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Calendar 2022 of Stegi Vitsentzos Kornaros

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Calendar 2022 of Stegi Vitsentzos Kornaros

This year’s edition of our calendar combines excerpts from the first volume of the poetic collection by Kostas Fragkoulis – Antaios, “Ta Difora” (“The Double Fruits”), along with paintings and watercolors by Tzeni Kafetzaki, inspired by the land of Sitia.

At the beginning of the long sold-out poetry collection “Ta Difora,” which Stegi republished in 2021 in agreement with the poet’s family — 60 years after its first edition and 30 after the second — Antaios pays due tribute to his teacher, Vincenzo Kornaros, with four verses from Erotokritos:

In those days when time was passing by,
Aretousa took four double-fruited apples,
she sends and prepares them for the sick man’s mother,
and they became a cure, and healed him.

Menelaos Parlamas, a great philologist and friend of Antaios, when he read Ta Difora — even before the identity of its creator was revealed to him — wrote:

Thus, one by one, there passed before my eyes a whole series of figures — all nourished by the rich Cretan root, like its double fruit. I had no longer the slightest doubt that the poems of the notebook were the work of a nostalgic soul, who returned with longing and boldness to his roots in order to secure his existence upon the ancient trunk… For only such a passionate nostalgist could revive so many things using the form of the folk song without the slightest trace of thematic weakness.”
Menelaos Parlamas

And Rea Galanaki wrote about the third edition of Ta Difora published by Stegi:

Life in his village in Sitia and the lack of systematic education gave him the language in which he wrote, continuing a centuries-old local tradition of oral speech — where, of course, by the word ‘language’ I do not mean merely words but an entire universe. […] He was, I would say, a man who encountered in a natural, effortless way not only the linguistic wealth of poor farmers, but also the intellectual wealth of the educated people of the city.
Rea Galanaki
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