As we mentioned earlier, Klitos Ioannides was born in Moutoulla in 1944. This village belongs to the Troodos mountain range and is crossed by three rivers that offer the community rich vegetation. Klitos Ioannides moved in his childhood and adolescence between Moutoulla, Amiantou, Kalopanagioti and Pedoula. These are historic villages with monuments from the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine tradition.

The center of his life was the church and the ecclesiastical hymnology and life. Next to Agia Paraskevi Moutoulla was the cafe of his father Ioannis Chatziharalambous Ioannides and so the sense of Oral History was instilled in him, which he then cultivated in a systematic way.

His mother is Androniki Kakoullis Sophocleous, whom, unfortunately, he lost three years ago. The role of mother for his sister Eleni – known as Niki (Nikoula) from Andronikis – was taken over by his grandmother Eleni Kyriakou Xiouri – (caressingly Kakoulina) (mother of his mother), before he came – at the age of five – to his mother of Antigone Nikola Taliadorou. For the traumatic loss of his mother, he wrote in his poetry the verse – a wound a source deep – an unfulfilled void, a bitter deprivation, which he tried to fill with the intense presence in his life of the female world.

When the liberation struggle of Cyprus began (1955-1959), Klitos Ioannides was about eleven (11) years old. Difficult and painful years for the Cypriot Hellenism. He lived deeply the titanic heroic moments, which he attributed with about six thousand pages (about 6,000) to his various scientific books that followed, using the method of Oral History as a method. He imitated Herodotus – he became a modern Herodotus – as Professor Evangelos Moutsopoulos characteristically said, in a special honorary event.

At the age of eighteen and after the Hellenic Pedoulas High School, he found himself in the capital Nicosia, where he studied for two years at the Cyprus Pedagogical Academy (1962-1964). There are the roots of his philosophical, religious, aesthetic and socio-political interests. He had a deep philosophical dialogue with the philosopher Giannis Koutsakos and the painters Andreas Chrysocho and Stelios Votsis. Also with the musicologist Roger G. Loizidis. The dramatic events of 1963-1964, the years of harsh inter-communal unrest and Turkey’s open interventions, find him among the legitimate forces of the state and serve as a conscript in the National Guard of Cyprus.

From 1962 to 1967, whenever he left for Paris, Nicosia brought him into contact with the artistic and spiritual world of the island and with everything that was founded in those first years (relationships, friendships, acquaintances) he built, after his return. in 1976 in Cyprus his literary history, his radio and television programs (around thirty thousand 30,000), his continuous, for 40 years, his collaboration with the Cyprus Radio Foundation and other channels and stations, the domestic daily and periodical press, but and that of Greece and abroad. (He wrote 1700 small and large texts, which had as raw material and first writing the broadcasts on RIK). At the same time, he participates in intellectual and artistic associations and organizations, has an active participation in the cultural events of Cyprus with speeches, announcements at conferences, seminars, teaching and is in constant spiritual mobilization in the field of Culture and Cyprus in general. multifaceted (expression of the friend of the philosopher Christos Malevitsis).

His life in Paris, in addition to his studies, was intense and rich in harvest. During those seven years (1967-1974), the magical, as he usually calls them, Paris pioneered, with forms of global radiation and range. He was active in the revolutionary events of May-June 1968, with his friend the philosopher Daniel Furjot.

He had the good fortune to meet and connect with a warm and creative friendship with the Greek exiles and exiles of the April dictatorship and the Civil War. He was particularly associated with Odysseus Elytis, Margarita Lymperaki, Costas Axelos, Mimika Kranakis, Konstantinos Despotopoulos, Costas Papaioannou, Dimitris Christodoulou and his wife Maria Kandreviotos Chmatoros, the painter Nikos Resanlis and the painter Nikos Kesanlis. He was also associated with other painters: Michalis Vafiadis, Iasona Molfesi, Giannis Tsarouchis and many other important intellectuals, artists and thinkers. He had fellow students and friends, Professors Stella and Dino Georgoudis.

In one of the last literary salons in Paris, which was maintained by the widow of the French philosopher Michelle Amedée Ponceau, she met and connected with special forms of French and world letters. Among many others, the figure of the Neo-Socratic philosopher-existentialist and playwright Gabriel Marcel stands out. He also collaborated with the distinguished scientist, speaker and author Marie-Medeleine Davie, in the publication of the Encyclopédie des Mystiques encyclopedia under the pseudonym Lefkon Agathias, writing about ancient Greece.

He began his spiritual Odyssey, because it is about the Odyssey, with the research of the Musician (the man of the Muses) and was led to the philosopher, the seeker of eternal truth, through the Prosocratic, Socratic and Platonic forms (Philosophy of Essence) of the greatest music – . Always guided by Plato’s Phaedrus (philosopher, philologist, musician, eroticist), he proceeded to the saint (with numerous editions of ecclesiological and hagiological content), the lover of heaven and perfection. His relationship with Agios Porphyrios was the culmination of this research and this is due to his wife, the radio and television producer and presenter of RIK Mary Kontogianni Ioannidou, from whom he acquired his only son Alexandros Ioannidis, who is repeatedly in his poetry. He and his wife collaborated on research and publication of several volumes on Gerontic Wisdom and Orthodox Holiness.

