Penelope Delta

Penelope Benaki was born in Alexandria in 1874, the daughter of Emmanouil Benakis, a cotton merchant who was one of the richest Greeks in Egypt and later mayor of Athens; her brother Antonis founded the Benaki Museum. She grew up in a strict, wealthy household, educated by governesses, and in 1895 married Stefanos Deltas, a businessman, with whom she had three daughters. The marriage was correct and unhappy. In 1905, in Alexandria, she met the diplomat and writer Ion Dragoumis, and the two fell in love; the relationship remained platonic and was broken off, but it shaped the rest of her life and her diaries, which were published long after her death.

The family lived in Frankfurt for a time and settled in Kifisia, north of Athens, in 1916, in a house that is now part of the Benaki Museum's archives. She began writing for children around 1909, encouraged by the demoticist circle around Dragoumis and the educator Alexandros Delmouzos, and kept at it through illness: from the 1920s she suffered from a progressive paralysis that eventually left her bedridden. Dragoumis was assassinated in Athens in 1920, a blow she never got over.

On 27 April 1941, the day German troops marched into Athens, she took poison; she died a few days later, on 2 May, and was buried in the garden of her house in Kifisia. Her gravestone carries a single word: ΣΙΩΠΗ (Silence).

Her first books were historical. Για την πατρίδα (For the Fatherland, 1909) and Τον καιρό του Βουλγαροκτόνου (In the Time of the Bulgar-Slayer, 1911) are set in Byzantium under Emperor Basil II and were meant to give Greek children heroes from their own medieval past. Παραμύθι χωρίς όνομα (A Tale without a Name, 1910) is an allegory: a kingdom of lazy, fatalistic people is brought back to life by a young prince who makes them work, a story written with an eye on the Greece of its day and later turned into a famous play by Iakovos Kambanellis.

Her best-loved books came late. Τρελαντώνης (Crazy Antonis, 1932) follows four Alexandrian children, her own brothers and sisters, on a summer holiday in Piraeus and Athens in the 1880s, and Antonis, who cannot stop getting into trouble, is the most famous naughty boy in Greek literature. Ο Μάγκας (The Street Dog, 1935) is the autobiography of a fox terrier who tells the story of the same family from under the table. Τα μυστικά του Βάλτου (The Secrets of the Swamp, 1937) is her most ambitious novel: the Macedonian Struggle of 1904–08, fought between Greek and Bulgarian bands in the marshes of Lake Giannitsa, seen through the eyes of two children, with the real captain Agras (Tellos Agapinos) as its hero. Delta wrote in demotic Greek, in short sentences full of dialogue and action, at a time when school books were still in stiff katharevousa, and her books were a quiet argument that children deserved real language.

Τρελαντώνης and Ο Μάγκας are among the first full books Greek children read on their own, and extracts appear in primary-school readers; Τα μυστικά του Βάλτου is read in the upper grades. Τρελαντώνης has been adapted for Greek television, and Kambanellis's stage version of Παραμύθι χωρίς όνομα is still performed. Her house in Kifisia, a short walk from the station, belongs to the Benaki Museum and holds her papers and her grave in the garden. Her diaries and her correspondence with Ion Dragoumis, published from the 1980s, turned her into a figure of adult literature too. For a learner, Τρελαντώνης is an ideal first Greek novel: short chapters, everyday words, and a plot that needs no history lesson.

• Her brother Antonis Benakis, the real-life Trelantonis, grew up to found the Benaki Museum in Athens.
• She was a close friend of Eleftherios Venizelos, whom her father had served as a minister, and her diaries are a source on the politics of the time.
• Her grave in the garden of her house in Kifisia bears a single word, ΣΙΩΠΗ (Silence).
• She took poison on 27 April 1941, the day the Germans entered Athens, and died five days later.