George Katsimbalis

George (Giorgos) Katsimbalis (Greek: Γιώργος Κατσίμπαλης; 1899 – July 25, 1978) was a Greek intellectual, editor and writer, animator of the "30s generation" and the "patriarch" of the bibliography of modern Greek literature, known as the "Colossus of Maroussi" owing to Henry Miller's homonym work.

George Katsimbalis
Born1899 
Athens 
Died25 July 1978  (aged 78–79)
Athens 
Signature

Biography

George Katsimbalis was born in Athens in 1899.

In 1939, Katsimbalis married Aspasia Sakorrafo, daughter of Menelaos Sakorrafos, a professor at the University of Athens, but he did not have children and adopted a son, Giorgos Katsimbalis. The biological father of the adopted son was the superintendent of Katsimbalis' building in Athens.

His family was financially wealthy and had an origin from the village of Katsibali of Gortynia in the prefecture of Arcadia. His grandfather Georgios Katsimpalis bought an area of 400 acres in the area of Magoufana in Maroussi, in the current district of Agios Nikolaos, Pefki, where he built his summer residence, which Kostis Palamas or another source Zacharias Papantoniou called Trianame. Two hundred and eighty hectares of his fortune was expropriated in 1928 by the Greek state to be made available for the settlement of refugees from the Asia Minor disaster, according to newspaper reports of the time.

His father was the scholar Constantine Katsimbalis, studying in Paris, and his mother was a Greek woman born in Romania, the genus Gousios. His father's sisters were Marika or Maria Katsimbali, wife of Patro's lawyer Andreas Michalakopoulos, a politician who served as minister and prime minister, and Sofia or Fifi Katsimbali, wife of Doctor Morella, who in 1945 donated thirty-five acres of forest owned by her, initially in the Municipality of Maroussi and since 1952 in the Pefki Community. The summer residence of the Katsimbalis family, sold during the occupation of Greece by the Axis troops, in a mavarroit of the time and in the area where it was constructed, at today's Vassileos Konstantinou Street at 40, has been built a block of flats. The main residence of the Katsimbalis family was on a block of flats in Othonos Street at No. 4 in Syntagma Square in Athens and was demolished in 1965 to erect a block of flats. Konstantinos Katsimalis's father, his wife and two children, left Greece in 1916 and settled in Paris. George Katsimbalis had a sister named Soso, who committed suicide by falling off the hotel window in Paris, when her father's family was settled in France, while she was a cousin of the writer Zisimos Lorentzato.

At the age of seventeen he left his family and through Marseilles he was originally in Egypt, as the ship that transported them to Greece was sunk by a German submarine and then to Thessaloniki where he was ranked as a volunteer with the rank of second lieutenant in the National Defense of Eleftherios Venizelos, in the 2nd Order under the command of Major Chavinis. He fought on the Macedonian front and returned to France, attending courses at the Sorbonne University Law School, from which he did not graduate. Then he took part and fought in the Asia Minor campaign, while in 1924 the family returned to Greece for permanent settlement. He participated in World War II with the rank of the artillery lieutenant of the Artillery.

He published a total of 43 bibliographical works, 19 Greek and 14 foreign scholars, while already in 1925 he presented in London, a translation of poems. Katsimbalis was introduced to Henry Miller in the late 1930s in Athens by their common friend and write Lawrence Durrell. Miller and Katsimbalis became close friends and that is described in Miller's book The Colossus of Maroussi.[1] Patrick Leigh Fermor in an interview in 1978 said that George Katsimbalis' stories and friendship have greatly influenced his writings. In the 1930s, Konstantine Tsatsos was constantly pressuring Katsimbalis to write until one day Henry Miller pulled him aside and said, "Stop asking him to write. Katsimbalis will never write, he is a story teller and story tellers do not have any urge or need to write".

Katsimbalis died in Athens on June 25, 1978. He was buried in the first cemetery of Athens.

References
  1. "Paperback Writers: Henry Miller's Grecian days". Los Angeles Times. 2010-07-25. Retrieved 2021-02-03.

Literature
  • Κατσίμπαλης Γιώργος, in: Παγκόσμιο Βιογραφικό Λεξικό, vol. 4, Athens, Εκδοτική Αθηνών, 1985
  • Αλέξης Ζήρας: Κατσίμπαλης Γιώργος, in: Λεξικό Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας, Athens, Εκδόσεις Πατάκη, 2007
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