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Places

Places and literature

“Memory has its own geography.” Akakia Kordosi

“A world which sees art and intellect as suspect cannot hope to carry civilization very far or for very long.”  Anita Brookner

“We now receive most information like clouts, like slaps, disconnected, fragments, fragments of information that we are unable after a certain point to connect, and this of course always brings us unpleasant surprises because if you do not connect the information, you do not build that tissue of memory that protects you from unpleasant surprises. Books play this role of the tissue of memory….”. Petros Tatsopoulos

Each new drawing of one more place opens a window into memory, at times evoking nostalgia or the recollection of a literary text. Even the media, pen / ink that I have chosen, tells its own stories and takes me back in time, to adolescence and even further back to childhood, for example, to the transition from pencil to  pen and the first fountain pen…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I first heard about Messolonghi through my mother’s stories in childhood. One of her brothers had been transferred and  married there and she would visit them in the summers. A vague image of a lagoon existed in my imagination long before I actually saw it decades later.

An excerpt from a book by Akakia Kordosi, who was born in Messolonghi or Avroupoli as she prefers to call her town:

«Ο παράδεισος εκείνος των έξι χρόνων της, πιο σπουδαίος από κάθε ιδεατό παράδεισο  – όπως του Ροβινσώνα ή του Παύλου και της Βιργινίας – γιατί ήταν ένας παράδεισος της μνήμης κι όχι της φαντασίας, βρισκόμουν πάνω σ’ ένα πολύ μικρό νησί, στ’ ανοιχτά της θάλασσας της Αβρούπολης, εκεί που τελείωνε η λιμνοθάλασσα κι άρχιζε το πέλαγο…..

Το μικροσκοπικό και χαμηλό εκείνο νησί ενωνόταν με την πόλη μ’ έναν πολύ μακρύ δρόμο, που έκοβε στα δύο τη ρηχή λιμνοθάλασσα………..

Στο νησί εκείνο όλα ήταν μαγικά. Η χαμηλή από ξεραμένο γεμάτο αλάτι και φρυγμένο από τον ήλιο χώμα παραλία, άδεια, γλυκιά και ήσυχη, σε καλούσε να τρέξεις κατά μήκος της πολύ μακριά (ένα παιδικό «μακριά» βέβαια που μπορεί να ερμηνεύεται στην πραγματικότητα σε κάποιες εκατοντάδες μέτρα). Τα ξεβρασμένα τον χειμώνα απ’ τη θάλασσα στεγνά φύκια που τη γαρνίριζαν, σαν παχύ χαλί από σερπαντίνες, σε φώναζε να ξαπλώσεις πάνω του, να κυλιστείς, να στεγνώσεις και να ξαναστεγνώσεις. Γιατί το μπάνιο εκεί ήταν ολοήμερο, αφού η λιμνοθάλασσα ήταν μπροστά σου «ρηχή» – όπως την έλεγε ο ποιητής της – και «ήρεμη», κι έτσι μπορούσες  να περπατάς και να παίζεις χωρίς να σου λέει κανένας μεγάλος «μη», μια και το νερό σου έφτανε το πολύ ως το στήθος – το στήθος το παιδικό – για δεκάδες μέτρα από την παραλία, δηλαδή ως εκεί που άρχιζαν τα βαθιά – που ξεχώριζαν καθαρά όχι μόνο απ’ το χρώμα τους αλλά κι απ’ τις σημαδούρες που ήταν στη γραμμή και τον μεγάλο φάρο. Κι όταν βαριόσουν να τσαλαβουτάς, είχες τη διασκέδαση του βαγονέτου. Το βαγονέτο- «πλατφόρμα» όπως το έλεγαν οι εργάτες της αλυκής και πολύ σωστά γιατί πλατφόρμα ήτανε – χρησίμευε να μεταφέρουν το αλάτι απ’ τις αλυκές, όπου το είχαν στοιβαγμένο σε μεγάλες πυραμίδες, ως την άλλη άκρη της παραλίας. Όπου το ζύγιζαν και το φόρτωναν στα καΐκια».

