I took my first trip to Greece in 1947 and my last in the fall of 1966. My final image: an Aegean island, treeless, with a single village; a landscape stripped bare, with misery and beauty intertwined like two slopes of the same hill. Misery and beauty. The union of opposites, as Heraclitus's phrase suggests, that the Cycladic landscapes continue to recite within their light: "Harmony of the world, palintropic." If the image of this lost island remains so vivid within me, it is perhaps because it was the last. However, looking from the distance of time, I realize to what extent memories are intertwined in my mind like in a mysterious game. Because perhaps some of them, seemingly anonymous, persist insistently as if they wanted to emphasize a message whose meaning I still cannot grasp;

Contrary to myths, Greek history, literature, and philosophy offered me only a series of deceptive images, conventional but incredibly persistent, since for many, they still mean Greece. They were images of a land of ruins, columns, collapsed facades, and tombs gutted on the forest grass. Human beings often adorned these ruins, but they had the stillness of marble; dressed in white robes, they looked at the sea or the sky, in sacred poses, as if time, history, and duration in Greece were simply a long-lasting, motionless contemplation.

Precisely, then, the essence of what I learned on my first trip is that Greece still existed. Indeed, there were ruins here and there (difficult and often impossible to approach), but above all, there was a place still called Greece and inhabited by Greeks. And these Greeks, in 1947, were trapped within the political whirlpool, in the heart of the civil war. In Athens, the smell of war was not very strong—peace had already been imposed—but it was enough to leave the city, mainly...