«One day, while leafing through the books, I came across one with small blue and terracotta designs, palm trees, meanders, balconies that adorned some curious poems. I had just entered high school then, and I felt a secret pleasure reading them, so much so that it became a habit for me to go down to the library and read these and not others when the house was empty. That's when I started copying the poems into a notebook. At first, I copied them faithfully, then I started making variations, and I thought these variations were my own writings.» That's how I started writing. A few years later, Mitsos gave me the book with Cavafy's poems, it was the first edition of 1935 with the designs of Takis Kalmouchos, and this is the only book that survived from the library; since 1974, when the Turkish army entered Famagusta, we never learned anything, neither about the house nor about the books, the only sure thing is that the area has not been inhabited, the veranda must surely be overgrown; and the books, if they are still there, must have been covered with a layer of sand». Niki Marangou