Editor: Katerina Tsitoura
Philologist

Nikos Kazantzakis once said that it’s only when you dare face fear that it will leave you alone. I wonder if we sell-out our own lives, dreading for what has already happened, if we become extras in a modern ancient-Greek tragedy where the aggressors are testing the hero’s costume and the ex-machina God refuses to save a soulless audience.

They invaded – as the story goes – in your house and snatched all your furniture except your rickety bed. Yet you don’t react, your voice is being screened by the blanket of dependence. You clutch from your last asset because people around you end up homeless on the streets of ultimate conspiracy, so you are accounted to be one of the lucky ones, with a roof above the head of your miserable existence.

You don’t understand that a gun, slowly and excruciatingly, is pointing at your dignity, you don’t understand that time is running in reverse, that the day is forthcoming that the bed will vanish from the house of despair and the keys will be ceased by an foreigner.

You keep on arguing at social media on which politician is memorizing more convincingly the lines of this modern farce and advise your surroundings to only care for their families as – yes we’re all human- in times of disaster we transform to wild beasts concerned only for the survival of their own herd.

At certain moments, regrets shadow the conscience, yet again, the wise are advising you, they whisper that it is in vain to struggle to save the whole world, that your opinions are identified as especially revolutionary and not at all likeable from your ideologically conservative boss.

Come on now, do you really want to loose your little job? Wear the mask of hypocrisy and pet using the hand of terror those that offer you a lump of bread, even if the bread is poisoned and its medicine is luting the integrity of the soul. Please, don’t stop standing up against those ungrateful taxi-drivers who’re on strike because they’re hungry, or the corrupt pharmacists that deny to willingly accept absurd measures and all those professional groups that threaten momentarily the illusion of this unsavoury sanctuary.

Until a night comes where, clutched at the bed of individualism, you listen to heavy footsteps threatening the particulars of your paper-castle. You cry for help but no one redeems you from your bitter destiny, as a prison has taken over your country and the hostages, chained to the whispers – never converted to yells – are led to an execution once mistaken for salvation.