STAVROS MELISSINOS
Autobiographical Note
At the urging of my son, Pantelis, who at this time, in the midst of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, is taking on the task of carrying forward my work and legacy, I sit down to write this brief autobiographical note.
I look back over my life at a time of sudden withdrawal from active work, since my recent eviction from the historic shop on Pandrossou Street, where my father had established our business in 1920, also marked my own involuntary retirement. Perhaps, however, it is for the best, now that my beloved Sophia, my wife and companion in every struggle through all these years, has slowly begun to lose herself along the dark paths of Alzheimer’s.
I turn my gaze back and reflect on how life led me from my studies in cinema, which I had already begun, to a different professional and artistic path with ancient Greek sandals and poetry.
And all of it within the small family workshop, which was destined to become my own theatrical stage for nearly 50 years.
I was born at 6 Pikilis Street, in Plaka, the old quarter of Athens, on September 10, 1929, into a family where the smell of leather was as familiar as the musicality of poetic verse.
My father, George Melissinos, was a master shoemaker. My uncle Michael, his twin brother, was a poet. The two of them — together with the wider family tradition, which carried memories of a historic past in Crete and the verses of the Erotokritos by the Cretan poet of the Venetian period, Vitsentzos Kornaros — gave me, perhaps without knowing it, my destiny: the hand of the craftsman and the soul of the poet.
My mother, who came from the Tselios family, with ancestors who were heroes of the Greek War of Independence of 1821, dreamed of seeing me become a general. At least that is what I was told, because I never knew her. She died shortly after I was born. Growing up, however, in post-war Greece and watching Hollywood films, I dreamed of the cinema. I wanted images, drama, action, movement, stories, light. I had never thought of becoming a sandal maker. But life writes its own scripts and, sometimes, takes us straight back to the very place we tried to escape.
Because I was an only child, I developed a special bond with my father — a heroic figure who was held in great esteem in Athenian society. He later married Marianthi Acrithaki, a loving woman who made sure I learned the entire Erotokritos by heart. She, too, left us early.
After my military service, I planned to pursue a career as a film director. But the death of my father in 1955 changed the course of my life.
I was already married to Sophia, my beautiful muse, when I entered his workshop with mixed feelings. There, among leather, tools, dust, and memories, I began to discover that even a small shop in Athens could become a stage — and that perhaps it was there that I would finally play my own role in life.
I did not want to make ordinary shoes. Trying to understand what my own path should be, I continued an old habit from childhood: writing poetry.
My vague professional plans began to take more definite shape when an English choreographer walked through my door and asked me for several pairs of ancient Greek sandals for her dance company. At first, absorbed in my verses, I refused. But my wife, Sophia, with her practical and business-minded nature, took it as a sign of fate and left me little room for argument. So I took on the work with great zeal.
It was then that I understood that writing poetry while at the same time creating something traditionally Greek, something ancient yet still alive — something that could be my own small offering to the country I loved so deeply — might, after all, be my path in life.
The ancient sandal was not merely footwear. It was the form of an entire civilization. It belonged to history, to tradition, to theatre, to mythology, to the road, to the human body, and to the sun.
When I began making sandals inspired by ancient Greek forms, I was not copying the past. I was bringing it back to the feet of modern people. Some thought I was crazy, but the great success that followed soon convinced them otherwise.
My philosophy was simple: the sandal must be made by hand, fitted to the individual person, and born inside the workshop. The human foot is not a standardized industrial measurement. It has character. It has memory. It has its own personality and dignity. It cannot simply be imprisoned inside a shoe.
That is why I never wanted to turn my work into mass production. Many people wanted me to sell my name, to franchise the business, to make the sandals impersonal and profitable in the usual commercial sense. I refused. I did not want my name to become a label without a soul. I preferred one real customer standing in front of me to a thousand pairs being made without me — especially when I could also recite verses from my philosophical poetry and exchange views and ideas with them like Athenians of another age.
In time, the world began to seek out my little workshop.
Artists, poets, actors, dancers, hippies, queens, and people with no title at all — who were often even better — passed through the door of my workshop. The famous and the unknown sat on the same old chairs I had kept from my father’s time, all waiting for the same thing: a pair of handmade sandals, made to their measure by my own hands.
One day the Beatles walked into my workshop. They had come to meet the poet and sandal maker of Athens and to have me make their sandals before they left for the Greek islands. They had been told about me, about my poetry, and about my sandals. They came in with an innocence and a comic rhythm, almost like the Seven Dwarfs from the Walt Disney film. In my shop, even legends made a kind of pilgrimage… for a pair of sandals.
Years later, my son Pantelis asked me why I had not asked the Beatles for autographs. I answered him with a little mischief: “My work will still be here when they are gone.” What I meant was simple. Through my literary work and my craftsmanship, I was trying to create something that would outlive the noise of the moment.
