"Alexis Parnis"

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Alexis Parnis (real name Sotirios Leonidakis, 24 May 1924 – 10 March 2023) was a Greek poet, playwright and novelist. He was also an ELAS fighter in the National Resistance and the ISE in the civil war.

Biographical data
Born in Piraeus on 24 May 1924, from Crete and Mani. He was organized by a boy in the National Resistance, took part in the last battle against Germans in Athens and was injured in December. He learned about the end of World War II at the hospital in Korytsa where he was hospitalized and in May 1945 he was transferred to Rubik, Albania.

There he began his career as a Theatre writer with the one-act "Last night", a work mentioned in December and played by the rebel troupe. As of November 1948 he worked as a war correspondent, lieutenant for the IOC sheet, "News Release" and later for the newspaper "Toward victory". At the same time he also made his first appearance in literature with the collection of short stories "I am a militant of the Democratic Army" published by the Republican Army printing in Prespes.

With the collapse of the front he was transferred to Tashkent, Uzbekistan where he worked as a journalist in the local newspaper of the Greeks and in 1951 began his studies at the Moscow Literary University "Maxim Gorky". During his stay in Moscow he was friendly to letters personalities such as Boris Pasternak and Nazim Hikmet and began writing the epic poem "Belogiannis", which won the first world poetry award at the 1955 Warsaw festival.

He was a close friend of Nikos Zachariades, to whom he remained faithful and after his deposed and deleted. He said: "I went the next day to Ka Ge Be. They showed me in “Evgo” the letter of women in Averof prisons, where they signed the deposing of N. Zachariades – among them the signature of Roula Koukoulou. And the general says: “Here his wife renounces him, why do you insist on supporting him so stubbornly? Go with your party and leave the emotional stuff.” I told him then: “I am a Cretan-Manian, I do not betray my own.” He, of course, did not understand the origins and because he thought that I was referring to some Marxist theory-discretion, as it sounded like “Creticonaniac”, he tells me with terrible interest: “Tell me, what is this?” Zachariad was laughing when I told him about the incident. "You're an old man, Piraeus," he told me."

In 1960 his play "The Island of Venus" (on Cyprus) was very successful in 180 theatres of the Soviet Union with over 22,000 performances. According to him, this performance "was artistic, but also political success in the sense that a superpower, the USSR shouted that Cyprus was Greek. ...In my works I never faced heroes singlely, by