Kevin Andrews was a philhellene

Philhellenism

Philhellenism was an intellectual fashion prominent at the turn of the 19th century, that led Europeans like Lord Byron or Charles Nicolas Fabvier to advocate for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire...

, writer and archaeologist. He was born in Peking, China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

; second son of Yvette Borup, wife of Roy Chapman Andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia...

, the American explorer, who however was probably not Kevin's father. Born a U.S. citizen, he became a citizen of Greece in 1975. He was schooled in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, where he learned classical Greek. He served for three years in World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 as a private in the US Army

United States Army

The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

 seeing action in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. After graduating from Harvard in 1947 he entered for a travelling fellowship in Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

, and his future life in Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 was decided by chance when he was successful; as he said "the award ... was fortuitous since no one else applied for it, and is relevant only as the reason why I went to Greece in the first place."

Arrival in Greece

During the autumn of 1947 Andrews arrived at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

American School of Classical Studies at Athens

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is one of 17 foreign archaeological institutes in Athens, Greece.-General information:...

. It was a time of civil war

Civil war

A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....

, the rate of inflation was high and the Greek people were suffering extreme hardship. He was unfortunate and suffered from an "obscure nervous disorder," which turned out to be epilepsy, and spent much of his first winter in a miserable draughty room. Travel was severely restricted; a permit was needed to travel more than a few miles from Athens. It could also be dangerous, for a few days after the students had visited Mycenae

Mycenae

Mycenae is an archaeological site in Greece, located about 90 km south-west of Athens, in the north-eastern Peloponnese. Argos is 11 km to the south; Corinth, 48 km to the north...

 an English journalist was kidnapped there; some travellers were unlucky, and a US reporter was captured in the mountains and his body was washed up soon afterwards near Salonika. After a disappointing stay in Greece Andrews was preparing to leave when he was offered a Fulbright Fellowship to stay and carry out a study of the castles and fortifications built by various invaders in the Peloponnese

Peloponnese

The Peloponnese, Peloponnesos or Peloponnesus , is a large peninsula , located in a region of southern Greece, forming the part of the country south of the Gulf of Corinth...

. This offered a field unresearched by others and the freedom to travel alone, and so he accepted with delight.

Traveller in the Peloponnese

Andrews spent the long summers of 1948 to 1951 travelling around the Peloponnese, the winters writing up in Athens. His journeys and the people he met are described vividly in The Flight of Ikaros (published 1959, 1969 and 1984), "one of the great and lasting books about Greece." As this overlapped with the Greek Civil War

Greek Civil War

The Greek Civil War was fought from 1946 to 1949 between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece , the military branch of the Greek Communist Party , backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania...

 and its aftermath, it was a time of mistrust, particularly of foreigners (and especially of one making plans and notes in the hills), but he soon gained the trust of country people on both sides of the conflict. He became friends with a shepherd in the Gerania (Γεράνεια) hills and become his child's koumbaros or member of the family and godfather. The fruit of his work, Castles of the Morea, was published in 1953 (republished in 2006).

He returned to the US only to feel an exile, after failing to get a job connected with US aid in Greece. Greece was in the process of reconstruction and the domestic politics were dominated by America, left-wing politics was banned and many activists were shot or placed in camps. During this period he met Nancy Thayer, E.E. Cummings's daughter, who was married to Kevin’'s friend Willard Roosevelt at the time. Kevin and Nancy married in 1954 and the next year moved to Europe with her first two children, eventually settling in Athens; the couple later had two children of their own, Ioanna and Alexis. In 1968 Nancy and Kevin separated, and she and her children moved to London because, according to Kevin's biographer Roger Jinkinson, "she did not want to live under the Junta nor have her children brought up in a police state"; she kept the name Nancy T. Andrews and hoped they could someday reconcile.

Later writing

Back in Greece Kevin Andrews's next publication Athens was published in 1967. It was a counterblast against a westernized Greece which had been sanitized for the tourist. Protest had to be guarded and he waited until the departure of the Junta

Greek military junta of 1967-1974

The Greek military junta of 1967–1974, alternatively "The Regime of the Colonels" , or in Greece "The Junta", and "The Seven Years" are terms used to refer to a series of right-wing military governments that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974...

 in 1974 before plain writing about political matters was possible. Writings in this period included an essay on Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice

Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco...

 and a lengthy autobiographical poem published in book form, called First Will and Testament. In 1975 he relinquished his US citizenship and became nationalized as a Greek. Athens Alive followed in 1980, it is a book of writings about Athens from Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

 in AD 7 to Cavafy and Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

 in the 20th century.

In 1988, Andrews met and fell in love with Elizabeth Boleman-Herring in Athens. In the late summer of 1989 they traveled to Kythira

Kythira

Cythera is an island in Greece, once part of the Ionian Islands. It lies opposite the south-eastern tip of the Peloponnese peninsula. It is administratively part of the Islands regional unit, which is part of the Attica region , Greece.For many centuries, while naval travel was the only means...

, an island off the southern tip of the Peloponnese. On 1 September they walked to Cape Trachylos at the southern end of the island, Andrews started a swim to Avgo (Αυγό), a rocky island, the reputed birthplace of Aphrodite

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....

. He was drowned and his body recovered the next day.

Published works

• Castles of the Morea, (1953), (Gennadeion Monograph 4), Princeton, NJ.
• The Flight of Ikaros: a journey into Greece, (1959), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Athens, (1967), London: Phoenix House.
• The Flight of Ikaros, (1969), Bath: Cedric Chivers Ltd.
• (essay on Louis MacNeice).
• First Will and Testament, (poem).
• First Will and Testament, (1974), Athens: privately.
• Athens Alive : The practical tourist’s companion to the fall of man, (1979), Athens: Hermes.
• Greece in the Dark : 1967-1974, (1980), Amsterdam: Hakkert. ISBN 90-256-0785-3.
• Byzantine Blues: A cradle-song for neodemocracy, (1980), unknown.
• The Flight of Ikaros: travels in Greece during a civil war, (1984), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-009531-4.
• Castles of the Morea, (2006), (Gennadius Monograph IV), Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. ISBN 0-87661-406-3.
• The Flight of Ikaros: travels in Greece during the civil war, (2010), Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. ISBN 978-1-58988-064-1.