This summer has been filled with intense and numerous emotions due to all that has happened and continues to happen in Istanbul, in Smyrna, and with the threats in the Aegean...

No one can uproot the City of our dreams from our mind, our soul, our being, because it is imprinted in our DNA. We have been nurtured with the DESIRED, generations and generations of Greeks flow in our blood and will follow us into Eternal Life!

With Hagia Sophia in my mind and based on a related poem of mine about Istanbul in free verse, from my second book "Lamps of Hellenism," I thought to make some corrections for the second edition. The inspiration and a relatively lyrical and epic motivation led me to write the metrical verses that follow, which constitute a small epic of the chronicle of the establishment of the Byzantine Empire and, of course, the two Conquests, 1204 and 1453.

[...] (From the preface of the edition)