“So Sappho fell and drowned / I tell the man with the green eye, / for someone like you.”  Ersi Sotiropoulou

An excerpt from Traveling in the Cool Night (1991) by Nikos – Alexis Aslanoglou:

«Αργά το απόγευμα, πλησιάζοντας το νοτιότερο άκρο της Λευκάδας, όλα λάμπουν στο φως. Σαν ένα ηλιοβασίλεμα στο Θερμαϊκό. Δεκάδες χρωματιστά γουιντσέρφινγκ, μεγάλα ιστιοφόρα και βάρκες στην οργιαστική βλάστηση των νερών. Οι ακτές είναι μέσα στο πράσινο.

Ένα χωριό ψαράδων, η Βασιλική, που έχει όμως περισσότερο αγροτικό χαρακτήρα. Στα δεξιά, λίγα παραθαλάσσια εστιατόρια και ξενοδοχεία. Αριστερά, η πλαζ, τα θαλάσσια σπορ, μοντέρνα καταστήματα παγωτών και φρούτων. Στο τέρμα του ανηφορικού δρόμου που διασχίζει το χωριό, δεκάδες ξενώνες με χαρακτηριστική αρχιτεκτονική μορφή μέσα στα σπάρτα, σε εκτάσεις έρημες. Μια δισκοθήκη μέσα στο λιβάδι, σ’ έναν αχανή κήπο. Τα κάμπινγκ αρχίζουν μετά, δίπλα στη θάλασσα. Τα βράδια φυσάει πάντα ένας άνεμος θερμός, θαλασσινός. Όλα τα μέσα μεταφοράς επιστρατεύονται από κει προς όλα τα σημεία του νησιού. Οι αποστάσεις εκμηδενίζονται. Ποιος βιάζεται να φτάσει στην πόλη της Λευκάδας με 42 βαθμούς;

Μερικές μέρες στο Νυδρί συμπληρώνουν την κοσμοπολίτικη όψη μιας μεταμορφωμένης Λευκάδας. Διεθνές παραθεριστικό κέντρο, μια προσπάθεια που πολύ γρήγορα καρποφόρησε. Σε τρεις λωρίδες: η παραθαλάσσια με δεκάδες κέντρα φαγητού και αναψυχής. Η άσφαλτος με πολυτελή καταστήματα και λιχουδιές. Μετά τα μεσάνυχτα μεταβάλλεται σε Ταγγέρη. Ορχήστρες, δισκοθήκες και καλλιτέχνες του τραγουδιού ακούγονται σε πολύ μεγάλο βάθος στην κωμόπολη. Η ίδια αυτή πόλη έχει πολυδαίδαλους δρόμους όπου επαύλεις συνορεύουν με φάρμες, κήπους με οπωροφόρα ή αγροικίες μοντέρνου ρυθμού. Οι υπηρεσίες προσφέρονται αφειδώς. Τα εκλεκτά πάντα φρούτα είναι ηπειρώτικα. Η τέχνη του νησιού, παραδοσιακή, όπως και οι άνθρωποι. Περιμένουν ασάλευτοι στα κατώφλια τους ξένους…………».

A favorite route of mine – Delphi, Itea, Galaxidi, Eratini, Nafpaktos, Galatas, Messolonghi – along the old national road.

An excerpt from Kosmas Politis’ complex and multi-layered novel, The Lemon Grove:

«Μείναμε σιωπηλοί μέσα στη φωτερή γαλήνη των βουνών. Πολύχρωμα ζουζούνια πάνε κι έρχουνται, ανεβοκατεβαίνουν δισταχτικά τις πέτρες, κρύβουνται μέσα στη μυστήρια λόχμη του καινούριου χορταριού. Ένας χρυσαετός ξέσκισε με το κρώξιμό του το γαλανό διάστημα και χάθηκε ψηλά, πίσω από τα βράχια.

Σηκώθηκα νευριασμένος.

— Ένα πράμα δεν μπορώ να καταλάβω. Δε σας εμπνέει αυτό το περιβάλλον; Δεν είπατε ούτε λέξη! Σκεφτήκατε ποτέ όλη αυτή την περασμένη δόξα; Το κατάλευκο τέμενος ανάμεσα στους θησαυρούς που στήσαν ξακουσμένες πολιτείες κι ανάμεσα στ’ αγάλματα και τους βωμούς. Όλος ο παλιός κόσμος είχε το βλέμμα του στραμμένο εδώ, περίμενε να του μιλήσει ο θεός. Το παγκόσμιο ιερό.

