14 - Greece

Summary

On the tenth day of April, 1910, it was raining hard in Athens. A handsome man, aged forty, dressed in a white flannel suit and matching gloves, hired a two-horse carriage for the short drive to Skaramanga, a port on the coast facing the island of Salamis. Today, the shipyards of Skaramanga and the rusting tankers lying offshore are among the ugliest sights in Greece; a hundred years ago, there was not even a fashionable beach. There was, at least, an inn, where the visitor ordered lunch and a beer. Then, rising from the table, he called for the driver to unhitch one of the horses. Mounting without stirrups, he kicked the horse to a gallop and rode bareback straight into the sea. Far out from the shore, he raised a pistol, held it to his temple, and pulled the trigger. The rider disappeared; the horse swam back to shore. It would be another two weeks before the body washed up.

Pericles Yannopoulos had made a name for himself with a series of newspaper articles and two very thin cultural manifestos published in 1906 and 1907. In one of them, he had written, perhaps prefiguring his suicide:

A boy who was nothing, running in the light of the sweet mountains of Attica that is like Adonis, saw pass across the pure azure heavens of brilliant noontime the pure-white steed of rebirth with its enormous pure-white wings, and dared, threw himself after it, put out his hand to the base of its wings, and held them upright, burning white. Man and horse descended, trod the earth.

[…]

With the first powerful clap of its wings, the male child will be struck by its wing and will fall dead voluptuously, his lips drenched in the honey of voluptuousness.