Archaeology, my love...come and take me away from here

*Public Book Award 2023: Category "Greek Non-fiction"*

The book by Theodoros Papakostas (aka Archaeostoryteller) is a roller coaster journey from one end of antiquity to the other. The seventy-nine stories spread across the five chapters of the book are a fascinating interplay of emotions and images. Each chapter is a step towards acceptance, because what we experience to accept our individual past may also be the key to our collective past. Through Archaeostoryteller's narratives about famous and completely unknown people, we realize that, no matter how unknown we are to each other, we are connected by human experience.

And this can happen in a taxi too. Five people, different from each other, discuss and travel together on a journey from one end of the city to the other and simultaneously across the length and breadth of the ancient world. Stories of mythology, slavery and superstition, sculpture, painting, theater and entertainment, stories about poetry, philosophy and, most importantly of all, love.

Did Pericles have a favorite contractor? Was there a "Spartacus" shortly before Spartacus? Was there a "Homer" long before Homer? When did Minoan women start walking around topless in Knossos? How did Hercules experience body shaming? Did ancient Athens have haunted houses? Did Ghostbuster have one? (Spoiler alert: it did.) An illicit love affair in Sparta, a donkey sommelier in Halkidiki, and a flaming arrow that was thrown into the Aegean, tore through the darkness and saved lives.

The ancient world unfolds like a kaleidoscope, revealing to us what we are always looking for by digging in the soil: ourselves.