Nikos Kazantzakis Biography and latest books by Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion in Crete. At the time he was born, in the 1880s, Crete was part of the former Ottoman Empire and not part of the contemporary Greek state. He studied law in the University of Athens and then philosophy in the University of Paris. He was influenced by Henry Bergson, the celebrated French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in the literature category in 1927. Kazantzakis returned to Greece and met Angelos Sikelianos, the illustrious Greek poet and playwright. They traveled together especially across regions where the Greek Orthodox Christian culture thrived.

Nikos Kazantzakis married Galatea Alexio and later, they parted ways. Then he married Eleni Samiou. He traveled across Paris, Berlin, former Czechoslovakia, Nice, Cyprus, Aegina, Egypt, Mount Sinai, the former Soviet Union, China, and Japan. He admired Lenin; however, Stalin’s rise to power and his governance saddened Kazantzakis and he began to find the ideology of Soviet Communism unsettling. He became a minister in the Greek parliament as a minister without a portfolio. He represented a leftist party that was non-communist.

Kazantzakis died in 1957. He was buried at Heraklion and his epitaph reads, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Zorba the Greek is his most popular book.