ANTON BERABER
big idea
transl.: Alexandra Kostarakova
ed.. Polis, page 597

A real but fabulous figure, a real person who is at the same time a figment of the imagination.

A year before the speech of Ioannis Kolettis in the National Assembly on September 3, 1843, to whom the concept of the Great Idea is attributed, the poet Alexandros Soutsos, in his play entitled The Prime Minister, already proclaims in verse: “And if Genos had a great idea, / his dead members must be set in motion, / and he seeks his ancestral inheritance, / he would have to put up a bold resistance, / to stifle the pandemonium inside and outside his voice. ?”.

Nobody dared to resist. And the great idea was to set in motion the nation, which, serving a grandiose and difficult to interpret vision, eventually survived the Asia Minor Catastrophe. This great idea prompts the French writer Anton Beraber to create and follow a real, but at the same time fabulous figure, a real person who is at the same time a creation of the imagination, Saul Kalogiannis.

The researcher is preparing a thesis about this hero. She watches him survive August 1922, not retreating to war, but as a dishonored deserter. Take refuge with your comrades on an island and then wander the world, ageless, stateless, persecuted, living on the outskirts, worker, immigrant, universal man.

Saul Kalogiannis is gradually becoming a legendary figure. He is accompanied by many stories, as much evidence as the researcher collects, contradictory and contradictory, many people know him and no one really knows him, he has a mother, wife, friends, associates, everyone can give their testimony, their knowledge, their experience of relations with this person and yet the outrageous stories lead to the only real question: Did Saul Kalogiannis exist?

For the writer, this is just an excuse. His explorer like Saul will wander and suffer, live hunted and imprisoned, go to the mountains with the rebels and feel what it means to think, explore, expose, to harass the junta that always treats him in what he considers threatening violation: deprivation of his freedom, rights, will, intellect. The big idea in Beraber’s narrative eludes what it historically means to the Greeks. Intense wandering, searching for truth, finding an identity, giving meaning to life.

Explorer, real hero and narrator of the play

Kalogiannis is a hero, a leader, a point of reference for others, special in every way. He submits to his silence, he imposes himself with an indomitable mind, for his own soul there is nothing unbearable, impossible, elusive. A being that reality cannot meet, that moves towards the limits of fantasy, towards the miraculous, towards the unreal extreme.

He is one who is made for the worst and the best, a figure of silence and a gaze that is destined to create and destroy, he is determined to the last moment to claim any life that was given to him, indomitable, mythical. Saul Kalogiannis’ great idea is his timeless versatility.

The researcher, the real hero of the book and the storyteller, has been struggling with his dissertation for twenty years. He tries to gather clues that will shed light on the identity of Saul by collecting material from any available source that he can find, he listens to evidence that cannot be compared, he suffers, he faints but does not give up, he continues to investigate, he insists, he gets acquainted with worlds that exist tragically, but also products of the imagination through outrageous and unheard of stories, each interlocutor creates another Saul, each time new, different, different. For the researcher, the big idea is the indisputable search for the truth of the face.

There are no boundaries in this story, time is endless and fluid, space without obligations and restrictions.

The Beraber is taking us along in search of Kalogiannis. We are in Europe and America, citizens of the old and new worlds, we live everywhere, we participate in the war with Spain and go with him to Moscow, and suddenly New York promises us everything, gives us broken images of poverty, poverty, alienation. . Each of us can pursue our big idea, pursue a goal, take responsibility, enjoy joy, share experiences and dead ends, achieve despair and rebirth, as long as we think and organize life, nothing seems impossible, everything is possible.

At some point, the explorer will meet someone who calls himself Kalogiannis. It seems that a cleansing is coming, that this will be the moment when any truth will be revealed, when the darkness will finally dissolve into light.

But no. And this meeting will leave doubts, doubts, a big question mark. Saul’s mother’s revelation that he died, that she buried him and is now satisfied to know that her son died for a great idea, a fact so foreign to the son she knew, will leave the same confusion. And for his wife, Saul Kalogiannis is dead, she is the last witness that the explorer meets, an old woman who shows him to leave, not from where he came to find her, but from another road, in a side ditch, maybe he will learn the truth about Kalogiannis .

Beraber writes a huge adventure, in volume, in thoughts, in descriptions, in meaning. He weaves together truth and lies, myth and reality, tragic facts, comic ideologies, and leaves us with a decisive question. This silent man with black eyes, world hero, universal Greek, idealist and traitor, can he exist among so many contradictions and remain authentic, preserve and save memory, consciousness, affirmation in History?