At the end of October in beautiful Chania you could still see tourists on the streets, but the city followed its daily autumn rhythms. I was there as a guest of a tutoring school for secondary education as part of a course that provides for a joint examination in language and literature and is held throughout the country. The preparation for the lesson took months, and the students of the 2nd and 3rd schools read my two last books: “Song of the Father” and “Nostalgia for the Loss.” The director of the tutoring center, philologist Rula Vourakis, who was contacted online, wrote to me in a message that “the selection of books was made according to technical, aesthetic and ideological criteria that correspond to the guidelines for teaching the course and with the freedom that a legal tutoring education has, for the creative use of one narrative project…

I gladly accepted the offer, because I went to Chania since the 80s, when I served in the navy and we were under repair in Suda with a destroyer.

The first meeting took place in the picturesque village of Vamos, 25 kilometers from Chania. There we arrived at the picturesque Arosmari estate in an open theater among olive trees. The perfect environment, away from enclosed spaces! The students held books in their hands, read certain stories, and underlined a few points to ask questions. They commented enthusiastically, but also critically, they asked about things decades before their own empirical experience. In fact, some of the remarks went beyond the original intentions of the author, and the persistence of some of the stories in the collection proved that in the end, the reader decides what he likes best, not the author.

It was a wonderful meeting, culminating in the reading of the text “Medicine of Pure Literature”, which was published in “Kathimerini” in 2020 and was included in the examination in the course of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the same year. . Before leaving, the students asked me to sign copies of the books they had read, and one student offered to draw the cover for my latest book, inspired by her reading.

Having worked for many years in the field of public education, I always felt the pulse behind the new guys. They want to bring learning to life in any way possible. The creative combination of language and literature can be aided by visits to schools by authors, visits to libraries by students, reading classes in and out of the classroom, students creating their own websites on related topics, discovering literary experiences outside the school hall. But above all, with the introduction of a whole literary book on the modern Greek language. Such a book will not be thrown away and may become the starter for their future library.

The creative combination of language and literature can be facilitated by writers visiting schools, library students, etc.

I felt this vitality at the next meeting, when, at the initiative of the philologist and president of the Philological Association of Chania Varvara Perrakis, I met with two sections of the 2nd lari of Chania. There, the children with the open book “Literature, the folder “Materials”, the network of texts of the 3rd Lyceum” read my story from the “Card”, which (a great honor) was included in their material, and exclaimed with humor: a living writer!

Laughing, I told them that in my school years there was no way to find a living author among the texts of modern Greek literature. Some hands pressed for questions, I saw that one day some will definitely write, they will be the next “live”. For this there was a message and a mental and moral satisfaction: the teaching of literature should promote both language and experiential learning of students for the benefit of critical thinking, synthetic abilities and creative imagination. And that the literary canon is established by critics and theorists, and is fixed in the educational process by insightful and persistent teachers.

There, in Crete, under the eternal burden of Nikos Kazantzakis, we thought that a lot could be done and even passed on to the next generations.

* Mr. Theodoros Grigoriadis is a writer.