Konstantinos Statheros
As Konstantinos was photographed on his 28th birthday.
Konstantinos Statheros was born on February 16, 1995, in Naoussa, Paros, where he spent his childhood. As a local with deep roots, he participated in many habits and activities of the islanders: from pressing grapes for the production of wine, fishing and boating to gathering olives, wild grasses and snails. Moments and experiences that remained indelible in his mind.
Konstantinos started writing his first poems at the age of ten. He also belongs to the generation of children who started reading literature after the successful series of Harry Potter books. Although in those early years it was his childhood wish to become a lyricist, he never thought or dreamed of becoming a writer.
During his high school studies, he developed a keen interest in archaeology, psychology, and economics. Because of his distaste, however, for the outdated and coercive way of teaching ancient Greek, which still continues in the Greek school, he excluded the first two branches in which he would need to be examined in the nationwide exams. As he later stated, " Ancient Greek did not manage to gain my interest. I was never taught Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle in school. I knew the greatness of the thought of these men only in my adult life. Also, I don't remember a single time I thanked Homer at school. We simply read the ancient text, translated it like-like in each quatrain, and we had to assess the value of the work from the translation we made with our - definitely devoid of any imagination - teacher. However, in my adult life, Homer kept me company many evenings."
In the first Lyceum, Konstantinos showed some of his poems to the Literature teacher, who asked him to present them to the class and analyze them, but he found them too personal to present. That same year, the English teacher asked his class to create a short poem out of four homophones. Constantine returned home and wrote a four-line poem. Reading the poem the professor wondered if he had written it himself and after his affirmative answer, she asked him to keep his writing herself. Of course, he accepted. In fact, his teacher was also his first reader. Although the signs of his artistic inclination were there, he ignored them.
@kstatheros
In the last grade of Lyceum, Konstantinos was examined in the national exams. He managed to be admitted to the "Accounting and Finance" department of ASOEE (O.P.A.), which was the highest ranked department in the whole country in the field of finance. In a comical irony, Konstantinos used to buy the financial magazine "The Shipowner" from the age of 8, while at the same time he was asking his father to buy him shares in shipping companies.
In the second year of his studies, Konstantinos decided that he would not pursue a career in finance, and since then he only attended courses that piqued his interest. At the same time, he also started to travel. As a young student he visited twenty-two countries in just two years. Now, these have reached twenty-nine, with many of his favorite countries being revisited. He finally graduated in 2018 and did his internship in “Digital Marketing” in Paris, France. The city of light marked him forever. As he said: " I would never have become a writer if it hadn't been for Paris, where, at last, my artistic side prevailed." The whole city enchanted me and gave me inspiration which I expressed there, in my little house, writing my first notes .'
Upon his return to Greece, Konstantinos received a job offer from a Greek celebrity, which he accepted. However, he only stayed in this job for six months, after declaring that he was " mentally tired of the intrigue, indiscretion and pettiness of his colleagues ". Throughout these six months, and before the pandemic, Konstantinos only went out twice for coffee or a walk. He spent his free time reading physics and Einstein, Darwin, Freud, Plato, and academic textbooks in biology and psychology, such as the ICD -10 Manual of Mental Disorders , from the World Health Organization.
Despite the friction at the office, these six months were among the happiest, because during that period he began to write at a professional pace. " I had discovered Atlantis and I didn't want to leave it ", he will say about this period. After resigning, and in order to make a living, Constantine began giving philosophy seminars in the countryside " as Socrates would have done ". For these short stories Konstantinos has been rated 5 stars by his "students".
After two years, the author was ready to publish his first three books: "Schizophrenia in my teacher Socrates", "Mental Varieties in the Human Species" and "The Origin of Homosexuality". It is remarkable that in the last book Constantine has developed his own original evolutionary and complete theory of how homosexuality appeared in nature; a question that no biologist has answered to date. In his other book, he documents why Socrates suffered from schizophrenia presenting seven symptoms and stressing that " this voice which Socrates heard was nothing more than an auditory hallucination ". In "Mental Variations in the Human Species", the author-researcher addresses current issues in psychology and psychiatry, such as the question of whether part of the autism spectrum is a developmental disorder or simply a neurological differentiation of the human species.
To publish his books, Konstantinos created his own Publishing House, an energy with great advantages as a business model. This became evident in April 2022, when Constantine decided to write the history of his place in English ( “ Paros Ancient & Pirate Past ” ). He managed to finish writing the book in just two weeks, at the beginning of May, and put the first copies on the market on June 10. In other words, the book was released only fifty days after the first page was written.
Konstantinos is never stagnant; he likes to try new things in life. Currently, he spends his free time painting and playing basketball, but writing remains his main occupation. When we asked him what his favorite reading is, he replied: " I think my favorite reading is the one I'm reading at the moment, otherwise I wouldn't be reading it. Exactly, that is, as with my own books: my favorite is the one I write every moment. But, if I could single out one that enchanted me the most, then - and I apologize to Plato - it is Darwin's "Origin of Species". In my eyes, it is the most beautiful tale ever written about man, the tale that revealed the origin of our species."
It is necessary to say a few words about the "Tales of the Cyclades", which are also the author's first purely literary work. The fantastic stories of the fairy tales were born during the trip to Ireland in November 2022.
The second day of his stay in Dublin found the writer out of his misery on the streets. Completely by chance, he found an open shop. He went in and there he bought a little book about the folk tales of Ireland. Konstantinos managed to find time to leaf through it in a cafe. By chance, he came across the passage in which the Irish people believed that mountains were the bodies of giants, a universal motif that the author had encountered in many Earth cultures during his research, such as the Australian Aborigines. Without a second thought and reading, he took the pen and began to write his own story on the small margins of the book, since there was no notebook available. Much of the plot was written on this.
Constantine stayed just three nights in Dublin and then flew to Madrid, where he would stay for a week. The rest of his ideas, such as snails, were written on dozens of napkins in a cafe of the well-known Starbucks chain. On the evening of November 25, the author is back in Athens. On December 1st, within a week that is, and working from morning to night, with unique exits of this food supply, Konstantinos had written the entire fairy tale that you hold in your hands.