The love of Nikos Kazantzakis for Eleni was born on May 18, 1924, during an excursion to Mount Penteli and the sandy beaches of Rafina, near Athens. Nikos was 41 years old, and, at the time, still married to Galatea Alexiou, with whom, regrettably, their spirits “had never connected”; their divorce was issued on April 28, 1926.
Eleni was a beautiful and bright woman in her early twenties, with a gift for writing. In Nikos, she found a gallant man who spent the better part of that day on his feet, standing between her and the sun, “to protect her milk-white face with his body”. She also found a loving and devoted companion, a lover and a spiritual and intellectual guide. In Eleni, Nikos found a friend, a lover, a guardian angel and a muse.
In August 1928, Nikos asked Eleni to meet him in Moscow, a rather bold – for the ethical standards of the time – invitation. He noted that if she did decide to join him, there would be no turning back; from that point onward, he would consider the two of them as One, and her decision to be with him a pledge of lifelong commitment. Then Nikos warned her of the potential hardships such move might entail; being with him, she would enjoy neither the comforts, nor the material possessions of a domestic, settled life. Only companionship, devotion and love, as well as the one thing of which he could readily assure her: with him life would never be tedious.
Nonetheless, “you should not be asked to make such a life-altering decision with a man you hardly know,” he concluded. He advised her to travel to Dornburg, Germany, to seek the advice of his dear friend and former lover, Elsa Lange. So she did. Eleni traveled to Germany and met with the “silent lady of Iena”.
Elsa uttered but a few words, yet of such significance, that “weighed heavy on the scale of my Destiny” Eleni would write later in her biography of Nikos. “You can trust him”, Elsa assured her. “A flame burns him, but not for one minute does he lose sense of life. He is balanced, perfectly normal. And whatever happens, never regret answering his call. I will be with you in thought, during your harshest times.” Elsa left Eleni with a word of warning: “He is naked like Saint Sebastian”, she said, “protect him from the arrows…” Eleni rushed to Moscow, and stayed with Nikos henceforth.
Nikos and Eleni worked together, laughed heartily together, and shared their deepest thoughts and ideas. The stories he narrated to her before they fell asleep at night, she urged him to turn into novels. Eleni transcribed all of Nikos’s manuscripts on her small, portable typewriter, on which, she typed the entirety of his epic The Odyssey, consisting of 33.333 verses, seven successive times. He would always read to her his writings, for her opinion weighed heavily on him. Nikos had introduced all of his previous lady-friends to her, and whenever one of them visited their home, Nikos demanded that Eleni be present.
The tenderness and affection between them was renowned to all, as well as the fact that they had never once quarreled. In fact, they always addressed each other in the form of politesse, using reciprocal vouvoiement (“vous de politesse” in French – ‘εσείς’ [eseis] in Greek), until the very end. To those who were taken aback by this, Eleni would respond that it was no more than an indication of the profound and unwavering respect they shared.
Eleni was in charge of the household finances, and in particular, of the difficult task of creating a meal out of, very often, nothing at all. During the Nazi occupation in Greece, she launched a vigorous campaign to make certain that Nikos did not starve to death. She would gather edible plants from their own yard or from the fields of Aegina where they stayed at the time, or she would be offered some food from the island’s prison. In Athens, she was denied food rations, under the justification that “Nikos Kazantzakis was a communist”. When years later the couple lived in France, still being unable to make ends meet due to longstanding political persecutions against Nikos, Eleni walked to the city park with the tall palm trees, and gathered the date seeds from the ground. She cleaned them, dyed them, pierced them with thread, and turned them into necklaces which she then sold to the tourists for a few franks. With this, and with the little money she earned from her own French and English translations, she put together the plate of food that Nikos needed to survive. “To Eleni”, he once wrote, “I owe the daily bliss of my life; without her I would have died many years ago.” A few years later, a team of doctors, distraught by Nikos’s frail physical condition, asked Eleni if her husband had spent any time in a Nazi concentration camp. Indeed, in a picture taken in Aegina during the Nazi occupation, Nikos Kazantzakis’s body appears shockingly emaciated.
