Criaras, Emmanuel

Criaras was born on November 28, 1906 in Piraeus ^[2] , in a family originating from the island of Crete . The first childhood years lived on the island of Milos .

In 1914, the family moved to Chania (on the island of Crete ), where he graduated from high school. In 1924, he entered the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Athens , which he graduated in 1929 . From 1930 to 1950 he worked in the Medieval Archive of the Athens Academy , at the beginning as an employee, and from 1939 as its director.

Along with his work in the Medieval Archive, he continued his studies in 1930, went to Munich , receiving a scholarship from the Athens Academy to receive information on theoretical and technical issues of lexicography in the environment where Thesaurus Linguae Latinae began to be compiled.

In the periods of 1938 - 1939 and 1945 - 1948 , already being a professor, he went to Paris for retraining, for the first time Byzantine studies became his subject, and in the second “comparative grammatology”.

Received his professorship in 1938 at the University of Athens, for his work Research on the sources of Erotocritus ^[3] .

In 1948, he was a candidate for the Department of the New Greek Philology of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Thessaloniki of Aristotle , which was however occupied by Linos Politis . Two years later, he was elected permanent professor of medieval Greek philology at the same university. In the Macedonian capital, he taught mainly medieval literature, sometimes medieval (Byzantine) Greek history, modern Greek literature , but also General and Comparative Gramatology, because thanks to his actions the first - and for many years the only in Greece - autonomous faculty of the General and Comparative grammatology. Teaching Criaras was interrupted in January 1968 , when the Black Colonels decided to dismiss him from the university because of his democratic convictions ^[4] . After leaving the university, he resolutely turned to the compilation of the Dictionary of Medieval Greek Folk Literature (1100-1669) (the decision to compile the dictionary was made by him in 1956 ).

His wife, then a teacher at the Thessaloniki Industrial School (today the University of Macedonia ), Ekaterina Striftu-Kriara, whom he married in 1936, died on May 1, 2000 ^[5] .

Criaras himself died on August 22, 2014 ^[6] at the age of 107 years.

According to the will, he was buried in the homeland of his ancestors and the city where he lived in his youth, in the city of Chania on the island of Crete ^[7] .

P. Ziogas writes about Criaras as the most productive Greek scholar in the humanities. Ziogas wrote in 2008: “If we take into account the parameter, the number of publications of Criaras, then we will come to the following conclusions. Of the approximately 20 thousand pages of the famous works of Criaras, the vast majority belong to lexicography (more than 8.5 thousand pages), followed by grammatology (about 6 thousand), compositions (more than 3 thousand), epistolary (about 1.5 thousand pages), and finally linguistic, which have about 900 pages ” ^[8] .

Of the more than 1000 articles and about 60 books published by Criaras separately, his works on Psychyris , Solomos and Palamas , the publication of ancient texts of new Greek literature ( Panoria Hortatsis , theatrical texts by Petros Katsaitis , etc.), various studies on dimotikism and most importantly should be noted. The first 14 volumes of the Dictionary of Medieval Greek Folk Literature (1100–1669) (which in the international lexicographic circles received the name Kriaras Dictionary ). In 1997, for personal reasons, Criaras left the compilation of the dictionary and transferred his lexicographic archive to the Greek Language Center in the Macedonian capital . The Center continues to work on the archive and published the 15th (2006), 16th (2008) and 17th (2011) volumes of the Dictionary, as well as a two-volume collection of the first 14 volumes, which is available on the Internet ^[9] .

Another lexicographic work of Criaras was the Dictionary of Modern Greek Folk Language , written and spoken, published in 1995 .

Criaras is not confined to scientific work. As he stated in an interview in 2002: “A scientist ... must popularize his science. I have been striving for this all my life, especially after 1974, when Democracy was restored in our country. A scientist should be a researcher, a teacher, and a popularizer ” ^[10] .

Criaras has been faithful to the ideology of dimotikism since school, since 1923, and fought with all the means at his disposal for his language credo. His contribution was significant both in the recognition of dimotics as the official language of the Greek state, and in the introduction of monotonic spelling, instead of the polytonic system of stress in writing preserved in Greek writing from antiquity until the second half of the 20th century.

By law 309 of 23.1.76, the government of Konstantin Karamanlis , in which Georgios Rallis was the Minister of Education, decided to recognize dimotics in the field of education and administrative board. At that time, a textbook on dimotics grammar, which was based on the "Modern Greek grammar" of Manolis Triandafillidis , entered the schools. The “Grammar” of Triandafillidis, published in 1941, was used in the education system and needed to be reduced and brought into line with educational and linguistic reality.

This work was undertaken by a committee of which Criaras became a member. A few years later, in the period 1981-1982, the government of Andreas Papandreou made two additional decisions: the first, to draw up all the laws in dimotics and to rewrite the main judicial codes in dimotics, and, second, to cancel the polytonic spelling. Criaras was the chairman of the “Committee of Twenty,” which undertook this hard work of rewriting legal codes, as well as the chairman of the committee, which proposed a modern look for the monotonic system.

In the years following the introduction of dimotics, and until his death, Criaras continued to defend the demotic language. He often wrote articles, trying to resolve problems encountered in using the language. At the same time, he tried to devote the general public to specific language problems through television broadcasts ( Five Minutes ) on the Greek state television EPT ( Greek Broadcasting Corporation ) from 1985 to 1987.

The professor’s multifaceted contribution to the humanities was recognized both in Greece and abroad.

The Kingdom of Greece and the Republic of Greece awarded Criaras with the command crosses of the Order of the Phoenix (twice), the Order of George I and the Order of Honor .

France made him a Knight of the Legion of Honor , and Italy a commander of the Order of Merit for the Italian Republic .

In 1977 in Vienna, he was awarded the Herder Prize by the German Alfred Toepfer Stiftung FVS foundation . He was also awarded the Greek Goulandris Foundation (for his work on Dionysios Solomos), the prize “Georgios Photinos” of the Athens Academy (for the publication of the Panorama ), and others.

Criaras was, among other things, an honorary chairman of the Greek Society of General and Comparative Gramatology , the Pan-Greek Union of Philologists , an honorary member of the Center for Greek Language and the Byzantine Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies . At the same time, he was a member of the Academy of Athens , and a foreign member of the Roman Arcadian Academy and the Sicilian Academy in Palermo. In 2006, on the occasion of his centenary, he was awarded the Thessaloniki Aristotelian University with his highest honorary award, the “Golden Aristotle” ^[11] .

In the same year, he was proclaimed an honorary professor at the Faculty of Communications and Media of the University of Athens ^[12] .

In the 2009 parliamentary elections, he was included in the list of candidates from the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement . At a meeting with the new Prime Minister, Georgios Papandreou , Criaras asked for the abolition of the teaching of ancient Greek in the gymnasium, noting that “the simultaneous teaching of the new and ancient forms of Greek actually introduces confusion, as a result of which the majority of students remain linguisticly illiterate” ^{[13 ]} .

• Αυτοβιογραφία Κριαρά: Μακράς Ζωής Αγωνίσματα , Αθήνα: Οι φίλοι του "Αντί", 2009
• Παναγιώτης Ζιώγας, Εμμανουήλ Κριαράς , Θεσσαλονίκη: Τυπογραφείο Αλτιντζή, 2008

• Άπαντα Κριαρά σε ψηφιακή μορφή
• Συνέντευξη του Κριαρά (2006)
• Βιβλία του συγγραφέα (unavailable link)
• Συνέντευξη στην Ελένη Ξενάκη , 01/21/2010, “Το Βήμα”.