Every time you leaf through a beautiful book, you feel somewhat embarrassed, like a visitor to the close interior world of a house to which you are drawn but hesitate to enter. As though you were in a garden of ideas, admiring sights, sounds and fragrances.

You sense the allure of ripe fruit that is far away, since a different farmer had been enjoying it until then. This is what an excavator, another cultivator of the memory of the land, feels upon touching this book, Traces of Antiquity in the Greek Landscape. Perhaps only the calloused hands of a farmer can fathom the mystery of the variations in the texture of the soil in terms of what has appeared on the surface, since so much has been concealed in its loins and has put down roots.

Like the primeval Greek memories that have been collected in this book. Potent monuments, like fragments of memory from other years and times, known and unknown, right beside us or in forgotten places. Pieces of carved marble that have been coming to light for centuries now. Perhaps as part of Greece's irrational, unexplained openness to that which springs up coolly from the ground, beside the waves or on a rocky ridge, shining brightly or very pale, in the ray of sunlight, of ethereal light pursued by a cloud.

In every glance Greece is revealed as inexhaustible. In some places it is concealed; in others it is there for us to see.

[Excerpt from the prologue text]