Demetrius Vikelas - Paris, The Illness of His Wife, and Literature

Paris, The Illness of His Wife, and Literature

In 1874, following the death of her father, Vikelas' wife Kalliope began to suffer from mental problems and showed a number of suicidal tendencies. The couple tried travelling to ease the illness. In Paris, following another scare, doctors declared Kalliope mad and she stayed for seven and a half months in Jules Bernard Luys' asylum in Ivry-sur-Seine. True to his character, Vikelas recorded the progress of his wife's mental health daily during the twenty years which followed.

In his journal, from 1872 Vikelas expressed the wish to move to Athens. In 1877, while Kalliope's condition was in remission, they took the opportunity to make the move. Vikelas started to build a home around the corner from the streets of Panepistimiou (on which the University was situated) and Akadimias. However, his wife's health worsened again and he accompanied her to France where she again stayed in Ivry-sur-Seine.

During his stays in Paris, Vikelas embarked on translating Shakespeare plays into Greek: King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Othello during his wife's first stay (1878), and Macbeth and Hamlet during the second (1881). The public readings of his translations received an enthusiastic welcome in the literary community in Athens. He then also wrote his main literary work: Loukis Laras. The book first appeared in Athens as a series starting in 1879. The same year, it was translated into French and German. The French translation (which had its first republication in 1880) was included by the Education Minister Jules Ferry in the list of works which could be given as prizes to good students.

Vikelas spent the following fifteen years in Paris, building up contacts with the surrounding intellectuals and literati of the French capital. Consequently, Juliette Adam dedicated her anthology Poètes grecs contemporains ("Contemporary Greek poets"), published in 1881, to him, and he published in her Nouvelle Revue. He wrote for it, as before, numerous articles (on Byzantine history, Eastern issues and Greek political life), novels (a compendium in French and Greek came out in 1887) and even travel guides.

In the linguistic controversy in Greece between Katharevousa and Dimotiki, Vikelas chose the middle ground, rejecting the excesses of the Dimotikists just as much as the fierce defenders of the more intellectual language. He suggested using Katharevousa for parliamentary proceedings, for example, but popular language for poetry.

Between 1877 and 1892, he travelled, since at the worst of her crises, his wife could not bear his presence. He returned to Greece, visited Scotland, Switzerland, Spain and Constantinople.

In 1892, he bought a new plot in Athens (between the streets of Kriezotou and Valaoriti) where he built a new residence which was also his final home.

In 1893, he helped finance the construction of the Greek Orthodox Church in Paris.

In May 1894, he received a request from the Pan-Hellenic Gymnastic Club, asking him to assist at a congress on amateurism convened the following month by Pierre de Coubertin. After hesitation, he agreed to represent the association. Following the congress it was decided to recreate the Olympic Games and to organise them in Athens.

Originally, it had been De Coubertin's idea to hold the first celebration of the modern Olympics in Paris in 1900, but Vikelas convinced him and the newly created International Olympic Committee that they should be held in Athens, in order to symbolically link them to the original Games. As the constitution of the IOC at that time required the IOC president to be from the country which would host the next Games, Vikelas became the IOC's first president.