-room house with a clay floor. In the village school he received a short and poor education. He then became a shepherd and tended the family's few sheep and goats. He developed a thorough knowledge of his area of ​​the island.

In the war that followed , people used the caves to live in them or to deposit weapons. They traveled the goat paths to carry people, goods and messages. Crete has a tradition of resisting occupiers; the island had only gained freedom from the Ottoman occupation in 1898 . Countless uprisings during the long occupation and the mountainous terrain resulted in the Cretans being given a liberal character and a willingness to own and use weapons.

Wartime

When the Battle of Crete began on May 20, 1941, Psychoundakis went to the nearest town of Episkopi near Rethymno , about 15 km away. He took part in the battle on the side of the poorly equipped Resistance, which retreated to the mountains after the rapid defeat of the Allied forces on Crete. The Cretans hid hundreds of British soldiers who had stayed behind and the resistance movement organized their transport to the south of the island. From there they were evacuated to Egypt by Allied ships. Psychoundakis helped lead small groups from village to village. From autumn 1941 the SOE began to organize on the island with the help of liaison officers , one of whom was Patrick Leigh Fermor . He reached the island of Clandestin by sea in July 1942. Psychoundakis worked as Fermors and Xan Fielding's messenger. He carried messages between the resistance groups and led people who did not know the area.

Patrick Leigh Fermor described Georgios Psychoundakis in the introduction to his work The Cretan Runner :

When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki down his throat with the words Another drop of petrol for the engine, and loped towards the gap in the bushes with the furtiveness of a stage Mohican or Groucho Marx. He turned round when he was on all fours at the exit, rolled his eyes, raised a forefinger portentously, whispered, "the Intelligence Service", and scuttled through like a rabbit. A few minutes later we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey.

The Cretan messengers accomplished great feats and contributed greatly to British operations in the Mediterranean. 490 BC Pheidippides ran 42 km from the Battle of Marathon to report the victory over the Persians and died immediately after conveying his message. In comparison, Psychoundakis covered the distance between Kissamos on the north coast and Paleochora on the south coast in just one night. The distance on the road that exists today is about 45 km. At that time there was this 70 km long road again, which was still used for many years for this route. Through a wild landscape, criss-crossed by deep gorges, and if it was necessary to bypass the Germans, the distance could have been up to twice as far.

The resistance fighters had to cope with the hot Cretan summers and the very harsh winters, especially in the mountains. Food was often scarce and the fighters had to hide in cold, damp caves while mountains of snow piled up in front of them.

The resistance fighters never got into an island-wide revolt; they had hoped that their island could become the starting point for the Allied offensive in southern Europe. With the conquest of Sicily in the course of Operation Husky in mid-1943, this hope was largely dashed. It was not until 1945, shortly after the end of the war, that the last German troops surrendered and Crete was liberated. The British offered Psychoundakis payment for his services, but he refused. He said he fought for his homeland and not for money.

Life after the war

After the war, Psychoundakis was imprisoned as a deserter for 16 months, despite having been awarded the BEM and £ 200 for his bravery by the British . In captivity he wrote on his war memories. His former supervisor Patrick Leigh Fermor found out about the incarceration by chance and arranged for Psychoundakis to be released by clearing up the misunderstanding.

It was also Patrick Leigh Fermor who translated Psychoundaki's memoirs into English after reading his manuscript. He also helped get this work published. With the help of Xan Fielding, the work was published in 1955 under the title "The Cretan Runner". It has since been translated into several European languages.

Just released from captivity, Psychoundakis had to go to the next war: a bitter civil war had broken out in his country .

After the second war, he worked as a charcoal burner and other odd jobs in the Cretan mountains to support his family until his book was published. During this time he wrote The Eagle's Nest , which deals with his life and the traditions of the people in the mountain villages near his hometown Asi Gonia. This work was translated by Barrie Machin, an anthropologist who did an anthropological study of Asi Gonia with Psychoundakis in 1967 and 1968. Barrie returned several times to work with Psychoundakis. They became close friends. The work should be published under the title 'Warriors and Maidens'.

Psychoundakis was a scientific anthropologist and a talented writer with an impressive memory. However, he was extremely impoverished. In 1968 Machin left him a large pile of cards and pens to write on. That year he began translating the Iliad .

Psychoundakis contributed significantly to the Cretan culture. He learned many of the Cretan orally transmitted poems and wrote them down. He translated Homer's work, the Iliad (560 pages) and Odyssey (474 pages) from ancient Greek into the Cretan dialect. For this extraordinary achievement he was awarded by the Athens Academy . When you put on your two to three years of occasional schooling, an incredible achievement.

From 1974 until his retirement, Psychoundakis and another resistance fighter, Manolis Paterakis, worked together as cemetery administrators at the German military cemetery above Maleme . It was Psychoundakis who buried Bruno Bräuer , who was reburied in Maleme in the late 1970s.

Publications

  • The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation . by George Psychoundakis, Translated by PL Fermor. 1955. Re-edited 1991, ISBN 0-7195-3475-5 .
  • Ομήρου Ιλιάδα. Ψυχουντάκης, Γεώργιος. Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, Ηράκλειο 2003, ISBN 960-7309-92-8 .
  • Ομήρου Οδύσσεια. Ψυχουντάκης, Γεώργιος. Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, Ηράκλειο 2003, ISBN 960-524-020-3 .
  • Αετοφωλιές στην Κρήτη: Λαογραφία της Ασή-Γωνιάς . Γεώργιος Ψυχουντάκης, Δημοτική Πολιτιστική Επιχείρηση Χανίων. Χανιά 1999, ISBN 960-85835-4-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction, Georgios Psychoundakis (1955). The Cretan Runner . London: John Murray
  2. ↑ George Psychoundakis: The Cretan Runner . Penguin Books, 1998, p. 3.
  3. ^ Antony Beevor Crete The Battle and the Resistance. 1991, pp. 342-343 John Murray
  4. ↑ The Cretan Runner, by George Psychoundakis . Guardian. Retrieved February 1, 2013.

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Psychoundakis, Georgios
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ψυχουντάκης, Γεώργιος (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek writer and resistance fighter in Crete
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Asi Gonia , Crete
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 2006
Place of death Chania