The creation of a linguistic interpretative guide that will allow the average reader to approach the inaccessible language of Nikos Kazantzakis has long been a pressing scientific demand.
The Glossary in the works of Nikos Kazantzakis, a product of years of diligent lexicographic research, aims to fill this significant gap; to reintroduce the author to the reading public through the lens of his unique vocabulary and to contribute to its understanding. It contains approximately 15,000 entries, in Greek and foreign languages, which were extracted from all of Kazantzakis's original works, from his foreign works translated by others (Brakhokipos, Tonta Rampa), as well as from Dante's Divine Comedy and Machiavelli's Prince, which he himself translated into Greek.
The preparation of the Glossary was primarily based on the editions produced in the 1950s and 1960s, with scholarly oversight by Emmanuel Kasdaglis, and secondarily on newer editions, where necessary. The processing and interpretation of the linguistic material relied on reputable dictionaries of Modern Greek, both older and contemporary, as well as various valid studies, glossaries, and sources, including the interpretative lexicons of Kazantzakis himself for his Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy.
The uniqueness and usefulness of this interpretative linguistic guide lie in the fact that it does not merely provide an alphabetical listing of verbal forms with interpretative references and etymological versions, but presents in its entirety the very words of the Cretan creator through selected—by word and meaning—characteristic excerpts from all his works, so that the specific use of the word being studied is directly documented.
