Return to Smyrna 1 – Our Sea

SMYRNA. THE CLOSE OF THE 19th CENTURY.

The odyssey of two families across time. Turks and Greeks on a path of unanswered questions and fateful revelations.

ATHENS. THE CLOSE OF THE 20th CENTURY.

A journalist and his brother seek the truth about their origins in the turbulent years of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Catastrophe of 1922: the secret of the life and disappearance of their grandfather, the physician Platon Pileidis.

As the story slowly unfolds, it draws historical figures into its action — Eleftherios Venizelos and Dimitrios Gounaris, King George and King Constantine, Ioannis Metaxas and Pavlos Melas, Ion Dragoumis and Manolis Kalomiris.

The tangled skein of memory unwinds, in a kind of deliverance, revealing truths and myths, hatreds and passions, political feuds and intrigues — the troubled past of two peoples.

A novelistic epic, the first part of the trilogy RETURN TO SMYRNA.