This book claims the strictest historical truth, but not historical completeness. It is not a scientific composition. Written by a man who had the fortune to breathe the tragic air of the front, it disdainfully rejects any profane imagination, any indiscreet mixture of the fictional. The campaign of 1940-41 is rich enough in content on its own to need no embellishment. However, this campaign, which everyone calls the "Epic," has this paradox: it is an unknown epic. I mean unknown in its warm aspects, in its human essence. An unexpected psychological and historical phenomenon, a creation of an unrepeatable moment, it was overshadowed by subsequent events, the abundance of experiences: the Occupation, the Resistance, the December Movement, the early post-war years, the awakening of a new world, the world of the nuclear age, came to overshadow the moment of Albania. This chapter of Greek History, one of the most significant, was closed, sealed, and placed in the Archive before it was monumentalized. Not that there are no Histories of the Greco-Italian war: there are, and notable ones. But what is missing is a book without pretensions, accessible to the average reader, the one unskilled in military and diplomatic matters, and that can be read easily. I don't know if I managed to provide it. I must say that I wanted to do so before the generation of fighters leaves life and thus irreparably loses the essence of the people who made History. Because History is always composed of two elements that time separates, a series of events and an aroma of the era. The first, the events, can be restored even after centuries. The second cannot. It is lost, it flies away with the moment. Even those who felt it - as much as anyone feels the present - even they lose their sense of it when taken by the wind of Time.

Angelos Terzakis