Η Βίργκω τινάχτηκε ορθή………

— Δεν πρόκειται για μένα, της αποκρίθηκα. Ούτε για μένα ούτε για σας. Μιλώ για την αναβίωση αρχαίων τελετών…

Μου έκοψε την ομιλία:

— Όσο δεν ξαναζωντανεύει κι ολόκληρη η αρχαία ζωή, να τη ζήσομε όλοι εμείς καθώς που ζούμε τώρα την καθημερινή ζωή μας, θα ’ναι μονάχα μια σκηνοθεσία.

— Μα επιτέλους ποια είναι τα ιδανικά σας;

Έμεινε σκεφτική. Τα μάτια της βυθίστηκαν μακριά, πιο πέρ’ απ’ τον ορίζοντα.

— Τα ιδανικά μου;… Ένα λευκό σπιτάκι με πράσινα παραθυρόφυλλα καταμεσής σ’ ένα λιβάδι».

‘Piraeus, for me, encompasses my university years, politicization and political youth groups, uninsured work, an unexpected road injury, countless journeys, Athens-Piraeus, by electric train (on the tube), trips to the islands, departures and arrivals by ship, parents and relatives’ stories of farewells and migration.

Stefanos Milesis writes “The Piraeus of work, of sailors, poets and intellectuals, of small boatmen and large shipowners, has stood through time as the port of the great migration.” His book, Piraeus: the port of farewell, concerns the history of the migration of Greeks to other places from the end of the 19th century to the mid-1960s and perhaps even the 1970s, without any beautification. The causes mentioned in the book of this great “hemorrhage” of population, in successive waves of migration of thousands of people, are the successive wars, the disaster of 1922, political and economic instability, and then the Second World War, the occupation and the civil war, the post-civil war period, hunger, poverty, lack of work and the absence of a working future, mainly in the provinces.

Στο πρώτο κεφάλαιο με τον τίτλο, Οι απόγονοι του Οδυσσέα, σημειώνει, κυρίως για τους μετανάστες του πρώτου μισού του 20ου αιώνα, «Αναχωρούσαν από το λιμάνι του Πειραιά χωρίς να ξέρουν τη γλώσσα της νέας χώρας που είχαν θέσει ως προορισμό, και δεν θα  ήταν υπερβολή να πούμε ότι πολλοί, οι περισσότεροι, δεν γνώριζαν να γράφουν ή να διαβάζουν καν τα ελληνικά….. ».  Το βιβλίο μας δίνει πληροφορίες για τις άθλιες συνθήκες των πολυήμερων ταξιδιών, κυρίως   στην αρχή, την αγορά και αργότερα την κατασκευή των πρώτων ελληνικών υπερωκεάνιων, τις σκληρές συνθήκες εργασίας κι εκμετάλλευσης των μεταναστών στις χώρες υποδοχής, τουλάχιστον μέχρι να σταθούν στα πόδια τους. Αφηγείται τις συνθήκες εργασίας των μικρών γαβριάδων των αμερικάνικών στιλβωτηρίων και των «υπηρετριών» της Αυστραλίας. Κάνει εκτενή αναφορά στα  Πειραιώτικα κυκλώματα, εκμετάλλευσης και εξαπάτησης των υποψηφίων μεταναστών, η οποία συνεχίστηκε ως τα μέσα του 1960, στους σαράφηδες ή  αργυραμοιβούς της Τρούμπας, και τον πλουτισμό πολλών και συγκεκριμένων ατόμων από την επιχείρηση της μετανάστευσης.

