User:Vicky Zont/sandbox/Kallinikos Kritovoulidis

Kallinikos Kritovoulidis (Chania, 1792- Athens, 1868) was a scholar who participated in the Greek War of Independence in 1821. His memoirs consist one of the main primordial sources of information about the Revolution of 1821 in Crete, exerting great influence on later historians.

Biography
Kallinikos Kritovoulidis was born in 1792 at Chania, according to N. Zannouvios, while Kritovoulidis himself mentions in his testimonies that he was born in 1794 or 1795. His origins were from the village Armeni and according to himself he was the son of Ioannis Maragoudakis and Aikaterini whose maiden name was Feloutzi.

He learned how to read and write in a monastery, while he was later schooled in the Greek school of Chania, from what comes out of his writings, and he was a classmate of Nikolaos Fourakis, who then became a teacher there. When he came of age, Kritovoulidis moved to Izmir to continue his studies in the Philological Gymnasium of the town, where he was a student of Konstantinos Koumas and Konstantinos Oikonomou. With the disintegration of the Gymnasium in 1819 during the riots, Kritovoulidis moves away and becomes a teacher in the Gymnasium of Rhodes.

Kritovoulidis in May 1819, while he was still in Izmir, he became a member of the Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends). With the onset of the Greek Revolution of 1821, he went to Crete. In the Assembly of Armenoi, in May 1822, and in the Assembly of Arkoudena in June 1823, he was a plenipotentiary of the province of Apokoronos. After the departure of Afentoulief and up until the arrival of Tompazis he was the manager of the Office of Administration. He took part in the siege of the Kissamos fort and in the campaign of Selinos. In the Assembly of Arkoudena he was appointed secretary general of Apokoronos. In addition, he was a secretary of Sifakas.

Following the suppression of the revolution in Crete in June of 1824 he left for Nafplio, where he was appointed secretary of the Police. He fought in the battle of Myloi on June 1825, where the Greeks beat the army of Ismail Pasha. When the revolution in Crete was reignited on August 1825, Kritovoulidis came back appointed with Georgios Kallergis and Panagiotis Zervoudakis as a member of the threefold which took charge of the temporary administration of Crete. In 1829 he was appointed member of the board of Cretans.

With the formation of the greek state, in which Crete was not included, with the London Protocol of 1830, Kallinikos Kritovoulidis found shelter in the continental Greece. In the National Assembly at Argos, he was a proxy of the Cretans. Later on, he was appointed at many administrative positions, like a second-in-command of Epidavros of Limira in 1837, member of the Ministry of Finance, treasurer and customs officer of Aigina (1833-34), treasurer and customs officer of Hydra (1834-36), customs officer and treasurer of Naxos (1838-44), customs subofficer of Skopelos (1844-46) and later of Skiathos (1846-47). He was also appointed customs officer in Nafplio from 1847 to 1856, when he was ceased due to abuse, with a short amount of time where he worked as a customs officer in Kalamata. He continued working up until 1857, when he retired.

He died in Athens in July 4 1868.

Personal Life
Kallinikos Kritovoulidis married Tarsi in 1836, daughter of Stamatis Doukas, with origins from Kalamata, and had three children, Sofoklis, Faidra and Giorgos, who died when he was 12 years old. Even though he is referred to as a priest or a monk, it is not clear whether he had practiced the profession of the priest or whether he had lived in a monastery, while he is not mentioned somewhere in the sources with a religious characterization, and neither did himself sign with the symbol of the cross. When he became a member of the Filiki Eteria, he signed as "Kallinikos hieromonk, Kris age 28", as he did in 1822. Emmanouil Antoniadis stated that he had never been a monk. It is possible that he got the monastic name Kallinikos when he served as a teacher in a monastery.

His forename is also unknown. He, himself, when he stopped using the name Kallinikos, he started using the name Kyriakos. However, in some sources, he is referred to as Konstantinos, like in the front page of the Newspaper of Greece (volume 23, of the year 1834), as well as by the topographer who took the measurements of one of his fields in 1858.

List of works

 * Memoirs of the war of the Cretans about the autonomy of Greece (1859)
 * Appendix on the Memoirs of the war of the Cretans about the autonomy (1860)
 * Concise essay on the demeanor of the dominant Turks and of the moral situation of the Christians of Crete before the Revolution., which was included in the Historical Dissertation about the Greek War of Independence (1861), of Ioannis Filimon
 * Words, phrases, proverbs, songs and traditions of Cretans, which was published in the Newspaper of Academics of Philological and Public Education in 1864 in volumes
 * Life of Vasileios Chalis, published in 1974

To Kritovoulidis are also appointed anonymous pages "for the Turks of Crete", which are written by an "old Cretan", without having been proved sufficiently however.