I took my first trip to Greece in 1947, and my last in the autumn of 1966. My final image: an island in the Aegean, treeless, with a unique village; a landscape stripped bare with misery and beauty intertwined like two slopes of the same hill.

Misery and beauty. (. . .) Several such moments were reproduced during my travels in Greece, and I tell myself that from those Greek years, what endures through time are these images.

When I happen to relive them, as vivid as ever, I think of those ancient seers who read the fates of people and cities in the flight of birds and the whistling of the wind among the oaks. (. . .)

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