A SONG FOR ARGYRIS

In Distomo, a small farming village in Greece, little Argyris survives what most other inhabitants of his native village do not.Within a few hours, he loses his parents and thirty more relatives. The unfathomability of war. In 1949, the orphan boy is taken to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland. He obtains a Ph.D. at the ETH Zurich, translates Greek authors into German, opposes the military dictatorship in his home country (1967-74) and is later active as a development aid worker on behalf of the Swiss Disaster Relief Corps. All his life, Argyris Sfountouris, a man of winning charm and melancholy cheerfulness, has tackled the horror he was subjected to as a little boy. He has not tried to come to terms with it emotionally. Rather, he has tried to learn to live with it and to do his utmost to prevent it from happening again.