Crossroads

(Η Μεγάλη Πλατεία)

THESSALONIKI: the crossroads between East and West … And in the turbulent, trouble-torn 20th century the city in which four lives cross, directly or indirectly …

Nikos Bakolas tells how ordinary men and women struggled to survive during a period of Greek history - roughly from the 1930s to the late 1940s - marked by oppression and violence and political polarities: the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas, the German Occupation, the Civil War. Against this background Fotis, jack-of-all-trades and adventurer, Christos, struggling journalist, Yannis, ambiguous scion of a well-to-do family, and Angela, orphan refugee from Asia Minor, -as well as Fotis’s son and Christos’s three children - grow to maturity and taste both sweetness and pain.

Interspersed between the chapters of this 20th century story is an imaginative and impressionistic recreation of a period of turbulence that occurred in Thessaloniki 6000 years earlier - the Zealots’ uprising of the 1340s. Characters, events and a bittersweet love story in the Middle Ages closely parallel those of the more recent past.

Finally, to complete this complex interweaving of history and fiction, the footnotes provide a third dimension: fact, in the form of personal memories.

Crossroads describes a time of cruelty, suffering and violence, yet with its compassionate tone the novel is a quiet celebration of the courage and endurance of the human spirit.

Ttanslated by Caroline Harbouri, July 1997