Το βιβλίο περιγράφει και την διαδικασία αναζήτησης Ελληνίδων συζύγων, τις λεγόμενες «υποψήφιες νύφες» και τα συνοικέσια της μιας φωτογραφίας.  Επίσης κάνει αναφορά στα άστεγα χαμίνια του Πειραιά, στρατιές από εκατοντάδες μικρά παιδιά, τα ονομαζόμενα «γαβριάδες» από τον μικρό ήρωα του Βίκτωρ Ουγκώ, τα οποία αποτελούσαν «ένα λαμπρό πεδίο παιδικής εργασίας και εκμετάλλευσης». Μάλλον αυτός ήταν και ο λόγος που τα πρώτα ιδρύματα του Πειραιά ήταν ορφανοτροφεία. Τα παιδιά δεν έμειναν στο περιθώριο στα χρόνια της μετανάστευσης καθώς τα πρακτορεία εργασίας «τα έθεσαν κι αυτά στο στόχαστρο του κέρδους» και έγινε εξαγωγή παιδιών εργατών.  Η εκμίσθωση ανήλικων λούστρων από Έλληνες στην Αμερική  σταμάτησε μόνο μετά από την επέμβαση της αμερικάνικης δικαιοσύνης.

Τέλος αναφέρεται στον κύκλο της «σιωπής», καθώς και στην ανάγκη δημιουργίας ενός μουσείου μετανάστευσης για τη αποφυγή της λήθης, Ο συγγραφέας θεωρεί αυτόν τον ιδιότυπο νόμο της σιωπής, ως τον δεύτερο πυλώνα συντήρησης της μετανάστευσης. Η σιωπή γύρω από τις πραγματικές αιτίες, συνθήκες και δυσκολίες, καθώς και τα εμβάσματα (αποτέλεσμα μεγάλων κόπων και θυσιών) που έστελναν οι μετανάστες στις οικογένειες τους, διατηρούσε τον μύθο του εύκολου πλουτισμού και την συνέχιση της μετανάστευσης. Η σιωπή συμβάλλει και στην λήθη της Ιστορίας. Τέλος, υποστηρίζει την ανάγκη δημιουργίας μουσείου μετανάστευσης στον Πειραιά και αναφέρει ότι  δεν έγινε ποτέ κανένα αφιέρωμα στα εκατομμύρια των Ελλήνων που αναγκάστηκαν να αναχωρήσουν ίσως γιατί πιστεύεται ότι απώλεια πατρίδας είναι μόνο εδαφική και ποτέ πληθυσμιακή.

Anyway, in the rest of Europe there are several museums. To mention a few, in Ireland, with its long legacy of emigration from the Irish shores to America, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, there are several museums that pay tribute to and explore the experience of those who left.  The EPIC, an Irish Emigration Museum has twenty galleries that detail the history, heritage, and culture of the Irish diaspora. The Dunbrody Famine Ship is a faithful reproduction of an 1840s emigrant vessel that carried weary and hungry refugees fleeing Ireland’s Famine caused by a potato blight that started in 1845, which killed the crop of the impoverished Irish tenant farmers. Within 7 years, one  million people had died and 1.5 million had emigrated. The Cobh Heritage Center tells the story of hundreds of years of emigration from the 1600s, when Irish people were transported to the British overseas colonies, The port of Cobh, then known as Queenstown, became the departing point of millions of emigrants. Between 1848 to 1950, 2.5 million of the six million people who left Ireland departed from Cobh.

The Red Star Line museum in Antwerpin in Belgium tells the story of the men, women and children from all over Europe, who travelled to the port of Antwerp where they embarked on the Red Star Line ships on a journey to America. From 1815 until 1940, around 60 million emigrants from all over Europe left their homeland for America. At the MEI – National Museum of Italian Emigration, one can retrace many stories, told through first-hand sources such as diaries, letters, photographs,  newspapers and archival documents, of the millions of Italians that left their homeland in search of a better life from the Unification of Italy (and even before) to the present.

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Places

Words and images

“For time is the longest distance between two places.” Tennessee Williams

“….. prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and  intimate, “big” history and private experience.” From The Years by Annie Ernaux

