"Solitude is not an absence. It is a form of fullness. Almost no one understands this. They call it emptiness, oblivion, cold, collapse, even pathology. And it is simply a language, the most ancient of all. Spoken by sages, eccentrics, exiles, writers and women who go out in the morning with a book under their arm instead of a companion." Sofia Proneikos, "Caryatid - The Vital Threads of The Soul"

Tonight, I am once again leafing through Pliny the Elder's Natural History, and I have come to the conclusion that if this man had access to the internet, humanity would probably need a special institution to fact-check his information, with working hours incompatible with labour legislation. Thirty-seven books, containing geography, medicine, precious stones, painting, animals, and so many extraordinary accounts that the modern reader must periodically remind themselves that they are holding a Roman encyclopaedia, not the correspondence of a particularly enthusiastic traveller. In Book VI, for example, Pliny recounts the story of the Carthaginian navigator Hanno, who reached islands off the African coast inhabited, according to his account, by extraordinarily hairy creatures. The males escaped, but two females were captured, and their skins were subsequently displayed in the temple of Juno in Carthage, where, according to Pliny, they remained until the destruction of the city. Hanno's own account calls these mysterious creatures “Gorillai”. And here history displays its magnificent sense of humour: in 1847, the American researchers Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman adopted the ancient name when scientifically describing the gorilla. Thus, a modern animal acquired its name thanks to a Carthaginian navigator, his interpreters, a Roman encyclopaedist, and almost two millennia of historical misunderstanding. Moreover, it is by no means certain that Hanno encountered actual gorillas. But evidently, for a name to survive successfully, its original application does not necessarily have to have been zoologically impeccable. In Book VIII, Pliny reports that elephants display religious reverence towards the Sun and the Moon, and that at the new moon they perform something resembling a ritual purification in water. I must admit that the idea of elephants practising religious ceremonies appeals to me considerably more than some actual human rituals, although my only observation is that Pliny left no information as to whether theological disagreements had arisen among them. But what is most wonderful about him is the confidence with which observation, someone else's account, mythological tradition, and pure conjecture sometimes appear on neighbouring pages, without disturbing the magnificent ambition to describe the whole of nature. And yet I must admit that I have profound respect for this man. To assemble such an enormous quantity of information in the first century, without search engines, photography, or electronic libraries, required exceptional curiosity, discipline, and a remarkable willingness to accept that the world was continually preparing something even more extraordinary than the last thing one had read about. And the story of the gorillas is enough to convince me that scientific nomenclature sometimes possesses a sense of humour, although nobody has included it among its mandatory requirements. After all, gorillas are probably the only participants in this entire story who have absolutely no idea how complicated the literary and historical procedure involved in acquiring their own name has been. Good night

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you." Harold Bloom Calm evening

Thinking Zone. Tuesday afternoon in my little Black Sea village, the sea is quiet in that particular way which does not signify an absence of movement, but merely well-mannered restraint, my coffee is beside me, and I am reading about Victor Hugo, reflecting on how rarely a writer chooses to complete not merely a book, but an entire moral continent, in a place where history has already decided the fate of an imperial ambition. I find it magnificent that Hugo completed Les Misérables near Waterloo. Not in his study, not in some comfortable library silence, but on the battlefield where the first Napoleon was finally defeated, while Hugo himself was living in exile, driven out of France after Napoleon's nephew seized power. History sometimes arranges facts with such literary sophistication that one almost begins to suspect it of artistic intentions. Much of the novel was written on the island of Guernsey, but in 1861 Hugo travelled to Waterloo and remained there for two months in order to incorporate the battle into his book. This seems particularly important to me, because it reveals something essential about him: he was not a writer who would have been content to use history as a backdrop. He needed the place, the terrain, the air, the very geography of defeat, so that his novel might absorb not only the event itself, but also its weight. Even more wonderful is the precision with which he recorded the moment of completion: 30 June 1861, half past eight in the morning. This is a gesture I particularly appreciate, because it contains discipline, vanity, and an awareness of the significance of what has been accomplished, and great writers usually possess all three, although readers prefer to attribute only inspiration to them. The following spring, the novel went on sale in Brussels, Paris, London, and other European cities on the same day, as though its very publication had been organised as a literary campaign on a scale worthy of a work that already knew it would not remain merely a book. And indeed, Les Misérables is not merely a novel. It is a work in which Hugo does something far more uncomfortable for any self-satisfied society: he compels it to look at those whom it prefers to describe as inferior, fallen, failures, or dangerous in such a way that it can no longer spare itself the moral discomfort. Perhaps this is precisely why I like the thought that this book was completed near Waterloo. Because the defeat there does not belong to Napoleon alone. In a broader sense, this is also one of the places where Europe could have seen how dearly greatness costs when it seeks to impose itself upon human life. And Hugo, who always had a sense of scale, transforms this historical memory into part of a novel about the poor, prisoners, the humiliated, the persecuted, and the morally misguided. There is something exceptionally beautiful in the fact that one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century was completed not amidst triumph, but amidst the memory of catastrophe. The sea before me remains calm, but history, like literature, is rarely calm. And perhaps that is precisely why one returns to Hugo: because in his work even defeat is not a final point, but the beginning of the more difficult question of what remains of the human being after the clamour of power. And that, it seems to me, is always a question worthy of a Tuesday afternoon.

