Nikos Kazantzakis

Kazantzakis studied law in Athens and philosophy in Paris under Bergson, then spent decades restlessly chasing successive obsessions (Buddhism, Marxism-Leninism, Christian asceticism) across travels through Russia, China, Japan, and Egypt, translating Dante, Goethe, and Darwin into Greek along the way.

Zorba the Greek (1946), his most beloved book, grew from a real failed lignite-mining venture in the Mani and the earthy, dancing, life-devouring foreman who ran it: a foil for the bookish narrator's own timid asceticism. He capped decades of Homeric obsession with a 33,333-line modern sequel to the Odyssey, the project he considered his true life's work.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1955) drew a Vatican ban and an Orthodox excommunication threat for imagining Christ tempted by an ordinary domestic life; Kazantzakis died in Germany in 1957 and was buried, denied consecrated ground, on Heraklion's old Venetian walls, under an epitaph of his own choosing: 'I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.'