Yanis Kordatos (1891-1961) was enmeshed with Leftist currents in Greece from early on in his life. After finishing school in his hometown of Zagora, his father sent him for further education to a Greek-German school in Smyrna, where he studied under Dimitris Glinos (1882-1943), later a prominent agitator for the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). After a few years of being shunted between Constantinople and Volos for schooling, due to ill health, he graduated and attended the University of Athens in 1911, settling in to study Law.
While attending university, he fell in with The Educational Club (Το Εκπαιδευτικό Όμιλο).[1] This was a collection of Leftist intellectuals, including Nikos Kazantzakis and Andreas Karkavitsas, who hoped to reform the Greek educational system around the Demotic language, as opposed to the Katharevousan language, which was much closer to ancient Greek, and generally allied with the Right.[2] As part of this club, he came into contact with Nikolaos Giannios (1885-1958), a socialist scholar and journalist who was active in the Socialist Workers’ Party of Greece (SEKE), which soon became the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).[3]
He joined the SEKE in May 1919, and was elected to the Central Committee the following year. He also began contributing to the communist newspaper, Rizospastis, of which he became director in November 1922. In 1922, he was arrested twice – first because of anti-war articles published in Rizospastis, and then because of his involvement in an attempted coup on 11 September 1922 after the Asia Minor Disaster.[4]
However, he would not remain so neatly allied to (or deeply tied to) the Communist Party for much longer. In either late 1924 or early 1925, Kordatos left the Communist Party in protest over the Party’s position on the Macedonian Question, rejecting the idea of an independent Macedonia as part of a Balkan Soviet Republic.[5] He quickly fell out of favour, and, by 1933, was attacked by historian Yannis Zevgos (1897-1947), who called him a ‘historian of the bourgeoisie’.[6]
In 1940, he was arrested by the Fourth of August Regime (1936-1940) for writing reports that called the Greco-Italian War an anti-fascist war.[7] When released during the Occupation, he joined the National Liberation Front (EAM), which was spearheaded by the KKE.[8] However, he never fully reconciled with the Party, despite working alongside them as part of the United Demotic Left (EDA) after World War II.
As a historian, Kordatos was very much interested in social and radical history, and pioneered both historical materialism and Marxist historiography in Greece. In 1924, he published The Social Significance of the Greek Revolution of 1821 (Η κοινωνική σημασία της Ελληνικής Επαναστάσεως του 1821), delving into the history of the modern Greek state, but it wasn’t really until the institution of the Fourth of August Regime that he began working on ancient Greek literature. In 1939, he became the director of the “Library of Ancient Greek Prose Writers and Poets” (Βιβλιοθήκη Αρχαίων Ελληνών Πεζογράφων και Ποιητών). This library included the works of the following ancient authors: playwrights Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles; poets Alcaeus, Apollodorus, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Homer; philosophers Antiphon, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Plato; historians Arrian, Herodotus, and Plutarch; and novelists Heliodorus, Longus, and Lucian. In 1940, a slew of ancient works began, ranging from ancient Greek literature (Homer, Sappho, the philosophers), to dialectical histories of ancient, Hellenistic, and Roman-dominated Greece, following his Marxist style. He also translated a number of ancient texts, including Plato’s Euthyphro and Critias, and Demosthenes’ On The Crown.
In the last few years of his life, he worked on a history of Greece, spanning from the prehistoric period to 1924. Before he could finish the work, though, on 29 April 1961, while writing an article for the Left-wing newspaper Dawn (Αυγή), he had a heart attack, and died at his desk. He remains a giant of Greek Marxist historiography and radical politics, and has given his name to the Yanis Kordatos Association (Σύλλογος Γιάνης Κορδάτος), a group that seeks to spread Marxist ideology in Greece and abroad.[9]
This profile was written by Anna Coopey.
[1] For more on The Educational Club, see Markos Tsirimoukos (1927): “Ιστορία του Εκπαιδευτικού Ομίλου (γραμμένη από έναν ιδρυτή)” (pp. 401-410, 468-478) from Nea Estia (7&8).
[2] For more on Demotic and Katharevousan Greek, and Ion Dragoumis, proponent of the former, see Mark Dragoumis (n.d.): “Ion Dragoumis, The Misguided Patriot” from Hellenic Communication Service L.L.C. – https://www.helleniccomserve.com/dragoumis.html (accessed 01-03-2025, 18:02).
[3] On the history of the KKE, see Nikos Marantzidis (2023): Under Stalin’s Shadow: A Global History of Greek Communism (Northern Illinois University Press).
[4] The Asia Minor Disaster was a great turning point in Greek self-identity. After the Greek army were defeated by the Turkish, and the Greek population in Smyrna was massacred, the repercussions were felt throughout Greece, as people and politicians came to terms with the death of the long held “Megali Idea” (“Great Idea”), that enshrined Hellenic irredentism and expansionism. For more on the Disaster, see Damien Agravaras (2022): “The Asia Minor Catastrophe” from Europeana – https://www.europeana.eu/en/stories/the-asia-minor-catastrophe (accessed 01-03-2025, 18:05).
[5] For more on the Macedonian Question – a thorny subject even now – during the interwar period, see Spyros Sfetas (2007): “The Birth of ‘Macedonianism’ in the Interwar Period” (pp. 285-303) from Ioannis Koliopoulos (ed.) (2007): The History of Macedonia (Museum of the Macedonian Struggle Foundation).
[6] Quote accessed via Giorgos D. Boumbous (1996): Η ελληνική κοινωνία στην πρώιμη μαρξιστική σκέψη. Γ Σκληρος-Γ. Κορδάτος (1907-1930) (Τμήμα Πολιτικής Επιστήμης και Διεθνών Σπουδών, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο Κοινωνικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών), pp. 382-384.
[7] The Fourth of August Regime was itself fascist, with their structure based on that of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany. From the government’s perspective, therefore, the war was more about imperial encroachment than ideological disparity. For more on the Regime, see Robin Higham & Thanos Veremis (eds.) (1993): The Metaxas Dictatorship: Aspects of Greece 1936-1940 (Eliamep-Vryonis Centre), as well as the Metaxas Project website – https://metaxas-project.com (accessed 01-03-2025, 18:15).
[8] On EAM and the Axis Occupation of Greece, see Mark Mazower (1993): Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (Yale University Press).
[9] The Yanis Kordatis Association can be found at the following link: https://www.kordatos.org/about-us/ (accessed 01-03-2025, 18:19).