"I see you have books under your arm, brother. It is indeed a rare pleasure these days to come across somebody that still reads, brother." Anthony Burgess, "A Clockwork Orange"

The Latin expression ‘laudator temporis acti’ a quotation from the Roman poet Horace is used of someone who considers the past a better time than the present.

That I sit and think of Odysseas Elytis not as a literary figure but as a kind of atmospheric condition, something that enters the bloodstream rather than the intellect, feels less like reading and more like surrender to a force that has already decided language must burn to be sufficient. He was born on 2.11 , as poets often are, between two worlds that refused to remain separate: a father of matter and structure, and a mother of inner luminosity. In that narrow space between discipline and light emerged a voice that would later insist reality is incomplete and subject to revision. "I said, I will remove the darkness." For Elytis, darkness is not absence but distortion, something to be corrected through perception, by reshaping the visible world until it aligns with inner necessity. His Greece is not geography but a field of light so absolute it becomes ethical. "The sun is not a star. It is a judge." Everything in his work is exposed and stripped, including himself. What is often mistaken for beauty is, in fact, discipline. His life remained grounded in history, marked by the Greco-Italian War, where reality confronts the body without regard for poetry. From this friction his voice returns, not softened but clarified. "If you dismantle Greece… you can rebuild it." This is not nostalgia but structural faith, that beneath collapse remains a minimal architecture of meaning. The women in his life remain presences, not narratives, distances that illuminate rather than objects to possess. "Wherever I go, Greece wounds me." Yet he never abandons it. This wound is not injury but condition, a reminder that belonging exacts a cost. Even the Nobel Prize does not displace him, because no recognition rivals the authority of that inner light. "Beauty is not an adornment. It is a necessity." Beauty is not added but revealed, what remains after everything unnecessary is removed. Elytis understood that immortality is not duration but intensity. "The truth is in the light." And the light is never gentle. It demands that we see, and not turn away.

Thinking Zone. Tuesday morning, I am drinking my coffee and rereading Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, and this morning my attention has been drawn to a sentence in which the writer has managed to capture more psychological insight than some authors achieve in entire chapters devoted to emotional experiences. “On the following morning, in the small, tidy room with furniture covered in light-coloured floral chintz, Tony awoke with that exhilarating and joyful feeling with which we open our eyes amid new circumstances in life.” Tony Buddenbrook is in Travemünde, staying with the Schwarzkopf family, and Mann, who knows perfectly well her family pride, her vanity, and her ability to turn every personal experience into an event of definite social significance, leaves her alone for a moment in a modestly furnished room, where the entire imposing history of the Buddenbrook family is of no particular use to her. I find it amusing that Tony, who so carefully distinguishes between people according to their social standing, experiences her most pleasant awakening among furniture whose principal distinction is its light-coloured floral chintz, rather than any impressive demonstration of wealth and prestige. Even more amusing is the fact that Morten Schwarzkopf awaits her there, a student whose political convictions would probably cause considerable bewilderment in the Buddenbrook family drawing room. Tony, of course, has no intention of reconsidering the social order, but that does not prevent her from discovering that the company of someone who questions it can be far more interesting than conversations with those who regard it as natural and definitive. Mann is particularly good at such contradictions because he never needs to resolve them on behalf of his characters. Tony can be simultaneously convinced of her own family's superiority and entirely sincere in her attraction to someone whose social position does not correspond to its expectations. And what is most interesting is that Mann does not need some grand scene to introduce us to this contradiction. A single morning is enough. As I read, I recall how much irony there is in Tony's fate, for throughout the novel she makes such an effort to prove herself worthy of the Buddenbrook name, yet she often seems most spontaneously alive precisely when, for a brief moment, she forgets the obligations that come with it. And perhaps that is why I like this sentence so much: Mann did not write that Tony was happy because she had finally found her place in the world. He wrote that she had awakened amid new circumstances in life. And with Thomas Mann, such a formulation is enough to make us suspect that the Buddenbrook family will soon have reasons for concern. ☕️📖🪻 Good morning

