θάλαττα! θάλαττα!

I still vividly remember reading in my early teens in the 80's John Fowles' magical descriptions of the Greek landscape in "The Magus". Far in dismal north, in dismal circumstances such strange places were imagined. The merciless light, the stillness of the Greek air, the pagan, amoral brightness of the decidedly non-Nordic azure sea, the sense of the mad beauty of it all - the amazing power of literature (no film can ever be made, no place visited that would make justice to human imagination). Such contrasts in that burning, painful life, such places visited ("only" in imagination, it is rather incomprehensibly said). But not only a half-forgotten private memory: ever since I have had a real interest for antiquity, not Roman or Hellenistic, but for that brief, wild explosion of classical Greece. It is a central place, a central era for us, even now.