A nice book this about the mother city. It consists of pieces written by Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis. Most modern of Greek writers, most distinctly Greek, Pentzikis assembles his pieces so that, beginning in alienation, with the recalcitrance and transience of things, the casual cruelties of space and time, they reach out, through the luminous Orthodox immanences of the past, the reverberations of historical memory, towards an inclusive density of present experience. And the wonder lies, the beauty, in the way that we sense, looming in the endlessly modulating density of style, the Orthodox presence of the city.