Pantelis grew up inside this world, which he adored, and he was always beside me through our shared interests. His elementary school was only a block away from my workshop and near the house where I was born, beside the Ancient Agora of Athens. To him, the workshop was not a business address, but a living, fairy-tale place where magical things happened. He loved the leather, the tools, the visitors, the daily theatre of the work, the chaos, the humour, the fatigue, and the pride.
After school he would always come to help — although at times he reminded me more of Dennis the Menace. He was constantly under my feet, hyperactive like a bee that never stops moving. But I allowed him to bond with this dream, just as my own father had allowed me to bond with the workshop. Between us there was always something more than the usual relationship between father and son. There was a silent apprenticeship, not only in technique but also in spirit.
That apprenticeship soon extended beyond the workshop. From a very early age, Pantelis also became a valuable collaborator in my literary work, creating illustrations for several of my poetry collections. As he grew older and became fluent in English, his contribution took another form: he began translating my poetry into English, helping my work reach readers beyond Greece.
In this way, our collaboration gradually came to embrace not only the craft of sandal-making, but also poetry, drawing, language and the arts that had always surrounded our family life.
I was happy that he understood that the workshop was not only about making sandals. It was about safeguarding a name, a memory, and a way of standing in the world.
Pantelis followed his own artistic path. He studied in Florence and New York, earned his degrees from the Parsons School of Design, painted, designed sets and costumes for the theatre and for the Greek Cultural Center of New York, wrote and continues to write plays and poetry, and lived abroad. But the thread was never broken.
When the time came, he returned not simply to take over a shop, but to continue a family legacy. What passed into his hands was not only leather, tools, designs, or customers. It was the reputation of the Melissinos name, the story of the Poet Sandal Maker, the archive of an entire lifetime, and the responsibility to carry on the tradition in art and sandal-making without betraying it — to continue our saga.
He also returned to stand beside us, his now elderly parents, as, especially now, the page of our lives turns to a difficult chapter, with his mother’s Alzheimer’s slowly clouding her memory.
But let me return to the remarkable people who crossed my threshold. Each of them appeared for a while, almost like a guest star on the small Athenian stage that my workshop had become. The Beatles were not the only ones. Joseph Cotten, Gary Cooper, Sophia Loren, Michel Piccoli, Anthony Quinn, Rudolf Nureyev, Barbra Streisand — and many others whose names I no longer remember — all became part of the history of the workshop.
In the late 1960s, Jackie Onassis entered my life — and the life of the workshop — in a way I never forgot. During one of her visits to our picturesque neighbourhood of Plaka, I had the opportunity to speak with her. She received my poetry with kindness and understood that my place was not simply a shop. It was part of the living memory of Athens.
When I told her that the area was threatened with demolition because of government plans, her immediate support helped save not only my workshop but also the neighbouring shops in the Monastiraki area. I remained deeply grateful to her for this, while the local shopkeepers came close to putting up a statue of me. Jackie saw what bureaucrats often fail to see: that a city is made not only of real estate, stones, and streets, but of human stories, places, voices, hands, habits, and memories.
I always believed that commerce without culture is poverty, even when it makes money. A shop can be just a place of commerce, or it can also become a small theatre of culture. I wanted mine to be the latter. I wrote poems during the short breaks in the day. I talked with visitors. I measured feet. I argued, laughed, observed, and made sandals.
I never felt divided between poetry and the craftsman’s art. To me, they were the same act. A poem is made with the hands. And a sandal, when it is true, is also a poem.
That is why I never considered my workshop a commercial enterprise in the ordinary sense. It was my personal platform, a place from which I could express ideas that sometimes displeased the establishment of the day. It was built from hands, poems, friendships, visitors, photographs, books, conversations, and countless pairs of sandals that left Athens and walked out into the world.
If my sandals travelled farther than I did, if my poems found readers in places I never saw, if people remember the little workshop as something more than a shop, then I am satisfied.
I published many books of lyrical poetry, influenced by the romanticism of Omar Khayyam, by philosophy, by Greek history, and by the heroic imagination. My poetry was translated into many languages abroad. Works of mine entered the libraries of Harvard and Oxford, and I was featured by major television networks and media around the world. My Rubaiyat, written in 1959, celebrated life through 127 quatrains, with wine as its symbol, and was included in the curriculum of several American universities.
I was called the Poet Sandal Maker of Athens. It was not a title I invented for marketing purposes. It was the truth of my life. The title was given to me by the people and by the journalists who began to write about me. I made sandals like a poet and wrote poems like a craftsman. Between the two, I lived.
Stavros Melissinos / Athens 2004
