Gefyraki

During the brutal years of the German Occupation and the Fratricide, the Civil War, a schoolboy from Primary School, grows up in a poor neighborhood of Thessaloniki, "lost" between the Jewish neighborhood of Hirs and the "Gypsies": the tin shacks. A stream divides and a wooden bridge strives to unite the neighborhoods and bring people together: the Jews and the Christians of the slum and the Gypsies. These are the years when the world opens up in front of the child and presents its harshest face. Bombings, killings, deaths from hunger and starvation and in the middle of it all the tragic annihilation of the Jewish neighborhood. These are the years that are here called "Years of the Apocalypse". The School and the playground in Alana, next to the little bridge, are a little out of the way. The search for consolation in the Church and the Catechetics lead to the acquaintance with an elderly Agiorite sage and to the first contact with the terrible Book of the Revelation of John. And the little student reflects on how much of what the world "reveals" to him, are similar to what the Agiorite sage brings up from the Apocalypse in his sermon. The military "Diary" of a fratricide fighter, a notebook of "Ichnography and Calligraphy" from the fifth grade of Primary School and a Synaxari of the hermit Monk's meditation, are what helped "to stir up the accumulated childhood memories and images from significant times" that they have been engraved in the memory of the now mature narrator and they depict for us the hard years of the Great War. However, they also ask us questions about the extent to which that barbaric slaughter of human beings acted over time on the increasingly lonely path of modern Man and if "the road leading to Armageddon was then the only open one".