Greetings! My name is Kostas Michos. Born in 1978, I am an international relations specialist, a graduate of the Department of Balkan Studies of the University of Macedonia. I also have a Master's Degree in Educational Technology and Human Resource Management from the University of Athens. I created this website to connect with fellow travelers on a grand research journey I began more than two decades ago. One sunny morning in the summer of 1994, in a remote seaside village in Western Greece, my father and I were cleaning the storeroom of our old house, which was about to be demolished. We stumbled upon an old photograph, or rather a daguerreotype, partially buried under a layer of mouse and bat droppings. Fortunately, the worn frame and the half-broken glass had shielded it enough that we could make out the image of a man holding three cannons draped over him. My father, sweaty and dirty, carried the picture from the dark storeroom into the light. With his fingers he tenderly brushed off the filth that covered it, and asked me proudly: - Do you know who this man is? - No, how could I? I replied innocently, staring at the man and his three cannons in amazement. - This is Coutalianos. Your grandfather had his picture hanging in the old taverna. - And who is Coutalianos? I’ve never heard of him.... - Haven't you heard the old song that goes "Coutalianos is chewing iron"? - Okay! I know the song, but not who it was about. - See, Coutalianos was a great wrestler and weightlifter from the old days... - But what is his picture doing here? I asked... - As your grandmother once told me, your great-grandfather, her father Zafeiris, the one who emigrated to America, happened to meet Coutalianos, who gave him this photo as a gift... That was my first contact with a figure out of history. A few days later, my father cleaned the old photo carefully, put it in a new frame, and hung it on one of the walls of our house. My gaze fell on it often. The man’s powerful, contorted body fascinated me and could not be ignored. And of course, it is not very common to see a man supporting the weight of three cannons by himself. The thoughts the image triggered within me matured as the years passed. My curiosity about this man’s life story sought a way to be satisfied. I needed more than the five lines of the "Coutalianos" entry in our library’s old encyclopedic dictionary. Even a few trips to the bookshops of Athens failed to shed more light; contemporary literature on this person was completely insufficient. Digging deeper, I discovered scattered references to books long out of print and never reissued. I kept on searching in secondhand shops. I discovered, scattered and torn, pages of some of these books in long-unopened cardboard boxes. Even these did not enlighten me -- I quickly realized these were just novels, not genuine documentation of this athlete and his reputation in Greek popular tradition. To help fill the gap, I have created this web page, to broaden my quest for information and meanwhile to provide, where I can, historically documented answers to questions regarding the life and athletic achievements of Panagis Coutalianos.