STAVROS MELISSINOS
THE POET SANDAL MAKER OF ATHENS
An Autobiographical Note by Stavros Melissinos
At the request of my son Pantelis, who, as of this moment in 2004 — the year of the Athens Olympic Games — has begun to carry forward my work and legacy, I sit down to reflect upon my life and write this autobiographical note. I do so during what I must admit is an involuntary retirement, with time to look back on the strange road that led me from poetry and cinema to leather, sandals, and the little workshop that became my stage.
I was born in Athens on the 10th of September 1929, in Plaka, the old quarter of Athens, into a family where the smell of leather was as familiar as the sound of poetry. My father, George Melissinos, was a master sandal maker. My uncle Michael, his twin brother, was a poet. Between them — and through the wider family, which carried memories of a heroic past in Crete and the verses of Erotokritos by the Cretan-Venetian poet Vitsentzos Kornaros — they gave me, perhaps without knowing it, my destiny: the hand of the craftsman and the soul of the poet.
At first, I did not wish to become a sandal maker. My mother, who came from the Tselios family, descendants of heroes of the Greek War of Independence of 1821, dreamed of seeing me as a general. This is what I was told, because I never met her. My mother died soon after I was born. But as I grew up, in post-war Greece, watching Hollywood films, I dreamed of the cinema. I wanted images, drama, action, movement, stories, light. But life writes her own scripts, and sometimes she leads us back to the very place from which we tried to escape.
Being an only child, I developed a special bond with my father — a heroic and greatly respected figure in Athenian society. He later married Marianthi Acrithaki, a caring woman who made sure that I would know the long poem Erotokritos by heart. She, too, died early.
After serving in the army, I made plans for a career as a film director, but yet another death changed my course: the death of my father in 1955.
After my father’s passing, and since I was already married to Sophia, my beautiful muse, I entered his workshop with mixed feelings. There, among leather, tools, dust, and memory, I discovered that a small shop in Athens could also be a stage.
I did not want to make ordinary shoes. While trying to understand what my path should be, I continued my old habit: writing poetry. My vague business plans took clearer form when an English choreographer walked through my door and asked for a few pairs of ancient Greek sandals for her dance troupe. At first, busy with my verses, I declined. But my practical and business-minded wife, Sophia, saw it as a sign from the universe and left me no alternative. So I took on the project with great zeal.
I realised then that writing poetry and making something traditionally Greek, something ancient and alive at the same time — something that could offer a small gift to the country I loved so deeply — was perhaps my own path in life.
The ancient sandal was not merely footwear. It was the shape of a civilization. It belonged to history, tradition, theatre, mythology, the road, the body, and 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 my great success soon convinced them otherwise.
My philosophy was simple: the sandal must be made by hand, fitted to the person, and born inside the workshop. A foot is not an industrial measurement. It has character. It has memory. It has its own personality and dignity. It cannot simply be encased in a shoe-like prison.
This is why I never wished to turn my work into mass production. Many people wanted me to sell my name, franchise the business, or make the sandals anonymous and profitable in the ordinary way. But I refused. I did not want my name to become a label without a soul. I preferred one real customer standing before me to a thousand pairs made without me — especially when I could recite to them verses of my philosophical poetry and exchange views and ideas with them like true Athenians of the past.
In time, the world began to seek out my little workshop. Artists, poets, actors, dancers, hippies, queens, and people with no title at all came — which was often even better. The famous and the unknown sat on the same old chairs my father had kept in our workshop, waiting for the same thing: a pair of made-to-measure sandals made for them by my hands.
One day The Beatles walked into my workshop. They had come to meet the poet and sandal maker of Athens and to have their sandals made before heading for the Greek islands. They had been told about me, my poetry, and my sandals. They entered with the strange innocence and comic rhythm of a fairy tale, almost like the Seven Dwarfs from the Walt Disney film — forgive the parallel, but that is how they seemed to me in that moment: a small magical procession, cheerful, curious, and completely unexpected. In my shop, even legends had to come on a kind of sandal pilgrimage.
Years later, my son Pantelis asked me why I had not asked for their autographs. I answered him with a little mischief: “My work will still be here when they are long gone.” What I meant was simple. Through my literary work and my craft, I was trying to build something that would outlive the noise of the moment.
My son Pantelis grew up inside this world, which he adored, and he was always by my side through our shared interests. His elementary school was only a block away, near the house where I was born, at 6 Pikilis Street, beside the Ancient Agora of Athens. He knew the workshop not as a business address, but as a living, fairy-tale place where magic was happening. He loved the leather, the tools, the visitors, the theatre of daily work, the chaos, the humour, the fatigue, and the pride.
After school, he would always come to help — although he was occasionally something like Dennis the Menace. He was always under my feet, moving around, hyperactive, like a busy bee. But I allowed him to bond with this dream, just as my father had allowed me to bond with the workshop before him. Between us there was always more than the usual relationship of father and son. There was a silent apprenticeship, made not only of technique but of spirit.
I enjoyed the fact that he understood that the workshop was not only about making sandals. It was about protecting a name, a memory, and a way of standing in the world.
Pantelis followed his own artistic road. He studied in Florence and New York City, earned his degrees from Parsons School of Design, painted, designed sets and costumes for theatre and for the Greek Cultural Center in New York, wrote, and lived abroad. But the thread remained unbroken.
When the time came, he returned not simply to take over a shop, but to continue a family inheritance. What passed to him was not only leather, tools, patterns, or customers. It was the reputation of the Melissinos name, the story of the Poet Sandal Maker, the archive of a life, and the responsibility to carry the tradition forward without betraying it — to continue our saga.
He also returned to stand beside us, his ageing parents, as the page of our lives now turns to a difficult chapter, with his mother’s Alzheimer’s slowly clouding her memory.
But let me go back to the remarkable people who crossed my threshold. Each of them appeared there briefly, 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 workshop’s story.
In the late 1960s, Jackie Onassis also came into my life, and into the life of the workshop, in a way I never forgot. During one of her visits to our scenic Plaka neighbourhood, I spoke to her. She received my poetry with kindness and understood that my place was not merely a shop. It was part of the living memory of Athens.
When I told her that the area faced the threat of demolition under government plans, her direct support helped protect not only my workshop but also the neighbouring shops around it in the Monastiraki area. For this I remained deeply grateful, and the shopkeepers of the area almost wanted to erect a statue in my honour. Jackie saw what bureaucrats often fail to see: that a city is not made only of real estate, stones, and streets, but of human history, places, voices, hands, habits, and memories.
I always believed that commerce without culture is poverty, even when it makes money. A shop can be a temple of vulgarity, or it can be a small theatre of civilization. I wanted mine to be the second. I wrote poems between customers. I spoke with visitors. I measured feet. I argued, laughed, observed, and made sandals.
I was not divided between poetry and craft. To me, they were the same act. A poem is made by hand. A sandal, if it is honest, is also a poem.
This is why I never considered my workshop a commercial property in the ordinary sense. It was my own personal podium, a place from which I could express ideas, sometimes disliked by the establishment of the time. It was built from hands, poems, friendships, visitors, photographs, books, conversations, and countless pairs of sandals that left Athens and walked 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 several languages abroad. My works entered the libraries of Harvard and Oxford, and I was featured by major television networks and media throughout the world. My Rubaiyat, written in 1959, celebrated life in 127 stanzas, 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 as a marketing trick. It was the truth of my life. The title was given to me by the people and by the journalists who began writing about me. I made sandals as a poet, and I wrote poems as a craftsman. Between the two, I lived.
Stavros Melissinos / Athens 2004
