In the coming year, it will already be 30 years since Angelos Sikelianos closed his great eyes and ascended to the heavens, from where he had descended to earth in 1884.

For such spiritual giants, the memory of death does not bring tears but awe to the soul and exaltation and enlightenment to the mind. With such feelings and as this tainted century leans towards its end, we stand on a ridge and once again behold Sikelianos, burdened with the experience of bitter days and the mortal agony of an era that shattered many certainties of the soul and plunged us into the humility of a human relativity of all things. We behold him as thrice-great and radiant, spiritually intact and poetically authoritative, blending and fusing within the breadth of his titanic inspiration and the tone of his poetic speech the entirety of Hellenism, from antiquity to modern times.

He is a poet of rare caliber, a mystic and hierophant. He brought poetic speech to prophetic lips, reached the Greek tradition at a time when it became relevant and viable again, and showed its eternal essence within the meagerness of a life, of our land, tormented by history.

In him, we find, in a unique blend, the robustness of speech and the nobility of character, the divine vision and the consciousness of national mission, the bard and the apostle, the Greek and the human, in their grandeur and unblemished beauty.

Angelos Sikelianos was and is a gigantic, unsurpassed figure of our spiritual life, a generous soul, and a deeply philanthropic heart.

"Responsibility," with this Notebook, wishes to elevate him as an exemplar, at the boundary of times, at the forefront of the New Greeks: an exemplar of high work and meaningful life sanctified by love for Greece and faith in the sanctity of poetic speech.

The laurels that cover him will remain unfading through the ages!

"Responsibility"