For this reason, I must admit, I was offended when I heard the slanderous, stupid whisper behind my back that, they say, my mother and father were Bulgarians, that they spoke Bulgarian. The accusation was hurled by some moral hypocrites and whiners from my village. Some rags who remembered they were Greeks only when they saw the flash of economic salvation in emigration, while until then they crawled on all fours, bastards, at the Bulgarian doorsteps, ready to jump and do any vile bidding for the first scrap thrown to them by the foreign master. The same ones fought to the last moment as slaves in the Bulgarian armies and came here to relearn Greek, with compensations. They, since pride and disdain did not allow us to shame them with their history, found an opportunity at the first corner of the road, in the first secluded alley, instigated by lowly enemies, to whisper obscenities about us.

A boy about ten years old, tied to the mast of a large fishing boat so as not to be taken by the waves, confronts the Black Sea. This story I heard again and again from my father, about how great-grandfather Nikolis "made a man" of my grandfather Stavros. […]
Years later, my father Asteris gave me a faded and half-torn, thick, blue envelope, which contained a letter from my grandfather with the family history, the story of Nikolis. […]
Reaching today, in an era where people are again searching for self-identification and where issues of national identity are once again at the forefront, I felt that this letter, recording a not very well-known Hellenism – that of Eastern Rumelia – and responding to the claims of national purity with a free, brave, and restless spirit, can offer a small stone for thought. To transcend our "small" family history and thus perhaps find its modern recipients.

[From the preface by St. Ast. Stangos]

The letter of Stavros Stangos is an existential and historical-anthropological essay on the agonizing question of what it means to be Greek. He wonders if his father was "Slavo-Bulgarian or Greek," anguishing over his origins. He answers this question of certification with a vivid narrative that rejects racial purity. [...]
His reflection on Greekness has structured arguments and notable intellectual depth. He views the history and anthropology of Greekness through his genealogical lens, without neglecting its broader Balkan context. [...]
His letter is a confession of the soul that poses the question of what it meant to be Greek then.
[From the introduction by Sp. G. Ploumidis]