During the period of the Civil War, Makronisos is inhabited by raw violence, terror, and despair. However, at Zero Abyss Street, there are not only "executioners" and victims; in this society of madness also belongs the uncompromising ideologue, the petty fraudster, the marginalized one who becomes the torturer, but also the faux intellectual who "revives" and passionately recites poetry to his old comrades...

“The horror of Makronisos cannot fit in books. It can only be read in the eyes of its madmen. Only the ears of Lavrio managed at first to catch some scraps of the voices... At first, because later they too cracked and could hear nothing anymore. And so only the dogs remained – with their prophetic instinct – to scatter from the heaps of charcoal their howls, like black oracles emerging from the guts of the primordial beast.”

Here is the house of Menelaus. Not Abyss Street, number Zero. Human Street, number 1. There’s no need to knock. The door is open. You can enter. With the lantern of my heart lit, I illuminate your door, Menelaus. I found you. Come in, brothers. This house accommodates us all. Here lives a man who burns from the sun of his heart and illuminates. Giannis Ritsos, April 1955 Excerpt from a poem dedicated to Menelaos Lountemis, newspaper Avgi, 22/5/1955.