Nine short stories with tales of ordinary people.

Days and events emerge from the decades of the twentieth century, where they were classified based on wars and disasters, and become stories of people with flesh and blood: the share of everyday life in historical time.

In the strict protocol of methodical research required by historical science, the anarchic arrogance of everyday events, which literature adores, is juxtaposed. The raw material is the recorded memory on yellowed newspaper pages, the black and white imprint on photographic paper, the narratives of people who lived to tell.

Stories inspired by events that took place in western Thessaloniki from 1914 to the present day, with newspaper publications as primary sources. A century with two world wars, two dictatorships, and a civil war, with relentless repression of internal enemies and all kinds of social and racial violence, with swindlers and thugs, workers and peddlers, with love and friendship nonetheless, with sacrifice and dedication to a person, an idea, an illusion...

The first literary book in Thessaloniki that breathes and has the blood of the city's western neighborhoods, highlighting events and characters from the very first day that the refugees from Eastern Thrace settled there in 1914, until the internal migrants of the 1960s and the transformation of the streams into plots of land and hope.

The author was not born near 1916, and in 1965 he was still in the village, a seven-year-old child. His personal memories penetrate the last story of the book. But he feels all the stories engraved on his skin. Like the vaccine on his left arm. Then he started to remember too. Those other stories. Bloodless, so to speak.