Georgios Vizyinos

He was born Georgios Michailidis on 8 March 1849 in Vizye (Βιζύη, today Vize in Turkey), a small town in Eastern Thrace, and later took his pen name from it. His father died when he was small, and at about ten he was sent to Constantinople to learn the tailor's trade. A relative then took him to Cyprus, where Archbishop Sophronios noticed the clever boy and had him study for the priesthood. Back in Constantinople he found the patron who changed his life: the banker Georgios Zarifis, who paid for his education for the next fifteen years.

Vizyinos studied in Athens, where in 1874 his long poem Κόδρος (Codrus), about the last king of Athens, won the Voutsinas poetry prize. From 1875 he studied philosophy and psychology in Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of Hermann Lotze, and then in Leipzig, where in 1881 he completed a doctoral thesis in German on children's play. In Paris in 1883 Το αμάρτημα της μητρός μου first appeared, in French translation, before the Greek text came out in Εστία.

Zarifis died in 1884 and the money stopped. Vizyinos settled in Athens, taught as an unsalaried lecturer in the history of philosophy at the university and gave private lessons. He sank his hopes into a mine near Samakovo in his native Thrace, for which he never found investors, and fell in love with a pupil, Bettina Fravasili, who was still a teenager. In April 1892 he was committed to the Dromokaiteio psychiatric hospital in Athens, where he died on 15 April 1896.

Each of his few stories is built like a mystery: something happened years ago in the family, and the narrator, a young man called Georgis back from abroad, slowly uncovers it. In Το αμάρτημα της μητρός μου (My Mother's Sin, 1883) the mother confesses that as a young woman she smothered her baby daughter Annio by accident in her sleep, and that her devotion to adopted girls is an attempt to pay for it. In Ποίος ήτον ο φονεύς του αδελφού μου (Who Was My Brother's Murderer?, 1883) the killer of the narrator's brother turns out to be a young Turk the mother has nursed and come to love like a son.

Αι συνέπειαι της παλαιάς ιστορίας (The Consequences of the Old Story, 1884) is set in Germany, a love that ends in madness. Το μόνον της ζωής του ταξείδιον (The Only Journey of His Life, 1884) is the most tender: a boy apprenticed to a tailor in Constantinople runs home to his dying grandfather, who filled his childhood with tales of distant lands, and learns that the old man never travelled further than his own wedding. Μοσκώβ-Σελήμ (Moskov-Selim, 1895) lets an old Ottoman soldier tell how captivity in Russia turned his loyalties upside down; the first Greek story with a Turk as its hero.

The narration is in katharevousa, the formal written Greek of the day, while the characters speak the demotic of Thrace: an educated man listening to the people he came from. Vizyinos also published poetry, including Ατθίδες αύραι (Attic Breezes, 1883), and verses for children.

Το αμάρτημα της μητρός μου is in the Lyceum literature anthology, so almost every Greek has met Annio and her guilt-ridden mother at school; Το μόνον της ζωής του ταξείδιον is also widely taught, and both are performed regularly as one-actor stage pieces in Athens. The film Το μόνον της ζωής του ταξείδιον (2001) by Lakis Papastathis weaves the story together with Vizyinos's own life and is a good place to start. Several Greek towns have a Βιζυηνού street, and his grave is in the First Cemetery of Athens. In English, William F. Wyatt's My Mother's Sin and Other Stories (1988) made him known abroad. On this site, the B2 course is the natural companion to his stories.

• He was a tailor's apprentice at ten and a doctor of philosophy at thirty-two; his Leipzig thesis of 1881 was on children's play.
• His most famous story was published in French, in Paris, before it appeared in Greek.
• Vizyinos is a pen name: it means «the man from Vizye», his home town, and his real surname was Michailidis.
• He spent the last four years of his life, 1892 to 1896, in the Dromokaiteio psychiatric hospital in Athens, still writing poems.