Petros Markaris

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Petros Markaris ( Greek Πέτρος Μάρκαρης , real name Petros Markarian ; born January 1, 1937 in Istanbul ) is a Greek writer. He became internationally known for his detective novels about the quirky "Commissioner Kostas Charitos" investigating in Athens . In 2008 he was appointed President of the National Book Center ( EKEBI ).

Petros Markaris at a reading in Werther 2012

life and work

Petros Markaris, son of an Armenian businessman and a Greek mother, attended the St. Georgs College in Istanbul and after graduating from high school, studied in Vienna and Stuttgart for a few years . He was also a Turkish citizen for years. Markaris speaks and writes in Greek, Turkish and German. He has lived in Athens for a long time .

Before he started writing, he had studied economics . He has written several plays, including The Story of Ali Retzo , which was staged with great success in 1971 during the military dictatorship. Since the play takes place in Turkey, the censors said it criticized Turkey.

He started a popular Greek television crime series (Anatomy of a Crime) and was co-author of filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos (1991 The Stork's Floating Step , 1995 The Gaze of Odysseus, and 1998 Eternity and a Day ). He also translated several German dramas into Greek such as B. Goethe's Faust I and Faust II as well as Brecht's mother Courage . Together with the Turkish director Yeşim Ustaoğlu , he worked on the script for their 2004 film Waiting for the Clouds .

His crime novels always have a tendency towards social criticism and are often set in the milieu of an established leftist that has lost its ideals. “Commissioner Charitos” is on the one hand a Greek petty bourgeois and average man who doesn't think too much of women, but at the same time loves his daughter and his wife very much. During the colonel's regime , he participated in torture as a police candidate, for which he is ashamed; in the meantime he maintains a close friendship with one of the victims of the time, but one that is burdened with guilt. He is obedient to his superiors, but in solving his cases he acts without hesitation against their instructions. He persistently persecutes the crimes committed against marginalized groups, although he is full of prejudice against them. “I have an insurmountable aversion to two things in life: against racism and black people.” (Charitos in Nachtfalter .) In his spare time, Charitos almost exclusively reads encyclopedias.

The autobiography of Markaris was published in 2008 in German translation at the Zurich Diogenes Verlag under the title repeat offenders. A life between Istanbul, Vienna and Athens .

Works

The Kostas Charitos novels

  • 1995 Nυχτερινό δελτίο (literally: late news )
    • Hellas Channel. German by Michaela Prinzinger. Diogenes, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-257-06241-9 .
  • 1998 Άμυνα ζώνης (literally zone defense )
  • 2003 Ο Τσε αυτοκτόνησε (literally: Che committed suicide )
  • 2006 Βασικός Μέτοχος (literally: main shareholder )
  • 2008 Παλιά, πολύ παλιά (literally: earlier, much earlier )
    • The nanny. German by Michaela Prinzinger. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-06696-8 (The German edition contains a further chapter, which the author added at the end at the request of the publisher).
  • 2010 Ληξιπρόθεσμα Δάνεια (literally: loans due ).
  • 2011 Περαίωση (German about: debt settlement , literally: implementation, termination ).
  • 2012 Ψωμί, Παιδεία, Ελευθερία (literally: bread, education, freedom )
  • 2014 Τίτλοι Τέλους (German approximately end credits ), epilogue to the Trilogia tis Krisisos
  • 2016 offshore
  • 2018 Σεμινάρια φονικής γραφής
  • 2019 Η εποχή της υποκρισίας

Other works

  • 2004 Η Αθήνα πρωτεύουσα των Βαλκανίων (stories including with Commissioner Kostas Charitos)
  • 2006 Κατ 'εξακολούθηση (autobiographical and essays)
    • Repeat Offenders A life between Athens, Vienna and Istanbul. German by Michaela Prinzinger. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-06639-5 .
  • Across Athens. A journey from Piraeus to Kifisia. German by Michaela Prinzinger. Hanser 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23560-1 .
  • Dark times: The crisis in Greece. Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-06836-8 .
  • 2015 Τριημερία και άλλα διηγήματα

literature

  • Petros Markaris: On the streets of Athens. In: Achim Engelberg : But where does Europe end? Border crosser between London and Ankara (= In the abyss of the 20th century). Dietz Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02132-0 , pp. 132-147.

Movie

  • “Athenian underworld. The writer Petros Markaris ”. Film by Vera Botterbusch , 45 min., Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2002.
  • "Petros Markaris - My Athens". Film by Günter Schilhan (from the ORF / 3sat series "Inter-City Spezial"), 45 min., ORF / 3sat, 2011.

Awards and honors

Web links

Commons : Petros Markaris  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ta Nea, September 4, 2010
  2. ↑ Greece Newspaper No. 117 of February 6, 2008.
  3. ↑ Deutschlandfunk of June 12, 2008: “Autobiography of a repeat offender” - review
  4. ↑ NZZamSonntag, supplement books on Sunday, pp. 12-14 (from August 30, 2009)
  5. ^ The winners of the Goethe Medal 2013: S. Mahmoud Hosseini Zad, Naveen Kishore and Petros Markaris
  6. ↑ Petros Markaris receives the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on greece.diplo.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.griechenland.diplo.de
personal data
SURNAME Markaris, Petros
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Istanbul