In this post I have included four new drawings of places. Part of this current art project includes reading, poems, stories, articles, things related to the artwork in obvious or less visible ways. Narratives and images are often in some kind of relationship, even though they may seem unlinked, parallel activities. Also, sometimes one thing leads to another, and I end up finding something interesting to read, albeit unexpected. Today I will be referring to some of the things I’ve been reading recently, all written by women, all including themes of loss, loss of parents. Man overboard and Ηοw beautiful life is written by the Greek writers Ersi Sotiropoulou and Maria Laina, respectively, and La Place and A Woman’s Story written by French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022. I discovered Ernaux’s books by chance at a local book store. La Place caught my attention because of its title. This then lead to my getting acquainted with more of her work. In this post I will be focusing on A Woman’s Story, and her Nobel Banquet Speech I Will Write To Avenge My People.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her speech I Will Write To Avenge My People begins with Ernaux describing how in trying to find the right sentence to give her the freedom and confidence to speak that evening, a phrase she had written in her diary when she was young appeared: “It instantly appears. In all its clarity and violence. Lapidary. Irrefutable. Written in my diary sixty years ago. ‘I will write to avenge my people’…” She was at the time twenty-two, studying literature, mostly with the children of the local bourgeoisie, proudly and naively believing “that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success.”

Ernaux tells us that initially literature was a sort of continent which she unconsciously set in opposition to her social environment. She thought that with her writing she could transfigure reality, but being married with two children, a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, brought her further and further away from writing and her promise to avenge her people. Her father’s death, a job teaching students from working class backgrounds and the 1968 protest movements were the factors, she says, that brought her back: “through byroads that were unforeseen and proximate to the world of my origins, to my ‘people’, and gave my desire to write a quality of secret and absolute urgency”.

She understood she had to delve into repressed memories and bring light to bear on how her people lived, adding that those who “as immigrants, no longer speak their parents’ language, and those who, as class defectors, no longer have quite the same language, think and express themselves with other words, face additional hurdles.” She realized she had to break with ‘writing well and beautiful sentences’ and “to root out, display and understand the rift running through [her]”.

Ernaux tells us that her first book in 1974 mapped out the social and feminist realm that she would situate her writing. Through reflecting on life she would inevitably also reflect on writing, on how writing reinforces or disrupts the accepted, interiorized representations of things and beings. With her fourth book she adopted a neutral, objective, “flat” kind of writing, where the violence was no longer displayed, it came from the facts themselves and not the writing.

Towards the end of the speech Ernaux writes: “In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and / or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

La Place and A Woman’s Story

In her books,  La Place and  A Woman’s Story, which Ernaux wrote after her father and mother’s deaths, she chronicles a generation, and the process of breaking away from her class and surroundings, through her education and then through her move into the middle-class literary world, which felt like a kind of betrayal. She examines this breakage, and also, considers the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, and what it means to contain a life within the pages of a book.

La Place              (My own translation of the Greek translation)

“He didn’t belong anywhere, he didn’t belong anywhere, he just paid his annual membership to the trade association. At his funeral, the vicar spoke of “an honest, hard-working life”, “of a man who never harmed anyone”.

“When I read Proust or Mauriac, I cannot believe that they are writing about the time when my father was a child. In his case, it was probably the Middle Ages.”

“Obsessive idea: What will others say about us (neighbors, customers, everyone).”

A Woman’s Story

Ernaux claims that this book isn’t a biography or a novel, “maybe a cross between literature, sociology and history.” She adds that when she thinks of facets of her mother’s personality, she tries to relate them to her story and historical and social background because history and social background contain and, to a great extent, shape a person’s life. She searches for explanations As the writer talks about her mother and the web of people she was linked to, we also encounter the ‘big’ history events and social norms and circumstances, and the opportunities that were not available to her mother and those of her social milieu:

“It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time…….. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has recently appeared in my dreams….. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.”

“She could have become a school mistress, but her parents wouldn’t let her leave the village. Parting with one’s family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, ‘ambition’ refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.) ………In those days, nobody ‘pushed’ their children, they had to ‘have it in them’. School was merely a phase one went through before earning a living. One could miss school; it wasn’t the end of the world. But not Mass.”

“There were the black years of the economic crisis, the strikes, Léon Blum (‘the first man to be on the side of the workers’), the social reforms and the late-night parties in the café. There were the visits from her relatives….”

“The store lay in the Valley, where nineteenth-century cotton mills ruled people’s lives from infancy to death.”

“Under the Occupation, life in the Valley centred on their shop and the hope of getting fresh supplies. She tried to feed everyone, especially large families, because her natural pride encouraged her to be kind and helpful to others…….”

“In 1945, they left the Valley, where the foggy climate made me cough and stunted my growth, and moved back to Yvetot. Life in the post-war period was more difficult than during the war. Food was still rationed and those who had ‘cashed in on the black market’ were slowly emerging.”

