Evangelos Mavroudis

Evangelos Mavroudis was born in Athens in 1953. Both his parents were refugees from Smyrna: his father, Anastasios, came at the age of eleven, and his mother, Anna, at five — orphaned, with her 33-year-old mother, Evangelia Valagianopoulou, from Bournova. The middle of the family’s three boys, he grew up in the refugee quarter of Perissos, in Nea Ionia.

He studied at the Medical School of the University of Athens, and during his studies took up student theatre — acting, directing and writing plays. As a student representative he helped found, alongside figures such as A. Tassos, Melina Mercouri and Spyros Plaskovitis, the Panhellenic Cultural Movement (1977), where he was responsible for the magazine Art and Culture.

He specialised in internal medicine and worked for decades as a doctor in Rafina; from 2020 he took up the post of director of internal medicine at the town’s Health Centre. He was founder and president of the Association of Physicians of Eastern Attica, playing a leading part in the founding of the “Galilaia” Hospice.

Together with his wife, the Greek-English archaeologist Tina McGeorge, he takes an active part in the cultural life of Rafina. In 1997 he conceived and funded a collection of 25 works by the painter Leonida Bulgari, dedicated to Saint Chrysostomos of Smyrna and the Asia Minor Catastrophe. He was elected municipal councillor of Rafina and of Rafina-Pikermi, with responsibility for culture and health.

His first book, Our Sea — the first part of the trilogy Return to Smyrna — was published in March 2010 by Kedros. There followed İttihat ve Terakki and Light from the East, and then Time with Rosie (2013), The Red Tango (2016, with the director Kostas Koutsomytis), The Journey (2020) and The Interrogation of the High Commissioner of Smyrna (2022) — all from Kedros.