Ioannis Kakridis

Who was Ioannis Kakridis?

Ioannis Kakridis was a Greek classical scholar.

He was born in Athens in 1901 and received his PhD at the University of Athens. He went on to become a professor at the universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, Tübingen, Stockholm, Lund and Uppsala. Kakridis was a Homer scholar and one of most important classicists of twentieth century Greece. He was also an early and staunch advocate of the adoption of the monotonic system in the Greek language. In 1941, he was denounced by the faculty of the University of Athens for republishing a lecture in the monotonic system, which led to the so-called "Trial of Accents" and his suspension and later dismissal from the university.

The list of his written work is quite extensive. The most important works are a translation into the modern Greek language of the works of Homer, together with Nikos Kazantzakis and a five-volume collection of Greek mythology.