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one is listening, we must constantly go back and say it all over again." André Gide See you soon ☕️📖🙏

"Literature is the defense against the offenses of life." Cesare Pavese

Thinking Zone. Monday morning in my little Black Sea village, my Greek coffee is growing cold beside me because Seneca the Elder has kept me occupied with a man who would probably regard notebooks, files and all our digital memory aids with mild bewilderment. Porcius Latro. A Spaniard, a celebrated Roman declaimer of the Augustan age and one of Seneca the Elder’s closest friends from youth, Latro belongs to that category of people whose ancient biographies sound almost implausible until we remember how highly memory was valued in a world where words often had to exist first, and most securely, inside the human mind. Seneca tells us that Latro’s memory was not merely naturally exceptional but disciplined by method to such a degree that he remembered every speech he had ever delivered and had made written notebooks almost unnecessary. Of him Seneca preserves one wonderful phrase: aiebat se in animo scribere. He used to say that he “wrote in his mind.” And this is where Latro becomes more interesting than any man with a merely phenomenal memory, because he does not seem to have used his mind as a warehouse into which finished words were simply thrown. He organised it. He trained himself in parts: one day writing only concluding sententiae, another only enthymemes, separately collecting thoughts on fate, wealth, cruelty, time, ideas that could later be carried from one speech into another, and he called this reserve supellex, “household equipment,” the furniture of the orator. His mind literally had furniture. Seneca claims something even better: one could name a historical commander and Latro would immediately recount his deeds; whatever once entered his mind remained available. This is no longer mechanical memory, but a state in which knowledge is so well arranged that it can be summoned at the exact moment it is needed. And despite this almost monstrous memory, Latro does not emerge as a cold machine for quotations. Seneca remembers him with the warmth of a man who had lost a friend from youth and writes about him decades later with unusual intimacy, repeatedly calling him “my Latro.” Seneca himself was famous for an extraordinary memory, which creates a beautiful ancient symmetry: a man with a prodigious memory used his own to save from oblivion another man famous precisely for forgetting almost nothing. And perhaps that is why I like the phrase “I write in my mind” so much. We usually think of memory as the place where we store the past, but in Latro it is a workshop where thought is built before it is spoken. Not an archive, but the place where the text first becomes a text. ☕️📖🪻 Good morning

There is a kind of magic in reading before sleep like casting a spell on your dreams. Good night

