The death of the Greek writer and former President of the Academy of Athens, Thanasis Valtinos (1932-2024), has caused grief among friends of Greek literature.

Born in Kastri, Kynouria in 1932, Athanasios Spanos moved to Athens in 1950 and was determined by the courses he attended at Panteion University, the Philosophy School of the University of Athens and various film schools. His love of literature and cinema would lead to his receiving awards at an early age. Most notably, his first published short story, Katakalokairo, was awarded in 1958 by the magazine “Tahydromos”.

An important part of Thanasis Valtinos’ oeuvre is occupied by the scripts he co-wrote with Theo Angelopoulos for such landmark films of the new Greek cinema as Reconstitution (1970), Days of ’36 (1972), Voyage to Cythera (1984), Landscape in the Mist (1988) and The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991). More specifically, for Voyage to Cythera, in which Manos Katrakis and Dionysis Papagiannopoulos deliver two iconic performances, Thanasis Valtinos and Theo Angelopoulos won the screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The experiences of the civil war, the traumas it left on people and the deep introspection on the concepts of ideologies and belonging place the film among the most important moments of contemporary Greek cinema.

Voyage to Cythera, 1984

Already from his first novel, The Descent of the Nine, Thanasis Valtinos focuses on the recent history of Greece and more specifically in this work on the adventures of nine partisans of the Republican Army to cross Taygetos and find themselves at sea. The perfect balance of reflection and adventure gives way to a calm record of the adventures of private life. Indeed, The Synaxary of Andreas Kordopatis delivers with “succinctness and telegraphy” (according to Apostolis Sachinis) a true story of life and immigration to the United States and touches readers and viewers alike with every performance on stage (most memorably with Antonis Antoniou’s adaptation).

Winner of the State Prize for Fiction for his work Elements of the 1960s (1990), Thanasis Valtinos continued to stimulate intellectual circles, especially with the views he expressed on the Greek civil war in his book Orthokosta(1994). Many of his works have been translated into many European languages, including English, Italian, French, German, Russian, etc., while he has also worked on the translation of ancient drama (The Trojan Women, Oresteia), in the context of his collaborations with the Karolos Koun Theatro Technis.