Childhood
Vikelas was born in Ermoupoli, on the island of Syros in Greece. His father was a merchant, originally from Veria (then under Ottoman rule, now in Macedonia (Greece)) and his mother, Smaragda, was a member of the rich Melas family. He was educated at home by his mother, possibly due to his fragile health.
When he was six, the family moved to Constantinople, and ten years after that to Odessa. There he started working for his father's business.
Already he showed signs of his literary potential. At the age of 17 he translated Esther, a tragedy by Jean Racine.
Read more about this topic: Demetrius Vikelas
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children’s, and of what our children’s future will hold.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.”
—Edna O’Brien (b. c. 1932)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)