This evening, while leafing through my old German edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, edited by Kurt Batt, my attention was drawn to a title on page 348: “A Courteous Message from the Earth to the Moon.” And since Lichtenberg is one of those rare minds capable of turning politeness into a particularly sophisticated form of intellectual provocation, the title alone made me wonder how extraordinary human history would appear if, just once, we had to present it to a being that knew nothing of our titles, borders, national grandeur, or claims to historical exceptionalism. I imagine the Earth as a correspondent beginning its letter with all the necessary diplomatic courtesies, assuring the Moon of its unwavering respect, and gradually proceeding to an account of the achievements of its own inhabitants. We have created great philosophical systems, learned to measure the distances to celestial bodies, and written impressive treatises on reason, justice, and natural rights, yet we continue to experience remarkable difficulties in putting our own conclusions into practice. We would probably also have to explain to the Moon why creatures who are justifiably proud of having established the laws of celestial mechanics so often behave as though relations between human beings were subject to no rational laws whatsoever. Lichtenberg, who was not only a satirist but also an experimental physicist, belongs to that particular tradition of the Enlightenment for which observation is more valuable than a self-assured conclusion, and doubt is not a deficiency of the intellect but a necessary condition of its integrity. This is precisely why the imaginary conversation between the Earth and the Moon seems so appropriate to his way of thinking: it is enough to change the position of the observer to discover that an enormous part of what we call greatness rests upon an agreement to regard it from the most favourable possible angle. From the Moon, neither court ceremonies, nor academic titles, nor the historical speeches with which humanity likes to immortalise its own importance can be distinguished. Even our most celebrated statesmen would be impossible to identify without a list of their names and achievements being sent in advance, and if we insisted on explaining the causes of our numerous wars, we would probably have to enclose such extensive historical documentation that the recipient would have every right to terminate the correspondence. But the most delicate question would arise if the Moon wished to know why humanity is so convinced of its own rationality. We could send our libraries as evidence, after which we would inevitably have to explain why the possession of knowledge has not prevented so many generations from repeating the mistakes described with astonishing accuracy by their predecessors. At this point, I can already imagine Lichtenberg with his characteristic ironic restraint, for he would hardly have overlooked the most amusing aspect of the whole undertaking: the Earth writes to the Moon to recount human greatness, yet every successive sentence inadvertently becomes evidence of human self-importance. And yet I would not want the Moon to respond to us with contempt. That would be an excessively human reaction, and not a particularly original one for a celestial addressee. I would be far more interested in an entirely courteous reply in which the Moon expresses its gratitude for the extensive account, acknowledges the impressive achievements of terrestrial civilisation, and delicately observes that, from its distance, humanity appears considerably more united than humanity itself is evidently inclined to believe. And I would leave the final sentence very short: “Dear Earth, we have received your letter. There is no need to send us evidence that you are the centre of the Universe. Our observations do not confirm this circumstance.” Calm evening

“God be thanked for books." James Baldwin

One of the best pleasures in life is to read a book in total silence.

Thinking Zone. Sunday afternoon in my little Black Sea village, the sea is calm, and I am drinking my Greek coffee while reflecting that the history of philosophy would be considerably poorer in entertainment if philosophers possessed even a fraction of the composure they so insistently recommend to everyone else. Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provide a splendid example of how difficult it can be to apply one's philosophy to the unpleasant discovery that the world does not share one's opinion. Schopenhauer did not hate Hegel merely because they were rivals. He believed that Hegel had turned philosophy into a theatre of obscure language and that the university had rewarded precisely this accomplishment. In Schopenhauer's eyes, Hegel was not searching for truth but for authority, acquired through an imposing system of concepts whose meaning seemed to retreat whenever anyone tried to examine it. History occasionally displays a refined sense of humour by placing two philosophers in the same university and watching as one begins to suspect that the other is the greatest intellectual catastrophe since the invention of empty verbosity. Schopenhauer could never forgive Hegel for persuading almost all of Germany that philosophy ought to become increasingly incomprehensible in order to appear increasingly profound, which struck him as roughly equivalent to claiming that a clock becomes more accurate when nobody can read the time. Thus, when he began teaching in Berlin in 1820, he decided to test not Hegel but the students, scheduling his lectures at the same hours as his rival's, convinced that, presented with truth and error, reasonable people would recognise the difference. Almost everyone entered Hegel's lecture hall. If we are searching for the moment when philosophical pessimism ceased to be a theory and became a personal experience, a more suitable university timetable would be difficult to devise. The exquisite detail is that Schopenhauer had already published The World as Will and Representation, describing human existence as subject to a blind, insatiable will that continually generates desire, rivalry and dissatisfaction. Yet he expected students to demonstrate rational independence from prestige and intellectual fashion precisely when choosing between his lectures and those of Berlin's most celebrated philosophy professor. There is an almost laboratory purity to the experiment: a philosopher who explains the limited power of reason over the human will tests whether reason can defeat academic fashion, then takes personal offence when his own theory receives such convincing practical confirmation. Posterity would treat Schopenhauer more generously than the students of 1820. His influence would extend to Nietzsche, Wagner, Thomas Mann and many others, while his quarrel with Hegel would outlive them both. Yet this changes nothing about the wonderfully human detail that a person can possess an extraordinary intellect, be justified in some criticisms and still select the least promising possible means of demonstrating his superiority. As the afternoon passes beside the Black Sea, I imagine those two Berlin lecture halls, one crowded, the other nearly empty, and consider how differently freedom of thought appears when exercised by actual students, who are under no obligation to fulfil their lecturer's philosophical expectations. What amuses me most is that Schopenhauer could simply have chosen another hour, gathered an audience and developed his arguments in peace. Instead, he turned the university timetable into a remarkable experiment upon his own vanity. Hegel, meanwhile, simply continued teaching, which was probably the most unbearable part of the affair for his opponent.