Just as Elsa Lange had forewarned, the arrows did come, and from all directions. Nikos Kazantzakis, a sincere and tenderhearted man, was plagued, time and again, by intensive and systematic persecutions. The Church of Greece rallied for his excommunication (he was not excommunicated after all), the Government took measures so that he would not be awarded the Nobel Prize, he was sometimes refused visas for traveling, and his ex-wife and her sister wrote slanderous books against him. He was even accused of being so “inhuman that he did not even have an animal in his home”. Eleni vividly recalled and even chronicled in her biographical book how he narrated to her that he spent so much time with his little cat Sminthitsa during a time when she was briefly away, that he would either “learn to meow or that the cat would eventually learn some basic Greek”. Eleni was always by his side through turbulent times. She always shielded him, sometimes thrusting her own body up front.
They married on November 11, 1945 at Saint George Karytsi’s Church in Athens with Angelos Sikelianos as Nikos’s best man and Anna Sikelianos as Eleni’s bridesmaid. Nonetheless, the couple lived through times of happiness and prosperity as well. They both shined with contentment as they attended the premiere of Jules Dassin’s adaptation of Nikos’s Christ Recrucified, entitled: He Who Must Die at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, and one year earlier, in 1956, at the Peace Prize Award Ceremony in Vienna where Nikos was awarded the International Peace Prize.
Eleni wrote in her Introduction of Nikos Kazantzakis’s autobiographical novel, and his swan song, Report to Greco: “In my thirty-three years by his side I cannot recall ever being ashamed by a single bad action on his part. He was honest, without guile, innocent, infinitely sweet toward others, fierce only toward himself.” (Report to Greco, p.10) And Nikos, in the same book, reports to his “confessor” El Greco: “I like our ancestors' myth about Eros and Psyche; surely you liked it too, grandfather. It is both shameful and dangerous to light a lamp, dispel the darkness, and see two bodies locked in an embrace. You knew this, you who hid your beloved helpmate Jeronima de las Cuevas in love's divine obscurity. I do the same with my Jeronima. Intrepid fellow athlete, cool fountain in our inhuman solitude, great comfort! Poverty and nakedness—yes, the Cretans are right in saying that poverty and nakedness are nothing, provided you have a good wife. We had good wives; yours was named Jeronima, mine Helen. What good fortune this was, grandfather! How many times did we not say to ourselves as we looked at them, Blessed the day we were born! But we did not allow women, even the dearest, to lead us astray. We did not follow their flower-strewn road, we took them with us. No, we did not take them, these dauntless companions followed our ascents of their own free will.” (Report to Greco, transl. Bien, P., p. 506)
On a Saturday, on October 26, 1957, at 10:20 pm, at the University Clinic in Freiburg-im-Bresgau, Germany, Nikos Kazantzakis delivers his spirit. He is 74 years old. Eleni is alone by his side, begging him to return to her, invoking all the names of protector saints and angels. “Nikos mou, Nikos mou, courage my love! Tomorrow the sun, in all his brilliance, will shine again!” The last words she hears from his lips are: “Water! Water!” “He was thirsty”, she wrote, “All the oceans he had sailed had not quenched Odysseus’s thirst!” Eleni closes his eyes.
After her husband’s death, unable to continue living in the same space as before without him, Eleni moved from Antibes to Geneva. She settled in a small apartment in Geneva, at 32, William Favre Avenue, with a view to the scenic Parc de la Grange, close to the lake of Geneva. There she lived, making her new home a living museum of Nikos Kazantzakis’s life and work. From there she traveled to the longitudes and latitudes of the Earth, gave speeches about her Nikos, corresponded with admirers of his works, and ensured her husband’s writing would always be in print and available to be read by all. There, she wrote a biographical book about Nikos Kazantzakis’s life and work entitled: Nikos Kazantzakis – A Biography Based on His Letters*.
Her book has been regarded as the ultimate source of information about Kazantzakis’s life and work, as well as a scholarly work of exceptional importance, and for this she was awarded a prize by the Academy of Athens, on December 29, 1979.
The amount of mail she received daily was legendary at the Geneva Post Office, letters from men and women of all ages and nations who wrote to express Kazantzakis’s influence upon their lives. Once, a letter without a postal address, not even the name of the city, reached her. The only information on the envelope was: Eleni N. Kazantzakis, Switzerland.
Eleni remained in Geneva until 1989. On February 12 of that year, she suffered a horrible motor accident, only meters away from her apartment, which caused her serious internal injuries and multiple fractures. Her adopted son Patroclos and his wife Mary, rushed to Geneva to be by her side. On May 1st, 1989, Eleni traveled to Greece, to live with her son’s family in Voula.
Eleni left her last breath on February 18, 2004, 101 years old, on the day of Nikos’s birthday. She is buried only a few meters away from her Nikos on the Venetian Walls of Heraklion in Crete.