The most poignant part of the book is about the last years of her mother’s life when she was ill. Ernaux’s frequent short sentences convey so much:

“And here her story stops for there was no longer a place for her in society.”

“Most of the patients there are women.”

“The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.”

“I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.”

Man overboard by Ersi Sotiropoulou

Here in Greece her mother is dying and in the Arctic icebergs are melting:

“Only you and I are listening now. There is no one else. / a crackling of invisible crystals / of frost flakes breaking away. / Breathless we hear / The creak becoming a buzz / The roar of an approaching plane / Not from the air. / This mineral buzz as / a piece is detached from the mother.”

Ηοw beautiful life is by Maria Laina

“Mainly written art, the one that is written and then you look at it again, and that is  torture  because in the meantime it has changed, and you have changed…..”

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Place V

Birthplace

“It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” Rebecca Solnit

Today’s post includes some new drawings of places accompanied by a few short texts and poems.

Extract from Yiannis Ritsos’ poem, in which he captures the image of the rock, Monemvasia, his birthplace:

«Μονοβασιά»

(Monovasia is another way of saying Monemvasia, which means one way)

“The rock. Nothing else. The wild fig tree and the ironstone.

Armored Sea. No room for kneeling.

Outside the gate of the church* (dedicated to Christ) dark red in black.

Old ladies with their cauldrons bleaching the longest hooped tapestry in history

of the forty-four Byzantine arches.

The sun relentless friend with his spear against the walls

and death an outcast in this vast illumination,

where the dead, now and then, interrupt their sleep

with cannons and rusty lampposts, going up and down

steps and steps carved into the stone….”

“He went to bring his family for a tour of the village.  “Get to know our homeplace”, he said passionately to the children. Should I say my place? he wondered. MY place? He wondered a second time and sank into thought.’ Despina Kaitatzi-Houliomi

Everyone’s birthplace is the emotional capital of their entire life. Because there one lives their foundational childhood and teenage years, usually, and there one acquires for the first time a sense of self, of the other, of the family, of the neighborhood, of the language, of the sea, of the open horizon, and all these are unprecedented experiences for the person…..” Ioanna Karystiani

“Birthplace determines the images that we are made of. Which emerge involuntarily from the unconscious and are, sometimes, intentionally deposited in the conscious as signals that delineate our path in life. Because this is the only way we can (re)synthesize our personal and collective history, build our present through the past.” Leda Kazantzaki ”

Finally, two excerpts from Petros Tatsopoulos’  most recent book  (published just this month) that I’ve just finished reading:

“The ferocity is often under the skin, it is subcutaneous. If you browse the internet. Everywhere you look, you will stumble upon pockets of bigotry / intolerance. Mισαλλοδοξία (misallodoxia) is such a beautiful Greek word to capture something so repulsive: hatred of the heterodox, hatred of another’s glory, hatred of another’s faith. The internet is currently teeming with fundamentalists of all kinds. It doesn’t matter if they are Christian, if they are Muslim or if they are Jewish. They are manipulators of anger, hate, and these people seek, in addition to building, to engineer entire slanderous accusations for groups of people with whom they do not agree, they try to find every crack in the legislative framework, so that bigotry can pass through these… … I end with a remark. The State cannot and must not participate in this game of intolerance from any side. p. 101

The descendants of the enlightenment” I wrote in the News in October 2020……  they chuckle that the movement of the European Enlightenment, which manifested itself in France in the middle of the 18th century – with its main exponents – the famous ‘Encyclopaedists’ – didn’t touch the ill-fated enslaved Greece. If we judge by the result, the descendants of the Enlightenment are right: it is enough to glance at the salacious headlines of a deplorably large part of the print and electronic Mass Media to see that in terms of the level, quality and argumentation of intellectual dialogue, little has changed since the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But if we look at historical events, we will see that the Greek exponents of the Enlightmenment did not surrender without a fight. They fought a furious battle against the obscurantists, and if they ultimately lost it, they did not lose it in the realm of ideas (in that arena no one nowadays, with his sanity rudimentarily intact, disputes their absolute supremacy). They lost it in the field of power – consequently in education and society.” p. 285