Who was John III Sobieski? On 12 September 1683, when Vienna was besieged by the Ottoman army of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, it was John III Sobieski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, who took command of the allied forces that defeated the besiegers. Polish troops, together with Imperial and German contingents, carried out a military operation whose consequences altered the balance of power in Central Europe. He was an elected monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an educated man familiar with several languages, European political culture, and the complex relations between the courts of his time. He understood perfectly well that military victory was only part of the equation of statecraft, while alliances, interests, and treaties often determined who would benefit from what had been achieved on the battlefield. And here history displays its customary irony. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth bore a considerable military and financial burden in participating in the relief of Vienna, but in the following years it did not receive political benefits commensurate with its role in that victory. The Habsburg monarchy strengthened its position in the region, while Sobieski himself continued to confront internal contradictions, parliamentary obstruction, and difficulties in implementing his own strategic intentions. Today, the EU operates within an entirely different legal and political reality, founded upon treaties, institutions, and the principle of cooperation between sovereign states. Historical analogies with the seventeenth century therefore have their clear limitations. But questions concerning the distribution of responsibilities, the security of the continent, the contributions of individual states, and the relationship between the common interest and national priorities have not disappeared from European diplomacy. It is particularly important to remember that in 1683 there was neither a European Union nor a unified European political identity in the modern sense. There were dynastic rivalries, religious confrontations, shifting alliances, and states whose interests did not always coincide, even when they faced a common adversary. Sobieski was not an architect of today's Europe, and there is no need to attribute to him intentions belonging to our own century. It is enough to acknowledge his historically established role and to understand how complex the relationships between military necessity, diplomacy, and political gratitude already were at that time. There is also a detail that deserves particular attention: in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the king was elected, while political power was constrained by institutions and by the privileges of the szlachta, the nobility. The same political order that made Sobieski's rise possible also created serious obstacles to his government. The man capable of commanding allied armies before Vienna could not always secure the necessary agreement in his own parliament. This contradiction is far more interesting than the conventional heroic portrait. When we discuss European security, solidarity, and strategic autonomy today, the name of John III Sobieski reminds us of an old and very specific difficulty in international relations: successful cooperation in a moment of danger does not automatically eliminate the differences in interests that emerge afterwards. European history deserves to be understood in all its complexity, rather than merely through those events that fit conveniently into contemporary political speeches. And if the name of John III Sobieski does not mean enough to part of the European public today, this offers an interesting reason to reflect on how selective our shared historical memory can be. After all, the man crossed a considerable part of Central Europe with an army to take part in a decisive battle for Vienna. The very least we can do, three hundred and forty-three years later, is not confuse him with vodka.

