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 been only a few days since his father's death and Crete counts 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 moves to post-war England to save him.

The personal cost of his choice is enormous.
But this is the duty, this is the ascent that we all must climb.

The Ascent, the unpublished novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, is a classic work that poses questions that constantly haunt humanity, not just a very significant literary moment for our country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

"I don't care about death," he thought, "I care about decay, it humiliates man. This is what I must defeat..." The city of his childhood and youth had aged, it was crumbling too, starting to turn to dust and scatter in the wind. Another city could be built over it but it wouldn't be his, the streets would fill with young people again but it wouldn't be his youth... "Beloved Castle," he murmured, looking at it tenderly, "we have grown old..."