"I have written fifteen books and four more containing articles I wrote and were published in newspapers. I don't try to publish all of them because I couldn't sell more than twenty or thirty. I am satisfied with giving a photocopy to my children and some friends".

Describing characters

The folklorist Kanakis Geronymakis,  from Vouvas of Sfakia, writes under a mulberry tree, in the small garden in front of his house. He is much appreciated in the cycle of experts and newspapers for which he writes articles. His favourite subject is the history of Sfakia and its people. He has also written 170 metrical epic-like texts, and when he reads them aloud he gives his voice a musical tone, which is why he calls them songs. It is a rare type of metrical writing, not at all usual in Greece.

When we asked his fellow villagers about him, people told us: "Are you looking for our favourite writer? Let us show you where he lives". His serious and melancholic gaze, looked like it could not only see space but time as well. We were impressed. The environment he lives and meditates in is imposing, since the Libyan Sea lies before it and the White Mountains of Crete stand behind it.

Sfakia province is a narrow strip of land, trapped between the vast sea and the menacing vertical rocks. There is not even one facet, neither territorial nor historical, in Sfakia province not known by this great folklorist.

He adores tradition

Kanakis Geronymakis describes the incredible sacrifices made by the people of Sfakia for the liberation of Crete in a flat and soft voice. His speech is free of the usual Cretan theatricality and it is more like a low tuned drawn out song.He knows very well that his compatriots' explosive temper does not need any additional elements of exaggeration in order to be described. He adores tradition, but the possibility of it being lost because of contemporary evolution, makes him shiver. He fears that Greece is losing its authenticity because it is being influenced by cataclysmic changes coming from all over the world.

"The future maps may have the name Greece written on our country's position, but the real Greece will not be there. I don't blame the foreigners, but I don't think they're better than us. I had once gone on a trip to France and a French guy told me that we, Greeks, poisoned Socrates and sentenced Theodoros Kolokotronis to death. I answered that the French burnt Jean d' Arc alive and now they say she was a saint. So they're not as nice as they think they are".
TEXT-PHOTOS: GEORGE ZAFEIROPOULOS
SOURCE: www.greecewithin.com

ΠΕΡΙΣΣΟΤΕΡΕΣ ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΙΕΣ 

He’s a great woodcarver as well!

And he’s very good at pottery!

---