Literary places in Heraklion

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis

Kazantzakis sets the novel on the coast of Crete, his own island, where the young narrator and the labourer Alexis Zorba reopen a lignite gallery and build a brief life by the sea. The real venture behind it happened across the water in the Messenian Mani. The map keeps both: it anchors the explicit Crete of the book at Heraklion, the author's birthplace, and marks the Peloponnesian mine that actually inspired it.

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