Ioannis Sykoutris

Ioannis Sykoutris was born in Smyrna, Ionia, on December 1, 1901. His father, a livestock farmer of Chian descent, supported his large family modestly but honorably. He taught the frail, small-statured, and delicate Ioannis his first letters before he attended the third grade of the neighborhood primary school of Agios Konstantinos in 1909. Supported by Metropolitan Chrysostomos, he was enrolled for free at the Evangelical School, from which he graduated with honors in June 1918. Due to the blockade, he was immediately forced to take up a teaching position in Mourantie (Giaour-kioi), a town near Magnesia, where he also formed a youth club sworn to speak only Greek among themselves. At the age of sixteen, he was already a regular contributor to "Amaltheia" by S. Solomonidis under the pseudonym Antiphon the Smyrnaean. In the fall of 1919, he managed to come to Athens, where he retroactively enrolled in the School of Philosophy, graduating with top honors in 1922. He immediately left for Cyprus, where he was appointed a professor at the Larnaca Hieratic School. His stay there served as a rebirth for him from the acute internal crisis he was experiencing due to the Asia Minor Catastrophe. For two years, he published historical and folklore studies in the magazine "Cypriot Chronicles," which he founded. In 1924, he returned to Athens, where he was appointed an assistant at the Philosophical Seminar of the University. In 1925, he married and, with a university scholarship, departed for Germany. In 1930, upon returning to Athens, he was unanimously declared a lecturer, and his lecture halls were packed with attendees. He worked creatively but extravagantly, primarily as a research scientist but above all as a teacher. Simultaneously, he worked as a librarian at the Library of the Academy of Athens. In 1933, the University of Prague offered him the chair of Classical Philology. His publications—philological, philosophical, critical, and others—followed at a rapid pace throughout these years. In 1937, before he could be elected a professor at the University—how much he loved it and how much it pained him!—he committed suicide after a final visit to Acrocorinth.