Myrtia – the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum

Myrtia and the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum

Myrtia, set among vineyards and olive groves about 15 kilometres south of Heraklion and some 11 kilometres beyond Knossos, is dear to every Greek, for here lies the family home of the world-renowned 20th-century writer and thinker Nikos Kazantzakis, who is also called the Greek Nietzsche – aptly enough, since his dissertation at the University of Athens, where he read law from 1902 to 1906, dealt with Nietzsche’s philosophy of right and the state. The quiet, well-kept village with its flower-decked lanes still lives with its great name: quotations from his books meet the eye on the house walls, and the square in front of the museum is the village’s front parlour.

The museum on the village square

The museum was founded in 1983 by Giorgos Anemogiannis, one of the pioneers of Greek stage and costume design. He wished to preserve the writer’s memory and to make his work and thought known; Eleni Kazantzaki, the writer’s second wife and widow – Eleni Samiou, whom he married in 1945 – supported him with generous gifts. The building stands on the main square on the site of the family home of the Anemogiannis family, who were related to Kazantzakis’s father, and takes in an adjoining property where relatives of the writer once lived. In 2009 the museum, co-financed by the European Union and the Greek Ministry of Culture, was renovated from top to bottom and given an entirely new display; since then it has been regarded as a model of a small, up-to-date literary museum.

The visit begins with a documentary film of about twenty minutes on the life and work, shown in six languages; audio guides are available in Greek, English and German. In the showcases on the two floors lie some 650 exhibits, arranged in five thematic sections – the man himself, his “Odyssey”, his correspondence, friends and influences, the early and theatrical works, and the novels and travel books: manuscripts and notebooks, letters to eminent writers and scholars of his day, diaries, first editions in Greek and dozens of translations, rare photographs, souvenirs of his travels and personal belongings – together with set and costume models from productions of his plays, extracts from the film adaptations, portraits and sculptures. The archive, built up since 1976 and now numbering around 50,000 objects and documents in ten collections, and the Anemogiannis theatre archive, with material on more than 400 productions, are open to researchers.

The life and work of Kazantzakis

His works have been translated into some 40 languages. In 1956 he was honoured with the International Peace Prize, and later he was also in the running for the Nobel Prize. Best known are the novels “Christ Recrucified” (1948, also known as “The Greek Passion” and turned into an opera by Bohuslav Martinu), “Zorba the Greek” (in the original “Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas”, 1946), “The Last Temptation of Christ” (published in Greek in 1955 and placed by the Catholic Church on the Index of Forbidden Books) and his St Francis novel (1956), the life story of the Poverello. Kazantzakis also wrote several plays and philosophical works composed under the influence of Nietzsche and of Henri Bergson, whose lectures he heard in Paris between 1907 and 1909, as well as the epic poem “Odyssey” (published in 1938 after fourteen years’ work), a sequel to Homer in 33,333 lines arranged in twenty-four books; he translated Dante’s “Divine Comedy” (1932) and Goethe’s “Faust” (1936) into modern Greek. He was a seeker, drawn to the most diverse worlds of thought, from Buddhism to Communism; he lived for two years in Russia, and at other times in Berlin, on the island of Aegina and, at the end, in the old town of Antibes.

The writer’s travels, the films and the grave

Kazantzakis travelled widely – to Spain, Italy, Egypt and Sinai, to Russia, England, Japan and China – and his travel books are written with the same mastery as his novels. World fame came with the film adaptations: Jules Dassin’s “He Who Must Die” (1957, after “Christ Recrucified”, with Melina Mercouri), “Zorba the Greek” by Michael Cacoyannis (1964, music by Mikis Theodorakis, with Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates, Irene Papas and Lila Kedrova, among others) and Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988, screenplay by Paul Schrader, with Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey and others). The Zorba film was shot in Crete itself – in Chania, at the village of Kokkino Chorio and on the beach of Stavros on the Akrotiri peninsula, where the famous dance was filmed – and won three Academy Awards, one of them for Kedrova. The sirtaki that Theodorakis wrote for it became the best-known Greek tune of all.

The writer died on 26 October 1957 in Germany, at Freiburg im Breisgau, of influenza caught on his last journey to China. His body was brought home and buried in Heraklion – in the Kastro, as Cretans used to call their city, on the Martinengo Bastion of the Venetian walls, with a wide view over the rooftops and towards Mount Juktas. On the plain grave with its wooden cross stands the inscription he composed himself: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” To visit museum and grave in a single day is to have the beginning and the end of this Cretan life before one’s eyes.