Maria Iordanidu (Constantinople, 1897 - Athens, 1989) spent her childhood in Constantinople, but the outbreak of the First World War, which surprised her on vacation in the Black Sea, forced her to remain in Russia for years. Until 1919 he could not return to Greece, where he worked for a large American commercial company and, from 1926 to 1939, at the Soviet embassy in Athens. During the German occupation she was arrested several times and her house was destroyed, after which she was forced to move frequently and to survive teaching foreign languages. At sixty-five he published his first novel, Loxandra, an immensely popular work that has been translated into several languages.