Spyros Skouras: - The man who discovered Marilyn Monroe

The great man of 20th Century Fox, Spyros Skouras started as a shepherd, as he said, from a small village of Pyrgos, Ilia. He was the man who discovered Marilyn Monroe and was behind the greatest successes of the time. He grew up in the Peloponnese during the second

half of the 19th century. At that time , Greek viticulturists supported their families by exporting all their annual production to Europe and Asia, filling the gap in France, whose respective crops had suffered terrible damage. At that time, Moria raisins – fresh and dried – were the main export product. More than 150,000 tons of Greek product were consumed every year at the tables of the world. It was the golden age for Greek agriculture, which did not last long. In the 1870-80s, the French, with the help of their government, began to plant healthy vines and in a few years regained the market share that Greece had gained in their absence. 

 Spyros Skouras was born on March 28, 1893 in Skourochori where he is located at the foot of a low hill in the region of Pyrgos, Ilia. His father was a shepherd and he was trying to support his family of ten, having a very difficult time. Little Spyros then followed him to work with his brothers trying to help the family.  

In their adolescence, Karolos, Spyros and Giorgis, the three brothers, had undertaken to graze the sheep but the period was hard then. A little later the war started, so the solution was one, to leave the country and go abroad. In 1910, Karolos at the age of 21, Spyros at the age of 17 and Giorgis at the age of 14, boarded the deck of an ocean liner bound for America. This was the first wave of immigration, the Greeks had begun the search for their fortune away from poor Greece (according to statistics, in the decade 1901-1910 alone, 167,519 people -95% men- had left Greece for the US) . 

www.ellines.com