Koraes

Koraes

Chios counts with one of the largest libraries in Greece, the "Adamantios Koraes" Library. Established in 1792 as a department of the Great Chian School, today it stores a significant collection of over 130,000 volumes.

Apart from its size, one of the features that makes this library interesting is the origin of its books. The first ones were donated by Adamantios Koraes, the founder of the library, and many of his friends (mostly Greek living abroad). Later, the Argenti family, the major donator, were responsible of important upgrades and additions during the late 70s. Many other Chians have donated their personal book collections to the library, such as the important contributions made by Ioannis Andreadis, Zorzis and Tarse Dromokaitou, Alex. Pachnos, Georgios Michalinos, Alex. Votsanis, Leonis Kalvokoresis and Georgios Theotokas.

Before the Massacre of Chios in 1822, this library was the most important one of the whole region. Then, after the major earthquake in 1881, it was moved into a new building where it has remained ever since, and whose second floor was added after 1948 by Philip Argenti.

Today the Adamantios Koraes library reports to the Libraries Department of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. It also publishes a comprehensive catalogue and archives of the Library's book collections, has a lending department, and it has a mobile library van for the villages of Chios. During the last years, it has been working on the modernization of its storage and access systems to ensure the usefulness and efficiency of the Library both with users, visitors and researchers.

Biography of Koraes

Adamantios Koraes was born in Smyrni in 1748 as the son of a Chian merchant, Ioannis Koraes, and his wife Thomeatha Risiu. He studied in Greece and afterwards in Amsterdam until 1778, where he started a career in business, took lessons in foreign languages, studied scientific and philosophic books, and participated in the scholarly movements of the era. After a few years back at his motherland, he left to Montpellier in 1782 to study medicine, and later to Paris where he occupied himself with research and the publishing of it.

During his life, he successfully worked in different knowledge areas such as medicine, ethics and philosophy, and his works caused a great reaction both in Greek society and in Europe and the United States. His ethnic contribution is historically the most important, since there wasn't a Greek problem that he didn't follow and was not interested in, offering always his enlightened opinion. He also supported schools every way possible, and among his heartily defended values were freedom and democracy, strongly refusing and criticizing any despotic and authoritarian tendency.

One of his biggest efforts was done to create an impressive library in Paris of 3,500 volumes that he wanted to have transferred to Chios after his death. This wish was finally fulfilled to give birth to today's "Adamantios Koraes" Library, but only after many adventurous delays. He passed away in 1833 after seeing a portion of his fatherland freed; but not his beloved Chios.