The unique unpublished work of Nikos Kazantzakis. The great Greek literary figure writes with intensity and existential anxiety, contemplating all the big questions that trouble people to this day.

We were born slaves and we fight all our lives to become free.

In the mid-1940s, right after Zorba, Kazantzakis writes The Ascent, an introspective text marked by deep and redemptive melancholy.

The action unfolds immediately after the war, in Crete and England.
Kosmas, after an absence of twenty years and his active participation in the war, returns to his homeland, the Great Castle, along with his Jewish wife, Noemi, who carries the universal memory of the Holocaust, and with her the question of the value of life.

It has only been a few days since his father's death and Crete is counting its wounds, reviving personal stories of courage and pain.

The man emerging from World War II is a man who cannot reflect, a man who has not been saved, who is in danger, and Kosmas travels to post-war England to save him.
The personal cost of his choice is enormous.
But this is the duty, this is the uphill path that we all must traverse.

The Ascent, the unpublished novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, is a classic work that raises questions that constantly haunt humanity. It is not just a significant literary moment for our country but also a cultural event.

"I don't care about death," he pondered, "I care about decay, that humiliates man. This is what I must conquer…" The city of his childhood and youth had aged, it was also crumbling, starting to turn to dust and scatter in the wind. Another city could be built over it, but it wouldn't be his own, the streets would fill with young people again but they wouldn't be