He was one year older than my father. They grew up together—playing makeshift games under the plane trees, drinking water from the old fountains that never stopped running—in our village, Platanos Nafpaktias, birthplace of the great theater man Dimitris Rontiris.

My first meeting with Dr. Nikos Papanikolaou happened years ago, at a time when “Alicology” had flared up again thanks to the TV series “I Have a Secret,” where Katerina Papoutsaki portrayed Aliki Vougiouklaki.

I still remember my grandmother saying:
“Papanikolaou brought Vougiouklaki to our village. All the women gathered outside Saint Nikolaos to welcome her, shouting ‘the Vougiouklaki, the Vougiouklaki!’ He was a great doctor… distinguished. He helped her get pregnant—she had a problem—and he delivered her baby. It was a difficult birth. That’s why when Aliki came to the village, she brought a tama and placed it on the icon of Saint Nikolaos, right where you were baptized. ‘A devout offering from Aliki Vougiouklaki, 15/8/1969.’”

Decades after that offering—and long after Aliki and many of the stars he treated had passed away—I visited him at his office on Makrygianni Street, overlooking the Acropolis. He wanted to share stories, trust me with personal photos, and speak openly about things he had kept private for years.

He had promised Aliki’s brothers, Takis and Antonis, that he would never speak publicly about her. But the shared bloodline, the roots in Platanos, made him break his silence.

“You’re the grandson of the clockmaker,” he said, using my grandfather’s village nickname. “Take whatever photos you want. Keep them and use them whenever you like.”

He pulled leather-bound albums from his carved bookcase with the energy of a teenager, his smile lighting up the room as he flipped through faces and handwritten captions.

A Galaxy of Stars in His Office

In the photos, everyone from the golden age of Greek theater and cinema appeared:
Zozó Dalmas, Jenny Karezi, Aliki Vougiouklaki, Nonika Galinea, Melina Mercouri, the Kalouta sisters, Stella Stratigou, Betty Valassi, Elena Nathanael, Spyros Evangelatos and Lida Tasopoulou, Katia Dandoulaki with Marios Ploritis, Fotis Metaxopoulos and Nadia Fontana, Dinos Iliopoulos with his wife Hilda, and so many more.

For younger readers: nearly every major theatrical figure of that era trusted Dr. Papanikolaou to help them become parents.

“Zozó Dalmas would come for an exam and tell me, in great detail, how she slept with Kemal Atatürk,” he said with a playful wink.
As for Vougiouklaki and Karezi: “What rivalry? Look, here they are—both pregnant, posing happily together.”

The Photo That Left Me Speechless

Among the dozens of photos sliding out of their vintage plastic sleeves, one page stopped me cold:
A beautiful woman, unconscious, with a breathing tube in her mouth.

“It’s Aliki in the operating room, minutes before giving birth to Giannis,” he confirmed. “Take it. You’ll be the first to publish it. Only because of Platanos.”

He then shared a jaw-dropping story:
A famous journalist—friend to both Aliki and himself—had secretly entered the operating room during the C-section and photographed everything: Aliki’s open abdomen, the scalpel cutting into the uterus, even her exposed intestines.

“She made an entire album of those photos—unthinkable material. We fought. I cut ties with her. Who knows—maybe someday these images will appear in some book. I managed to keep just one: Aliki during anesthesia, intubated. That one I’m giving to you.”

The photograph, first published when he gave it to me, has since appeared across websites and social media—each claiming it was “first publication.”

A Doctor Among Legends

As the album ended, he showed me a handwritten letter from Marika Nezer, thanking him for writing to Aristotle Onassis and urging him to build a hospital in memory of his son, Alexander.
That letter, as he proudly explained, played a part in the creation of the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center.

Celebrated among celebrated people, this brilliant doctor passed away at the age of 99 just a few days ago.

I find comfort imagining him now—full of the same youthful energy he always had—kicking a makeshift cloth ball through the village square of Platanos, playing once again with my father and their old childhood friends.