Aegina's connection to literature is older than almost any place a visitor is likely to have been. In the fifth century BC the island's athletes were celebrated in the victory odes of Pindar - a remarkable share of his surviving odes honour Aeginetan champions, more than those of any other city - and ancient tradition records native literary figures such as Philiscus of Aegina, a philosopher of the Cynic school also remembered as a writer of tragedies. But the island's great literary age came in the twentieth century, when it quietly hosted the writing of some of the most important works in modern Greek.
Nikos Kazantzakis settled on Aegina in 1933 and by 1935 had built a house above the sea at Livadi, just outside the town - he called it the Cocoon, and it was designed by the architect Vassilis Douras and shared at first with the painter Takis Kalmouchos. For the next thirteen years this was the engine room of his work. On Aegina he completed his enormous modern sequel to Homer, the Odyssey, published in 1938; wrote the plays Othello Returns and Melissa and the French-language Le Jardin des Rochers; and produced a stream of verse translations - Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pirandello - working with monastic discipline from early morning to midday before taking the long uphill walks he loved. Angelos Sikelianos and Pantelis Prevelakis were guests at the house. Then, during the darkest years of the German occupation, between 1941 and 1943, Kazantzakis sat in that same study and wrote The Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas - published in 1946 and known to the world ever since as Zorba the Greek. The most famous Greek novel of the twentieth century is an Aegina book.
The thread continues directly into the next generation. The poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939-2020) was Kazantzakis's goddaughter - he was a close friend of her parents - and her family's old house on Aegina, bought in the 1920s and surrounded by a pistachio orchard, was the fixed point of her life. She published her first poem as a teenager, went on to win the Academy of Athens prize and, in 2014, the Grand State Prize for Literature, and though she wintered in Athens she always said it was on Aegina that she felt most at home. For sixty years the island's light, its gardens, and its unhurried rhythm ran through one of the most distinctive bodies of poetry in modern Greek, read today in more than ten languages.
The geography of all this is easy to visit. The street running north along the coast from the town is named after Kazantzakis, and his house at Livadi still stands, marked for the curious; the same street leads to the museum of the sculptor Christos Kapralos, who worked summers on Aegina for forty years - the island collected artists of every kind. None of these places demand a pilgrimage. But there is a particular pleasure, sitting at the harbour with a coffee, in knowing that a few hundred metres away Zorba first danced on paper while the island went about its business exactly as it is doing now.