By Zina Lysandrou
Philologist
Travel is inherent in human psychosynthesis. The adventure, the search, the acquaintance of new places and the contact with strangers, even their conquest, accompany him from the dawn of his historical course. All of us, or almost all of us, carry within us an Odysseus gene that "many people see as funny and lawless".
One such traveler, "meraklou", is our good friend Kika Olympiou who for some decades has been co-organizing, we can say, the excursions of the Association of Philologists every summer. However, he also travels every Easter with a smaller group of friends to a corner of Greece that characterizes it as the plot of God.
Reading the travelogues of Kika Olympiou, you are mentally transported with her to museums, squares, castles, towers, churches, monasteries, palaces, parks, restaurants, galleries, department stores, wonderful nature landscapes, you learn about history, culture, customs and the customs, the myths, the people, for all the strange things he sees;
She also likes to describe the food and wines, as in Poland, the meal in the salt mines of Vielicka. He presents us with sharpness not only what he saw and heard, but mainly what he felt, reminiscent of Costas Ouranis who writes in a prologue: "They express the movements of the soul and the imagination." It is a landscape of the soul, where it expresses its admiration, awe, surprise, quests, remakes and personal dreams. She also seems to like the various performances that take place in the streets and squares of European cities, something that we lack.
Through her writing, her various knowledge emerges in many fields, such as history, geography, music, literature, mainly, since she resorts to intertextual heteroreferences. Thus, she chooses with classics of travel literature, such as K. Ouranis and I. M. Panagiotopoulos, but she also resorts to verses of poets that match her descriptions or remind her of something, such as Seferis, Elytis, Karyotakis, K. Charalambidis, Vera Korfioti, Papatsonis.
In addition, he mentions writers such as Andersen in Copenhagen, the Norwegian writer Knud Hamsun with the nightmarish "Hunger", or the playwright and poet Eric Ibsen. Many names of musicians, such as the Norwegian Edvard Gregg, and painters who meet them walking around the various Art Galleries and Museums also parade. In Poland he will remind us of Chopin, Maria Curie, Lech Walesa.
Undoubtedly, reading the Travel Wanderings of Kika Olympiou, you enjoy and mentally transport yourself to places you met, you go back and your soul rejoices with what you experience again. But at the same time the longing to move and for places you did not see, for new adventures. Personally, I want to testify that every time I travel with my family, I have with me the booklets with the notes of Kika Olympiou for each country and I follow them in many places, because we follow our own program that satisfies both the son us.
Another point on which I would like to dwell is the reference to many points of the tragic fate of Cyprus, its history. Associatively, the author remembers and comments, compares, philosophizes, expresses wishes. At one point, when the guide speaks with great pride about a coffin-ship of the Viking queen in Oslo, the author observes: "I am thinking of one of our own, a Greek ship, which is twice the age of their own ships. How would the Norwegians really feel if they had found the Ship of Kyrenia in the 4th century BC? And yet we, I think, do not speak with such pride, we do not project our past as much as it should. "Maybe because our history goes so far back, maybe because we are surrounded by monuments much older than the Viking era, theaters and stadiums and statues, churches and icons, maybe that's why we do not pay so much attention."
The book takes us on a journey to two continents, Europe and America. From Scandinavia to Istanbul, Portugal, Poland and Moscow, we take off with a magic carpet in America, to land again in Germany and Slovakia. Our Greece is certainly not missing with the description of its experiences from Easter in Lesvos and Evros. Finally, like Seferis, she writes her own "Deck Diary", her travel impressions and thoughts from a two-week cruise in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
What characterizes Kika Olympiou's travel texts is the content, the philosophical reflection, the concise speech, the literary writing and the exploratory look. At the same time, it quotes facts about the weather, observations, comments, opinions of the guides, sometimes adorned with humor and sometimes with sarcasm. "We are accused of raining 365 days a year in Bergen, but that is a big lie. We only have 360 days of rain! "
It is worth mentioning the emotion he feels when he steps on the footsteps of people of the spirit, such as in the famous "Grand café" in Oslo where Ibsen frequented. "It was exactly twelve o'clock in the afternoon. "With so much precision that the students could stand outside and adjust their clocks."
Of course, travel never ends. I wish my good friend Kika Olympiou that God gives her health and strength to continue traveling and to give us her wonderful travel texts. After all, Kika Olympiou is indeed homo touristicus.
Zina Lysandrou