Yorgos Ioánnou—originally a pseudonym, later the legally adopted name of Georgios Sorolópis—was a distinguished and worthy writer of contemporary Greece. He was born in Thessaloniki in 1927 into a family of Greek refugees from Eastern Thrace, a region that had come under the control of the new Turkish state in 1923 following the Greco-Turkish War in Asia Minor (1919-1922), a conflict Greece lost.