Emmanouil Kriaras

Emmanuel Kriaras (1906-2014) was born in Piraeus, with roots in Crete. He completed high school in Chania in 1924. He studied philology at the University of Athens (1924-29), Byzantine philology, modern Greek philology, and comparative literature at the University of Munich (1930) and the University of Paris (1938-39 and 1945-48). He earned his doctorate in 1938. Kriaras was a research associate at the Medieval Archive of the Academy of Athens (1930-39) and later its director (1939-50). During the Occupation, he participated in the resistance and was held in Haidari for months until September 1944. In 1950, he was appointed as a professor of medieval Greek philology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy between 1954-55. He was dismissed from his position by the Junta in 1968. Kriaras cultivated medieval and modern Greek philology and language and advocated for the use of the demotic language. He served as the president of a twenty-member committee that translated judicial codes and chaired a committee that proposed the monotonic system that is applied today. He compiled the "Dictionary of Medieval Vulgar Greek Literature 1100-1669" (14 volumes) and the "Dictionary of Demotic Greek." He published studies on medieval and modern Greek language and philology. Among the more than 1,000 articles and 60 books he published independently, his monographs on Psycharis, Solomos, and Palamas stand out, as do his editions of older texts of modern Greek literature (such as Chortatsis's "Panoria" and the plays of Petros Katsaitis), his studies on demoticism, and his correspondence. He was honored with international awards, including the Herder Prize and the Association des Etudes Grecques award for his Medieval Dictionary. He also received four Greek honors (the last being the Commander of the Order of Honor) and was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor in France and Commendatore in Merito in Italy. He passed away from cardiac arrest at his home in Thessaloniki on the evening of August 22, 2014, at the age of 108.