A City and a Home.

When history meets with her major actors, that is, its events that constantly tend to reshape its flow, sets aside, the tiny neglected personal stories. It would hence, not be stopped neither by the pain nor the suffering of which constantly narrates. However, it would be, for those human stories and their rarely mentioned trials in which the truth of real life lies.

Since the dawn of time, from history to poetry, often, if not always we have constantly been trying to identify ‘’home’’. Poets writing about it, travelers reminisce it, tales as old as time, painting various pictures varying from one another, all around the globe. Where would ‘’home’’ be though? Could home be a meaning that has been altered during the ages? Could it be the warmth that never seizes to exist, the fire that would never stop burning? It seems that despite of wars, travels and calamities home will always be one’s root to comfort, memories and safety and mankind will always be in the search for it. It’s a natural instinct for men to always seek for it, especially if they would be rendered without one. Locals will always praise the one they have. Migrants and refugees would travel in search for one, a replacement of their past, one that was a source of memories, history, and life. A roof will never seize to exist above one’s head. The fire should always burn, filling the space with warmth, the light summer breeze should always enter from the open door at the homecoming of a beloved one. A home, a place to gather, a place filled with voices, various generations in one space, past, present and future all at once. Many have lost it, some managed to find it and many will be in a constant search for one.

Marco Polo, a Venetian trader that ended up chained in the depths of Asia, managed to portrait examples of a city and the sentiments that framed it in such a way that Kublai Khan granted him a seat in his court and his esteemed council. ‘‘A city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.” Polo said.

The history of the city, is just a mere reflection of her love was written by Necati Cumali, a Turkish poet, who was made into a refugee, part of the population exchange in 1922. The city then, would be able to proceed, only if memories of its love are relieved through our memories.

‘‘ From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real city is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. However, what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all future cities are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.’’

Marco Polo

Article and artwork Created by Vasileios Sempsis