The roads in Ammochostos descend towards the sea and show the East. In 1918 - the beginning of our story - the orchards with the sour trees and the fields with the wheat surrounded the infamous Famagusta, as the Venetian maps describe it.
In the streets of Vienna, the doors of the cafes and taverns open and close, warmth and smoke emerge, students and musicians enter. Innsbruck quietly freezes its nights under the snow-covered Tyrolean mountains. The clocks in the shop windows of Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich measure the time of the planet. War strikes Central Europe and institutions are being built in Athens that will be demolished in its passage.
In 1944, Limassol holds life in its hands, well-mannered merchants and British colonizers set the tone of cosmopolitanism there. In Alexandria, land, rivers, palm trees, spells, the blue line of the sea horizon, and the body of the Macedonian king beneath every clump of soil. At night, the sea always plays with the wooden piles that support the "Aktaios", again in Limassol, and above it, the samba, the foxtrot, the moonlight are in full swing.
The narrative of Niki Maragou is a unique depiction of this era. It starts from the narrations and notes of her father, complements them with research and imagination, and composes a book about the turbulent decades of the Interwar period, which ultimately constitutes a historical source.
A young man from Ammochostos studies to become a doctor-surgeon at the prestigious Medical School of Vienna. He has no resources, he is a foreigner, but he adapts and excels in his studies, in science, in love. A typical Greek case. Along with the events of his life, we witness how he grew up with the worm that ate at the heart of the apple - Austria and Germany - called fascism, also known as Nazism. Driven away by the dark cloud of war, the doctor eventually takes root in the southern sandy beach of Cyprus, finds a match in a woman, and discovers that "absolute openness," whoever possesses it, "can carry it everywhere."
Emotion is not horror, Niki Maragou seems to say as she narrates fluently, with the ancient art of rhapsody, a story with many storms and a happy ending.