The psychological landscape of the place

Thanasis Alevras | Eleftherotypia | 22 March 2013 The night-time train journey at the start of Dimitris Nollas’s ‘Journey through Greece’, published by Ikaros, is from the outset the most accurate depiction, the most faithful representation of the journey, or rather the almost motionless journey, through the time of Greece, a journey that compels you constantly to think about it, that is, to think about yourself, in a ceaseless shift through deserted night-time stations and empty platforms, a journey through your own mental landscape, this opening ‘idea’ of Greece, as Elytis might say, which is, however, more historically, emotionally and spiritually charged and in direct contact with the soul of the place, a soul brimming with domestic and foreign migratory currents, the overgrown railway tracks, the carriages with their pale lights, at the hour when ‘the moon, low on the horizon and before it began to set, spread a luminous, fairy-tale veil and cast a silvery glow over creation in its darkest hour’, it is precisely this most intimate, mysterious moment that finds its absolute centre in the present-day psychological landscape of the place, so far removed from the lyrical fishing boats, the olive groves and the Aegean sunsets, which remain, as if misunderstood by such naivety, on glossy postcards and alongside exorbitantly priced, plastic fruit salads5 of a crude commercial exploitation of this ‘idea’, the Acropolis Express, precisely that, set off once more on the same journey, ‘writing and rewriting the same thing’, and the first thing one says, halfway through the journey, and what one has probably never ceased to ask, over and over again, in one’s life, ‘where are we?”, already carries the body of history as luggage and transports it into a contemplative constellation of personal stories, fragments in the vortex of a larger shared history that has seen itself anew in the same light and continues to carry the collective suitcase further, sweeping everyone and everything along in a rather uncertain and astonishing gamble of self-knowledge, in a country endowed with boundless light, light that is probably not that of the sun of justice, but that Cavafian light, that unknown which—who knows what new tyrannies it will reveal—is another zone of twilight into which we have entered to find ourselves and understand what has happened to us, a zone all too lucid, like a radiant Attic morning, where ‘everything around them shone with light, confirming the suspicion that they were heading towards the realm of madness, since darkness cannot transform into light so quickly, so hastily, without this having an effect on people’s souls’.