1. Birth – education
Konstantinos Oikonomos was born in Tsaritsani, Thessaly in 1780. The ecclesiastical title and axiom of oikonomos was inherited from his family. His father was the steward of the church of Tsaritsani and, as he was a scholar himself, he taught his sons Konstantinos and Stefanos Greek and Latin, Later Konstantinos learnt French from the doctor from Ambelakia Zisis Kavras, German, Russian, and others. From the age of12 to 25 he traversed through ecclesiastical ranks until he succeeded his father to the axiom of «steward» at the archdiocese of Elassona.
2. Activities
His ardent revolutionary preaching in Thessaly in 1808 coincide with the revolutionary movement of Euthymios Vlachavas; A consequence of this was that he was accused as his collaborator after the failure of the movement and be imprisoned in Ioannina. After his liberation the patriarch Gregorios V invited him to the monastery of Ag. Ioannis in the archdiocese of Serres.
Later he left for Smyrna where he taught Greek and religious studies at the newly established 1 "Philological Gymnasiom". At this time, the school’s director was Konstantinos Koumas who also taught philosophy, while physics, history and chemistry were taught by Konstantinos’ brother Stefanos. When Koumas left the Gymnasium in 1813, his position was filled by Konstantinos Oikonomos. The progressive viewpoint he adopted during these years soon brought him into conflict with Smyrna’s conservative circles and the Evangelical School and, despite the attempts by the patriarch Kyrillos to reconcile the situation, Oikonomos was forced to abandon Smyrna in 1819 and go to Mytilini.
That same year the patriarch Gregorios appointed him «Catholic Missionary of the Great Church and Μέγα Οικονόμο of the Patriarchate» and invited him to Constantinople. After the outbreak iof the Revolution and the hanging of Gregorius, he escaped to Odessa where in April he gave his famous speech at the year remembrance service for Patriarch Gregorius V. After spending a considerable time in St. Petersburg as a guest of the emperor Alexander and travelling to Rome and the Vatican as a guest of Pope Gregorius XVII, laden with medals and honorary titles he returned to Greece alone, having lost his entire family, wife, brother and mother during a cholera epidemic in Vienna.
In Greece he lived in the first capital of the Greek State, Nafplion, until 1837 and later settled in Athens where he remained for the rest of his life, writing and studying. He died in March 1857. He was buried with particular honours in the precinct of the Petrakis Monastery.
3. His work
His presence at the "Philological Gymnasiοm" was decisive in the formation of a progressive environment in education in Smyrna during the Enlightenment. Himself a most able orator, he managed to encourage his students to execute phonetic and oratory exercises and showed a preference for the heroic enthusiasm of the ancient iambic poets such as Pindar.
Between 1810 and 1820 the then young Konstantinos Oikonomos was a supporter of Korais and belonged to the progressive world of the Greek Enlightenment. In 1813 he published Rhetoric and in 1817 Grammatical. In the prologue of the latter which is written based on the linguistic models of Korais, he does not hesitate, although a priest and «first missionary of the churches» of Smyrna, to side with the «philosophers». Of this work only the first two books were published: Aesthetics, on the relationship between the fine arts and Poetry. It is characteristic that in this work are discernable the influences of two great representatives of 18th century Western aesthetics, the Frenchman Batteux (1713-1780) and the Englishman Blair (1718-1800): both these books were an example of the western intellectual environment within which both Oikonomos and the Greek world moved during the 18th century. It is worth noting that Oikonomos was the one who presented the Romantic work of Edward Young to Greek readers of his time by referring to the latter’s philosophical poem The Nights 2 and expressing his aspiration for the work to be translated into Greek.3
After 1820 Oikonomos turned gradually to more conservative views, both linguistic and ideological only to become a adversary to the supporters of Korais and a representative of the conservative clergy and the «anti-philosophists». This shift was connected to his removal from the French influence and his acceptance of Russophile politics also underlined by his relations with Russian imperial circles.