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My father used to say that people (and writers) are divided into two categories: people of the future and people of the past. The first are fascinated, captivated by what lies ahead, they plan it, expect it, putting their hopes in it, in the wonderful things that have not yet happened. The latter, the people of the past, are overwhelmingly attracted to everything old, ancient, of bygone times and are convinced that they will be able to understand what will happen only by recovering the past and explaining what has already happened. They are convinced that the miracles of the past are much more than what we know and feel, that it depends on us to find them. They see the present day and the coming day as a continuation and consequence of yesterday. Just as the people of the future are excited by the new and expect the coming day to provide solutions to today’s problems, the people of the past feel that the old days have already made available the solutions to us but we have not been observant enough to notice them. For them, new, is namely, the old which they have not recognized to this day. Their favourite pastime is to bury deep into the memories, both in their own and in other people’s memories, often to the detriment of reality and everyday life. This distinction is more or less true for writers too. There are writers of change and writers of nostalgia. "Only Homer wrote equally well in both categories", again in my father’s words.

What truths did you learn from your Plovdiv grandmother Theophano while you were growing up close to her in Thessaloniki? Can fairy tales sometimes be more real than reality?

My grandmother was a practical woman and abstract wisdom could not be heard from her. She spoke and acted using examples and allegorical stories, which were extremely specific, with a very pronounced anecdotal character, in order for her to hold the attention of the listener. In the majority of cases, she believed that experience is far preferable to admonition. She used to say, "Let the child (ie, me) burn her fingers or she will never learn to be afraid of fire and to have respect for it." When she was busy and did not want me to get in her way, she took an embroidery thread, twisted it as much as possible and gave it to me to disentangle it. Only then had I the right to speak again, after I dealt with the thread. To be brought to patience, as she said. So, I grabbed the thread and I was occupied with this activity for hours, not uttering a word. In the end, what we played was a game of wisdom. In the same sense, just as the thread was the symbol of life's complexity and intricacies that can only be untangled with patience, fairy tales are a form of "condensed" truth and wisdom. As the thread of my grandmother, something seemingly simple and routine, represents life itself, the story, something also simple and easy to digest, is a collective wisdom, mellow and sure of itself. The most important things are said in the simplest words.

In the conversation with the Plovdiv audience, you compared the memory of older people and that of the younger, technologically distracted generations, examining the memory-image-words connection and the fragmented personality of today's youth. What does the comparison between the older generation (that of oral memory) and the modern young generation of electronic information make you think?

I have always had the feeling that the people of the old days remember more than the young do, because their memory is trained. In the past there were not so many ways to store memories as today, for example, there were no photographs (or they were a rare thing in itself which turned them into memory: when they were taken and on what occasion, how the persons in them found themselves in the particular place). In more ancient times, many could not read and write. So, people carefully preserved everything in their mind, they could not "unload" their memory, arranging it on a sheet of paper, in a drawer or in an album. By the way, let us not forget that, before being written down in the 6th century BC by order of Peisistratos, the Homeric epics were an oral poetic tale and were recited by heart by the rhapsodes. And they were not short poems....

This kind of memory of the old people may be chronologically inaccurate but it reflects the experience of generations and past centuries, sometimes in quite surprising details. For example, my grandmother on my father's side said her family, who were masons, had moved from Epirus to Edirne to "build the grand mosque", ie the great Selimiye Mosque, masterpiece of the architect Sinan commissioned by the prematurely deceased Sultan Selim II not in Istanbul but in his favourite city Edirne, the first Ottoman capital. When I told her that this was not possible because that mosque was built between 1569 and 1575, and it was impossible for her to remember this with such confidence, she stuck to her guns. Who knows, maybe I am wrong....