When Kostas Papanastasiou came to Germany in October 1956 at the age of 19, he had big plans for his life.

Acting wasn't one of them.

The fact that he ended up in front of the camera was thanks to a persistent landlady and the job of the host of a Greek restaurant.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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The landlady was an elderly lady with whom he stayed during his studies.

Papanastasiou once said in an interview that she simply registered him at the drama school because she was convinced of his talent.

The young Greek had actually moved to Berlin to study architecture, but seized the opportunity and completed both apprenticeships.

Since neither acting nor architecture immediately earned him a job, he opened the restaurant “Terzo Mondo” in Berlin in 1974, the name of which he simply kept from the previous Italian owner.

It was supposed to be a meeting place for Greeks who fled from the dictatorship of their home country at the time, it became a meeting point for the left-wing scene in West Berlin.

The role of his life

Artists also met there. And so Papanastasiou was eaten off the counter for his first feature film role; He stood in front of the camera for the first time in 1977 in Bernhard Wicki's drama “The Conquest of the Citadel”. A few years later, Hans W. Geißendörfer also came to “Terzo Mondo” and offered Papanastasiou the role of his life: the Greek innkeeper was supposed to be a Greek innkeeper in the TV series “Lindenstrasse”. Papanastasiou didn't think twice. From the third episode on he played Panaiotis Sarikakis, a proud head of the family who entertains the guests from the neighborhood in the "Acropolis" with ouzo and moussaka and whether the longing for home sometimes takes up the guitar.

In the eleven years as a television innkeeper, he not only had to ensure a good mood.

The plot about him became increasingly political, addressing xenophobia in Germany as well as crisis areas in Georgia or the Kurdish conflict in Turkey.

In 1996 he said goodbye as a permanent member of the "Lindenstrasse family", as he later lovingly referred to his fellow actors.

Only now and then did he come back for guest appearances.

However, he remained loyal to his own bar in Berlin, held concerts there and is said to have picked up the guitar himself.

According to the “Tagesspiegel”, he was respectfully called the “Zeus from Savignyplatz”.

Kostas Papanastasiou died last Sunday at the age of 84.