"For no one is pure, only the inactive." "Gkiak" means blood, kinship, murder for reasons of revenge, tribe. The heroes in Papamarkos' stories, soldiers who fought in the fierce battlefields of Asia Minor, return forever changed to their homeland in Lokryda. Defined by what they must do for the honor of the community, according to the heavy law of blood in the strict customary law of their closed society, they become perpetrators and at the same time victims.

Silenced crimes and wounds, destruction and annihilation, rapes and murders, spirits and demons, moral trials – stories of unconfessed acts, in the oral language of the Rumeli dialect, which ultimately lead, even violently, the heroes into conflict with their community and the reevaluation of their identity.

"This is what it means to be civilized. To step in the shit with a high heel." "An unmediated speech, deeply popular, folk, close to the Arvanitic oral tradition, which often sounds like a fragmented fifteen-syllable verse, as if rising from the depths of the fifteen-syllable, permeated by the spirit of history, fairy tales, myths, and legends and, above all, a purifying, cathartic, and redemptive discourse for those who recount their life affairs...

Kostas Papageorgiou, The Dawn "[In Gkiak] nothing is exactly as it seems... War in this case is not the war for tribe and homeland, it is not even how the faith in tribe and homeland can justify personal misdeeds: it is human existence stripped of any pretext in a desperate struggle for survival." Vangelis Chatzivasileiou, anagnostis.gr

"The realistic writing of the young author Demosthenes Papamarkos is shocking... Honor, pride, male friendship, the cold-blooded slaughter of mothers and children, the alienation of human emotion, guilt, the denial of the spiritual world are presented with an astonishingly harsh tenderness." Giorgos Stamatopoulos, Efimerida ton Sintakton

"Demosthenes Papamarkos' book Gkiak must not, under any circumstances, fall short, it must find the readers it deserves." Christos Papageorgiou, diastixo.gr

"What makes [Gkiak] a great book is the typologies of characters that emerge from the careful work in language and the depiction of the fluctuation of the heroes' emotions." Kostas Agorastos, bookpress.gr

"Gkiak is not just a collection of short stories. It is a comprehensive recording and analysis of the blood sacrifice..." Alexandros Stergiopoulos, toperiodiko

"By inscribing history into literature, Gkiak inscribes itself in the long history of blood – anthropological, religious, sociological-political, psychoanalytic, and, in this case, literary – to create a strong incision in the history of modern Greek short stories in general." Vangelis Bitsoris, Syghrona Themata

"What determines the intensity of Papamarkos' modern oral narrative is the vision of the solitary protagonist – just like that of the gaucho in all of Borges' stories." Tina Mandilara, Lifo

Demosthenes Papamarkos was born in 1983 in Malessina, Lokryda. He has published novels, short stories, and comics. The collection of short stories Gkiak won the Academy of Athens – Petros Haris Foundation Award and the Short Story/Novella Award from the magazine Anagnostis. It is available in Russian from O.G.I. publications. He has also written for theater and film. In the context of the Onassis Artistic Research Fellowship, he wrote the play In the Crow.