Το Ξύλινο Τείχος

Publisher: Patakis Publications
Edition: 8th (1st, 2006, Kedros)
Available in: Paperback, e-book
ISBN: 9789601675671

Link to Patakis Publications Interview with Eleni Gkikas, Fileleutheros newspaper

The novel animates the epic of the ancient world through the eyes of a child from Lemnos, Alkamenis, who was taken slave by Persians. He managed to go to Sparta and know that unique city. There he became the witness of the greatest military conflicts in human history. As helot, as moribund and as observer he is becoming the mythic axis for all the cruelty and the charm of a world one might call up-to-date. The Wooden Wall is, above all, the human adventure, the human being. The epic of man’s struggles, but also, his conception about life and fate, about Hades, about the soul. And only the decision of those “few” to oppose the hubris of Persian imperialism gives the measure of that era. With a vivid and perceptive language, with the events running in their archetypal ritual, the novel animates that time. It annuls the millenniums, becomes an adventure of today’s human being on the same earth. A novel which searches, in the depths of the soul, the collective memory and the lost self-knowledge.

I tried to portray the human side, to find the daily ritual of the ancient world so that events unfold in a time that is abolished but also magically present, in a time that is still alive. I believe that "The Wooden Wall" is a contemporary novel. Not so much because it presents that distant age, but because it contains, prophetically, everything that glorifies or plagues the modern world. Although a historical novel, I feel that I wrote it as if I were initiated. And every initiated wandering is at the same time an elevation of the soul to itself, to the multiplicity of its self-knowledge.

It was not easy to dive in time and find the ritual of the ancient world, this irresistible charm applied by a different perception of life, a different philosophy, which is the result of unique intellect. Intellect.Today I say that it was the intelligence of those people that fascinated me the most and made it alluring for me to dive into this different perception, to find the power it concealed, and yet, with my own initiated and insightful writing, to find the lost memory of blood, or else, to retrieve those elements that make up a collective archetypal memory on the place itself, on the same earth, and with the great Ephesian's word as navigator: "That which neither we see nor seize we carry with us".
The Memory of Blood. It was the first title I had considered.
And now as I read the book, I feel the same way. We exist in the tides of a time unproven by experience, of a time abolished and together alive and unseen, shining within us, carrying, through invisible paths, that distant archetypical memory that belongs to us.