The volume sheds light on unknown or little-studied sources of an important writer of the Generation of the 1930s. The articles by Angelos Terzakis, which have been collected from the Athenian daily and periodical press and make up the volume, constitute an important source of information on the social, literary, and broader cultural history of the period. Their language is excellent demotic and their style is exemplary.

They testify to how a young thinker and writer welcomed his era, how he judged it, how he saw the position of the young writers of his generation in relation to Greek society, and, finally, how he assessed the Greek social and cultural present on the eve of the outbreak of World War II. Among other initiatives, in 1937 Terzakis raised the issue of the “grammatical unification” of the demotic language, “our national language” as he defines demotic in his writings. A century had already passed since the founding of the Greek state in 1830, and it was only then, prompted by the proposal of the thirty-year-old Terzakis, that this issue was effectively addressed.

In 1938, a committee was formed to draft the Modern Greek Grammar (of the demotic language), chaired and coordinated by Manolis Triantafyllidis, which was published in 1941. Konstantinos Dimadis deemed it necessary to provide a broader commentary on the texts written by Angelos Terzakis between 1930 and 1938. The aim was to convey the atmosphere and conditions prevailing in Greece at that time, to highlight their status as “testimonies of the era” and their significance from the perspective of social anthropology.

• Konstantinos Dimadis is Professor Emeritus at the University of Berlin.