looking for traces
You seek, you will find; you miss, you will lose.Sophocles, Oedipus rex, v. 111
There are sources that confirm that many years ago, shortly after the death of Panagis Coutalianos in 1916, a biography of the athlete was published in the USA. The circulation of this book must have been limited, meaning no second edition. We assume that it would be a short book, circulated among Greek expatriates living in the USA. From time to time there have been people who have searched for this form to no avail. We assume that its first and only release must have taken place in Cleveland, USA, because we know that this city hosted several Greek immigrants originating from the islands of the Sea of Marmara. Of course, this does not exclude other US states such as New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago, places where we know our athlete has been very popular. In the past there were many who heard various stories about Coutalianos looking for their verification. Some even happened to hear about the release of this rare biography. There were not a few who went into the process of looking for it either in antique shops, or by publishing ads to be informed by a random reader of the luck that might have a discarded copy of it. One of these ambitious researchers was a Greek expatriate, John Psomas, a resident of Lynn, Massachusetts at 15 James Street. John is found searching for traces of this rare book through advertisements in the Greek expatriate newspaper ‘The Hellenic Chronicle’ with persistence, which shows that he was certain of its existence and earlier circulation .
Once it even happened to be published in this same publication- rather as a response to John Psomas’s searches- the content of a letter written by another Greek immigrant who was settled in distant Hawaii. Unfortunately, the brief and confusing information that this letter offers shows that the author, without guile or critical attitude, simply reproduced what he heard said by the older people about Coutalianos and not what he read in a reliable biography.
