George Psychoundakis
George Psychoundakis was born in Asi Gonia (Greek: Ασή Γωνιά), a village of a few hundred people high in the Mouselas valley in western Crete.
Crete had a tradition of resistance to rule by outsiders; the island had, about 40 years previously in 1898, obtained its independence from the Ottoman Empire.
Numerous insurrections during the long occupation, together with the mountainous terrain, helped maintain an independence of character and willingness to bear and use arms.
Psychoundakis acted as Fermor's runner, carrying messages between resistance groups and guiding parties unfamiliar with the territory.
Leigh Fermor described the man in his introduction to The Cretan Runner: When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki down his throat with the words Another drop of petrol for the engine, and loped towards the gap in the bushes with the furtiveness of a stage Mohican or Groucho Marx.
He turned round when he was on all fours at the exit, rolled his eyes, raised a forefinger portentously, whispered, "the Intelligence Service", and scuttled through like a rabbit.
A few minutes later we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey.
The island's fighters were never put to the ultimate test; they had hoped Crete might be a starting point for the invasion of southern Europe.
During this period, he wrote the book The Eagle's Nest, which deals with the life and customs of the mountain people in the villages near his home of Asi Gonia.
This book was translated into English by Dr Barrie Machin, the social anthropologist, who worked with George Psychoundakis in 1967 and 1968 on an anthropological study of Asi Gonia.
Machin made a video based on his research, Warriors and Maidens: Gender Relations in a Cretan Mountain Village (1988).
[4] From 1974 until his retirement, Psychoundakis, together with another fighter in the Greek resistance, Manolis Paterakis, were caretakers at the German war cemetery on Hill 107 above Maleme.