Thinking Zone. Sunday morning in my little Black Sea village, the sea is calm beneath the pale November light, and I am drinking my Greek coffee while thinking about a Byzantine princess who knew human vanity well enough to understand that sometimes the entire distance between two civilisations can be contained in a single chair, especially when that chair happens to be the imperial throne in Constantinople. Anna Komnene, daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, left history the Alexiad, a work in which she recounts her father's reign and the events surrounding the First Crusade, viewed through the political interests, culture, and refined ceremonial conventions of Byzantium. When the Western crusaders arrived in Constantinople in 1096–1097, Anna was only thirteen years old, and she wrote her history decades later, which means that not every incident she describes can be regarded as her direct eyewitness testimony. But this makes her accounts no less interesting, particularly when she begins describing the behaviour of the Frankish knights at the imperial court. In Book X of the Alexiad, she recounts a scene that I find magnificent. After the Western nobles have sworn their oaths before Alexios, one of the Frankish counts, evidently unfamiliar with or unwilling to observe Byzantine protocol, simply sits down on the imperial throne. Imagine the setting: a court in which every movement, position, and form of address belongs to a complex hierarchy that has existed and been refined over centuries, and a Western knight who decides that, after such a long journey, it is perfectly natural to rest precisely where nobody else has the right to sit. Alexios remains silent. Another crusader, Baldwin, approaches the count and explains that this place belongs exclusively to the emperor and that guests must respect the customs of the country in which they find themselves. But instead of apologising,the knight begins grumbling in his own language, indignant that so many brave warriors are standing while one man alone enjoys the privilege of sitting. The emperor asks for a translation, listens,and raises no objection. It is precisely this silence that amuses me most, because Anna manages to construct an entire political and psychological portrait from one offended remark,one unauthorised gesture, and an emperor who evidently sees no need to explain the organisation of Byzantine statehood to his guest. But the Alexiad is much more than a collection of such courtly anecdotes. Anna regards the Western warriors from the perspective of an educated Constantinopolitan aristocrat, for whom the Greek literary tradition,Roman statehood, and imperial ceremonial belong to a single cultural world,while the arriving Franks are simultaneously necessary allies, dangerous political partners, and sometimes astonishingly unpredictable guests. She does not conceal her distrust of them, just as she does not conceal her devotion to her father.Her history is not an impartial record of the Crusades,but a remarkable testimony to the way Byzantium understood its own place among peoples who did not always share its conceptions of order, legitimacy,and civilisation. And as my morning coffee grows cold beside the Black Sea, I find myself thinking that the most exquisite detail in this story is not the audacity of the Frankish knight,but the fact that he probably never suspected who would recount his visit to posterity.For him,the throne was a place to sit; for Alexios, a matter of imperial dignity;and for Anna, an opportunity to demonstrate with what extraordinary ease a person can enter a foreign civilisation without noticing a single one of its rules. Nine centuries later,the identity of this count remains uncertain,while his bad manners continue to live on in the Greek prose of a princess who understood perfectly well that history is written not only by those who occupy thrones,but also by those who observe who sits upon them without being invited. ☕️📖🪻 Good morning

Black is a matter of taste, the serious expression is accidental, and behind the camera, as usual, there is far more irony than the photograph would lead one to suspect. Good night

Today is International Black Sea Day, and to mark the occasion, my fellow villagers and I spent the entire afternoon cleaning the seashore. It turns out that humanity possesses inexhaustible ingenuity when it comes to producing objects which, after use, it prefers to entrust to nature, evidently convinced that nature has an unlimited workforce available for their disposal. A little-known detail is that International Black Sea Day is observed on 31 October because of the Strategic Action Plan for its protection, signed in Istanbul in 1996, when the six Black Sea countries agreed that the sea required joint efforts. There is also something almost unbelievable about the Black Sea itself: its deep waters are devoid of free oxygen and contain hydrogen sulphide, making ordinary marine life impossible below a certain depth. Nature has created an extraordinary chemical system, which humanity persistently attempts to supplement with plastic bottles, packaging, and all manner of other evidence of its own technological development. And so today, our little village celebrated international cooperation in the most immediate way possible: with gloves, rubbish bags, and a considerable amount of entirely justified indignation. But the real adventure began on my way home. Because today is also Halloween, the eve of All Saints' Day, and if we return to ancient Rome, we discover that relations between the living and the dead had long been the subject of serious ritual organisation. During Lemuria, celebrated in May, the Romans drove away restless spirits by throwing black beans over their shoulders nine times without looking back. They also had Feralia in February, when they honoured the dead. These were not direct historical predecessors of Halloween, but they demonstrate that humanity has long experienced administrative difficulties with the afterlife. And there I was, walking home, when I encountered three witches, four skeletons, two ghosts, and Death herself. We passed one another suspiciously. I examined them, they examined me, and I was particularly disturbed by Death, who appeared exceptionally well informed about local addresses. “Trick or treat?” they asked. I explained that I had four bags of rubbish collected from the seashore and twenty euros in my pocket, and that they were free to choose between environmental education and immediate financial satisfaction. After brief negotiations, conducted considerably more efficiently than certain international conferences, the delegation chose the twenty euros. In return, the three witches promised not to turn me into a frog, the skeletons guaranteed that they would not rattle their bones beneath my windows, the ghosts undertook not to appear in my library, and Death, after some deliberation, graciously agreed to postpone our professional relations indefinitely. I accepted the last promise with particular satisfaction, although I suspect it has very little contractual value. I also suggested, incidentally, that they participate in next year's beach clean-up. Three witches equipped with broomsticks represent considerable organisational potential, four skeletons would hardly complain of back pain, and the ghosts could collect rubbish from places inaccessible to the other volunteers. Death declined to make any commitment, citing her busy schedule. I arrived home twenty euros poorer, with four bags of rubbish behind me and in an unusually good mood, because after an entire afternoon devoted to protecting the Black Sea, I had also managed to negotiate a temporary truce with the afterlife. The only thing that troubles me is that if the Romans managed to drive away spirits with nine black beans, I have evidently paid a considerable premium. But what can one do? Two millennia of inflation, and besides, Death is hardly likely to entertain objections to her pricing policy. :) 🎃 Calm evening

