According to many, Rhodakanaty was born on October 14, 1828 in Athens, Greece to a member of Greek aristocracy and his Greek wife with an Austrian citizenship. Rhodakanaty's father died after the Greek war for independence against the Turks, and his mother took him to Vienna. In 1848, Rhodakanaty traveled to Budapest to assist in the failed Hungarian uprising of that year. He supposed to traveled next to Berlin where he was exposed to the ideas of Hegel, Fourier, and Proudhon. In 1850, he visited Paris specifically to meet Proudhon after reading the latter's "What Is Property?" While in Paris, he learned of Mexico's rural system of relatively self-governing agricultural communities and of the threat to them presented by capitalism and privatization. He supported the effort to save them and went to Barcelona where he lived for at least two years in the large anarchist community there. Rhodakanaty planned to help save that way of life in Mexico.