ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

- CONTENT--
Dimostenis Vutiras (1872 Constantinople – 27 March 1958 Athens) was a prominent Greek prose writer of the Interwar period. Heroes of his works were mostly poor and deprived people, as well as representatives of marginal strata who fascinated him, which is why many Greek literary critics characterized him as "Maxim Gorky of Greece".

Childhood and youth
Dimostenis Vutiras was born in 1872 in Constantinople. Stefanos Milesis writes that he was actually born on an Austrian steamship, on the way to Constantinople. He was the first child (of seven) in the family of Nikolaos Vutiras and Teony Papadi-Scipitari.
His father was from the island of Keia, where the future writer spent his first childhood years. Later, the family settled in Mesolongion, where the mother’s family had roots, and then, in 1876, in Piraeus, where his father was appointed a notary.
Here he graduated from primary school and went to the gymnasium, but he interrupted his studies in the gymnasium after the first attacks of epilepsy appeared.
His parents began to treat him as mentally ill and did not deny him any of his quirks. He enrolled in the Maheras Naval School, after which he began to practice fencing, first with a retired gendarmerie officer, Paralikas, and then at the Iliópoulos School.
In a youthful rush for adventure, he and his friends expressed a desire to go to Africa to create a “free state”, but the French consul in Piraeus demanded the consent of his parents.
At the same time, he received a musical education from the Italian musician Lacalamite and conductor Capellano.

Family
Vutiras married Betina Fexi in 1903. One of his daughters, Nausica, became a soprano singer of the National Opera of Greece.
Another daughter, Teony Vutira Stefanopoulu, became an artist. Although Theoni Vutira painted mostly landscapes, we owe her a number of portraits of the writer.

Bankruptcy
His father decided to leave the profession of notary and set up an enterprise for the production of building materials in New Faler, including a small foundry.
By 1905, his father’s business had gone bankrupt and, under pressure from his creditors, his father had committed suicide.
Dimostenis moved into a new home, where he moved everything he could save from creditors.
His father’s suicide caused Dimostenis’ deep sadness and melancholy.
Initially, he tried to continue the operation of the enterprise, but eventually he led it to complete bankruptcy.
For some time he worked as a tenor singer with a visiting Italian troupe, but soon lost his sources of income.
In large part, Vutiras’s becoming a professional writer was due to his deteriorating financial situation and the gradual loss of other income to live on, apart from publishing stories in magazines and newspapers.

The birth of the novelist Vutiras
His first story he brought back in 1901 to the writer and artist Gerasim Vokos, who published in Piraeus magazine "Periodico mas" ("Our magazine"). Vokos read the story fluently and tore it up - "not yours." Voutiras brought him a story exchange