Demetrios Vikelas (also Demetrius Bikelas; ; 15 February 1835 – 20 July 1908) was a Greek businessman and writer; he was the co-founder and first President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), from 1894 to 1896.
After a childhood spent in Greece and Constantinople (now Istanbul), he found fortune in London, where he married. He then moved to Paris, on account of his wife. Abandoning business, he dedicated himself to literature and history, and published numerous novels, short stories and essays, which earned him a distinguished reputation.
Because of his reputation and the fact that he lived in Paris, he was chosen to represent Greece in a congress called by Pierre de Coubertin in June 1894, which decided to re-establish the Olympic Games and to organise them in Athens in 1896, designating Vikelas to preside over the organisation committee. After the Games were over, he stepped down, remaining in Athens until his death in 1908.
Childhood
Vikelas was born in Ermoupoli, on the island of Syros in Greece. His father was a merchant, originally from Veria (then part of the Ottoman Empire, today capital of the northern Greek province of Imathia in Central Macedonia) and his mother, Smaragda, was a member of the rich Melas family. He was educated at home by his mother, possibly due to his fragile health.
When he was six, the family moved to Constantinople, and ten years after that to Odessa. There he started working for his father's business.
Already he showed signs of his literary potential. At the age of 17 he translated Esther, a tragedy by Jean Racine.
London, from business to literature
While aged 17, in 1852, he left home to live in London with his uncles Leon and Vasileios Melas, where he worked for their business, Melas Bros, first as a bookkeeper and then as a partner. He also began to maintain a weekly correspondence with his mother.
This correspondence, which was kept, is one of the most important in establishing his biography. He also kept a journal in which he recorded not only facts about his daily life but also advice from his uncle Leon and his thoughts on books he had read and plays he was able to attend.
After his day's work at his uncles' business, he took evening classes at University College London (the only university in London which did not require students to be Anglican). There, he obtained a degree in botany (the only subject which offered evening classes). He learned German and Italian. He also took part in fencing, horse-riding and rowing, although circumstances did not allow him to keep these up. He had also become very scholarly, and started to publish — an anthology of poems in 1862 and numerous articles in London periodicals, on the British press and the growing of cotton in Greece.
During the political events of 1863 in Greece, following the revolution which led to the eviction of Otto and the enthronement of George I, Vikelas led fundraising efforts in support of the provisional government. He also wrote letters to the main newspapers of the time to demand that Greece's rights be respected. He became definitively known in the British intellectual world in 1866 when he contacted authors and academics to gain their support for the Cretan cause during the Cretan Revolt of 1866-1867, for which he raised more fundraising.
Also in 1866, he married Kalliope Geralopoulou, a young sister of Katerini, the wife of one of his uncles, also a member of a rich merchant family in London. He also became a titular partner in his uncles' business.
He also met and became friends with Charilaos Trikoupis - the son of the Greek ambassador to Britain Spyridon Trikoupis, himself destined to become Prime Minister of Greece. At the time they met, Charilaos Trikoupis was just starting his diplomatic and political career as an attaché, then chargé d'affaires, of the Greek legation. The two men kept a busy correspondence.
Demetrius Vikelas continued to gain favour in Greece — in 1868 he published a 30-page statistical article on the Kingdom of Greece following a conference at the Royal Statistical Society; in 1870 he founded a school for Greek children living in England. All his work — polemic, political, journalistic, historical or literary — had a double objective: to elevate the morals and level of intellect of his country but also to change its reputation with respect to the rest of the world. In his historical essay of 1874, On the Byzantines, he wrote that he wanted to restore the reputation of the Byzantine Empire.