From the saint he was led to the hero, with many publications about the heroic figures and tragic moments of 1955-1959. The hero is the man who transcends himself for something greater than himself. He identifies with the idea and sacrifices for it. The studies of Klitos Ioannides for the heroes Kyriakos Matsis, Markos Drakos, Grigoris Afxentiou and others, confirm the fact of the story.

The existential, ontological and metaphysical center of the life of Klitos Ioannidis, apart from his scientific and essay discourse, stands his poetic discourse, the aesthetic unfolding of his erotic is, his testimony in the world, but not from the world, testimony of. In his poetry he manages to offer fine wine from the living waters of poetry, such as that, in keeping with the proportions offered by the Lord Jesus at Cana’s wedding, as he writes in his poetic manifesto. His poetry shows the nature of his work (Archbishop Christodoulos).

As President of the Cyprus Philosophical Society, he opened the philosophical discourse to the science of philosophy and to the general public. As secretary and vice-president of the Cyprus Center of the International Writers’ Union, chaired by his friend Panos Ioannidis, he helped Cyprus emerge from insular isolation and register on the world cultural map. He came in contact with selected members of the international literary community, such as Harold Pinder, Alex Bloch, Natalie Sarot, Antonis Samarakis, Tito Patrikios, Lydia Stefanou, Evangelos Pananoutsos, Christos Giankilios Giannialos, Tiara Elena, Hara Bakonikola. Tataki, Jean-Claude Vilain, Sadal Daziou. As part of his work through broadcasts and publications, many other notable figures came to his life: Cyprien Katsaris, the sculptor couple Bragouzi (Romanians), the daughter of Eugene Ionesco, Irene Papa, Emciellan Cell and Sylva Nikiforos Vrettakos, Loula and Manolis Anagnostakis, Giannis Ritsos, Iakovos Kampanelis and others.

We have left the Church of Cyprus to the last, but not the last. He collaborated systematically with the Metropolitan of Kykkos and Tillyria, for thirty so many years, Mr. Nikiforos Kykkotis. He owes the publication and circulation of twenty-five volumes of hagiological, historical, philosophical and essay content. Also, thanks to the generosity of Kykkos Nikiforos, Klitos Ioannides made the TV series, from twelve documentaries, which refer to the history of the Cypriot Church of the two millennia that leaked, to the contribution of the Holy Monastery of Kykkos9 in the 1955-1955 struggle documentary about the Museum of the Monastery, a real jewel of the Middle East.

It would be an omission if we did not mention the presence of the theater in the intellectual and artistic life of Klitos Ioannidis, thanks to his connection with his dear friend, the bold and heroic actor and director Nikos Siafkalis. They traveled together, organized international conferences and meetings, and promoted, as far as possible, the theatrical face of the island within the Cyprus Center of the International Theater Institute.

Today, he contributes to the theatrical events of Cyprus, through the pioneering theater ENA and its enlightened director, director Andreas Christodoulidis.

As part of the Center for Scientific Research, where he worked for 22 years (1979-1999), he wrote the History of Modern Cypriot Literature, putting scientific science and the Redemption in a literary chaos of two centuries (19th and 20th centuries). The supervisor of K.E.E., in the first years of his presence as a researcher, was his old friend and deep interlocutor, the internationally renowned historian and anthropologist Theodoros Papadopoulos. He dared and when necessary he clashed, promoting the Cypriot studies with scientific specifications. The scientificity of Klitos Ioannides was underlined by the late Professor Ioannis Taifakos (President of the Department of Classical Studies and Philosophy) at the honorary event of the University of Cyprus in the person of the author-researcher. At the Center for Scientific Research, he organized and left, in addition to his studies, the Literary Archive of the 19th and 20th Centuries and the material-rich Archive of Veterans of the 20th Century.

For thirty-three years it has kept the Orthodox discourse alive (RIC) through the live radio show Orthodoxy Today. Dozens of texts and people from the Church and the Spirit paraded from the show. Many of the texts in this radio series, as well as interviews, have been translated into several volumes by the author.

The strong presence of Klitos Ioannides in the intellectual, ecclesiastical and artistic events of Cyprus continues unabated. The love and appreciation for his face by the Cypriot society is uninterrupted and great, with the obvious spiritual admiration for the man’s contribution.

The love of Klitos Ioannides for nature is infinite. For endless hours he gazes at the night sky or hears the rivers of his village singing hymns accompanied by nightingales, from May to October. That’s why he maintains his holiday home in the neighborhood of his father’s cafe, a real refuge throughout the year. “I often look at green trees in my misery. And I am saved in their sacred seriousness “, he writes in some of his verses. To add, that in his village rise high mountains and trees that touch the sky and remind of their mission!

He is a great traveler. He traveled to many countries in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere to get to know, like Odysseus, many jokes, peoples and cultures, and to shape his thinking. He visited almost all the major museums of the world and it is for the poet, true magnets the places and centers where beauty blew and blew and the works of culture are developed. His passion for beauty led him, from his youth, to collect dozens of works of art, especially painting. It has a very rich and rare collection of works.

He is a lover of the works of God and Creation, especially of the subhuman kingdoms of nature, plant and mineral. From the created of Creation he proceeds to the Uncreated of God.