Thinking Zone. Saturday afternoon in my little Black Sea village, the sea is calm, and I am drinking my Greek coffee while thinking about a Frenchman who, in the eighteenth century, set out in search of the dead voices of ancient Greece, only to find himself confronted with the far more inconvenient discovery that some of them were still speaking, and in a language that European scholars had not always deigned to regard as a worthy successor to Homer. Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison was one of those extraordinary Hellenists for whom a Greek manuscript represented an almost physical temptation. In 1784, he departed for the Ottoman Empire with the support of Louis XVI, intending to search for unknown works of antiquity in Greek monasteries, particularly those on Mount Athos. Imagine the ambition: a man undertakes a journey across half of Europe, convinced that somewhere among monastic libraries a lost Sophocles, an unknown Aristotle, or at least a parchment sufficiently ancient to justify the entire enterprise might be awaiting him. The result was considerably less satisfying to his bibliographical imagination. The monasteries did not provide him with the treasures he sought, and Villoison gradually turned his attention towards living Greece itself, towards its dialects, customs, inscriptions, and people. And here begins the story that I find incomparably more interesting than yet another discovery of an old manuscript. Villoison recorded approximately 160 words from the Tsakonian dialect, spoken in the eastern Peloponnese and connected with the ancient Doric linguistic tradition. For a classical philologist accustomed to studying Greek through the writings of the dead, this represented a remarkable shift in scholarly perspective: the linguistic past no longer lay exclusively upon parchment, but was present in the mouths of people who were under no obligation whatsoever to speak as Athenian authors had spoken in the fifth century BC. I am particularly amused by the thought of a French scholar who set out to reconstruct the language of antiquity, only to have to acknowledge that the history of Greek had not ended with the final line of some classical text. During the same journey, Villoison copied numerous Greek inscriptions. In the modern scholarly edition of his travel notes, 110 such testimonies have been identified, some of which are known today precisely because of his copies. A stone may disappear, an inscription may be destroyed, a building may be reconstructed, but the meticulous Frenchman has already secured the letters in his notebook. His greatest ambition, however, remained unrealised: he wished to compile a kind of encyclopaedia of ancient and modern Greece, in which classical texts would exist alongside the language and lives of his contemporaries. Instead of a completed work, he left numerous notes, letters, and materials, some of which received a scholarly edition only in the twenty-first century. There is a magnificent irony in this man's fate. In 1788, he published the famous scholia from the Venetian manuscript of the Iliad, Venetus A, and contributed to a reconsideration of the Homeric textual tradition, while his other great encounter with the Greek world, that with its living voices, remained largely confined to his own archives. And I, beside the Black Sea, find myself thinking about the strange privilege of the philologist: to pursue the lost words of people who lived two thousand years ago, and sometimes to discover something no less remarkable in the speech of a person who is simply answering him. Villoison set out for Greece to find books that nobody read any longer, and returned with evidence of a language that people were still speaking. Louis XVI could hardly have expected precisely this outcome from his investment in classical philology, but for the history of the Greek language, it proved far more interesting than yet another solemn tribute to antiquity.