The Society of Cretan Historical Studies has received an important donation, the Archive of the award-winning poet and translator Christoforos Liontakis, which was added to its Archives on 23.03.2022.

The Archive of ChristoforosLiontakis was donated to the H.C.I.M. on the initiative of his legal heir, Mrs. Despina Liontakis, and the persons in charge of the Archive, the philologists Antonis Kartsakis and Dimitris Perodaskalakis, who handed it over having already proceeded to its first classification.

Πορτρέτο του ποιητή από το Αρχείο Χριστόφορου Λιοντάκη / Portrait of the poet from the “Christoforos Liontakis Archive”

The archive contains letters, handwritten notes, reviews of his work, works translated by him, notebooks with notes and unpublished poems, three unpublished anthologies of poems, photographic material, letter cards, newspaper clippings on the poetry of the 1970s generation, interviews with him in newspapers, notebooks and personal administrative documents.

An important representative of the poetry generation of the 70s, Christoforos Liontakis was born in Heraklion in 1945, studied law in Athens, and attended courses in Philosophy of Law in Paris. His first collection of poems, entitled “The End of the Landscape”, was published in 1973. For his work, he was honored with many awards and distinctions in Greece and abroad. His poems have been translated into French, German, Italian, and English. He passed away in 2019, at the age of 74.

Ιστορικό Μουσείο Κρήτης, 2022 / Historical Museum of Crete, 2022
From the Archive of Christoforos Liontakis

ChristoforosLiontakis was one of the main organizers of the Elytis Influences Scientific Symposium held at the Historical Museum of Crete on 11-13 November 2011. His paper entitled The Great Encounter, in which he examines the poetic relationship between Ulysses Elytis and Arthur Rimbaud is included in the publication of the H.C.I.M. Elytis’ Influences. In 2014, ChristoforosLiontakis gave a talk at the presentation of AntonisKartsakis’ book “The Literary Heraklion of the Interwar Period. Texts, Forms, Creators” which took place at the I.M.K.