On April 8, 1910, a young, blond-haired man with blond hair rode on a white horse into the Scaramanga Sea. With a bullet in the head he took his life, as he had planned several days before. After ten days, his dead body would be washed in the waters of Eleusis. The Greek-loving thinker and poet Pericles Giannopoulos had passed away in the way he wanted.
His death, and more specifically the way in which he decided to leave life, shocked the society and the press of the time, more, in fact, from his work as long as he lived.
The details of his death appeared in the front pages of the newspapers, but also in the wells of those who knew him, while there were many poets - among others Sikelianos, Palamas, Malakasis - who dedicated their poems to his memory.
There were many who began to explain the reasons that led him to the granted step. Among those who tried to give an explanation was Ion Dragoumis, who gave the suicide to the fact that Giannopoulos was a lover of the beautiful and did not want to grow old.
The truth, however, is much more romantic than one might imagine for the poet's personality: love for the painter Sofia Laskaridou, her refusal to marry him and her move abroad, away from him.
The history of their acquaintance
The two young people met by chance in Kallithea, where the house of the Laskaridou family was located - today this wonderful two-storey neoclassical building, on Laskaridou, hosts the Municipal Gallery of Kallithea where one can observe photos, works and personal objects of the painter. It is a building created before 1900 to the designs of the German architect and philhellene Ernest Ziller and the second house built in the area, while it was originally the holiday home of the family of a wealthy merchant from Trabzon.
So one day in 1985, and as young Sofia was returning home, she met by chance the charming Pericles Giannopoulos, who was enjoying one of his endless walks in the Athenian countryside.
Sofia Laskaridou was not like all the women of her time. In addition to being beautiful, her London-born father and Paris-born mother had raised her with modern and very free ideas for the time. Her father had even given her a revolver, as her "love" for painting often drove her away from home, and a revolver hidden in her bag seemed to be the perfect solution for her safety. It was that revolver that a few years later would deprive her lover of her life.
The passion that distinguished her and the personality that shaped her, could hardly go unnoticed by the charming writer, who unknowingly that afternoon who greeted the beautiful young woman, pressed the button alone to start the countdown of his life .
With Giannopoulos taking the first step by visiting her at home, the meetings of the two young people began to increase, while the need for one for the company of the other was growing. He even arrived on foot from Athens to Vouliagmeni, where the young girl's family had moved in the meantime, in order to spend a few hours with her. It was the day he revealed to her that he would ask her father for his permission to take her get married. The negative answer, however, of both herself and her father would slowly build the idea of suicide, albeit subconsciously, into the mind of the blonde writer.
Sophia was dedicated to painting. That did not change. A passion that would determine in the worst way the (prescribed) future of the couple. After her admission to the School of Fine Arts - she was the first Greek woman who managed to enter the school after a personal request to George himself, who in 1903 repealed the law and allowed women to be able to attend the school - took the her diploma in 1907, while she also managed to secure a three-year scholarship abroad.
Giannopoulos could never deprive his beloved of her dream of studying abroad. So he did not stop her from going away from him at all. He himself refused her proposal to follow her, being an ardent philhellene he could not leave Greece, as, as he had told her, "I always want to feel close to the Acropolis".
The walk in Scaramanga and Giannopoulos' promise of suicide
A few days before Sofia left for Munich, the young couple took a walk in Scaramanga, where Giannopoulos confessed to the beautiful painter that "if I ever lose you here I will come to commit suicide".
Giannopoulos' letters to his beloved were fiery. However, from the second year of her absence, she began to be discouraged, believing that she had nothing better to look forward to. Even professionally.
It was an April morning, a few days before she took the unexpected step, when she met her mother by chance on the street. Asking her with a smile what her daughter is doing, she replied that Sophia should not get married and that she should dedicate herself to art, as her teachers were very excited about her talent.
It was the "icing on the cake" for the young man's psychology poet. The night before his suicide he went to the cinema with a friendly couple, told them he was going on a day trip the next day, and on his way home he wrote a farewell letter to his beloved.
As soon as she received it in her hands, Sofia monologued "I am coming", but when she arrived in Greece it would be too late. Her lover was no longer alive. He had taken his life, exactly where he had been promised. In the sea of Scaramanga.
When she was informed of his death on the train, on her return to Greece, she fell into bed for a few days. One of these nights she saw him in her dream and in the morning she started for Scaramangas, cutting a few flowers from the garden of her house. It was the morning that the sea had washed away the corpse of Pericles Giannopoulos in Elefsina.
A few days after the funeral of her lover, she would try to end her life by cutting her veins. Her mother, however, caught up with her and so the successful painter passed away on November 13, 1965 at her home in Kallithea. According to the legend, in fact, her ghost wanders around the house guilty, for the unexpected death of the writer Periklis Giannopoulos in April 1910.
