Buried Dreams, Vivid Memories

In 1972, the first bulldozers rolled into the small Mornos valley near Lidoriki, in the heart of Central Greece, marking the beginning of construction on the Mornos artificial lake—an infrastructure project of vital importance to supply water to Athens, where nearly half the country’s population had gathered.

The local residents, whose families had lived there for generations, were forced to abandon their ancestral land in haste and seek new places to rebuild their lives. The harshness of life in the valley did little to soften the pain of such a sudden and permanent uprooting—an exile with no hope of return.

The waters drowned thousands of acres of land, but they could not wash away the memories and lived experiences—intangible and enduring imprints of human presence on this land.

The eighteen short stories in this book are a tribute to a world that the lake may have erased from the map, but not from memory.