North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family's Extraordinary Past

Eleni N. Gage

Abr 2006 · Ibinebenta ng St. Martin's Press

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Leaving behind a sparkling social life and a successful journalism career, Eleni Gage moved from New York City to the remote Greek village of Lia. Lia is the same village where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, and which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous twenty years ago with his international bestseller Eleni.

Her four aunts (the diminutive but formidable thitsas) warned Eleni that she'd get killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves if she moved to Lia, invoking the curse her grandmother placed on any of her descendants who returned to Greece. But Eleni was determined to rebuild the ruins of her grandparents' house and to come to terms with her family's tragic history. Along the way, she learned to dodge bad omens and to battle the scorpions on her pillow and the shadows in her heart. She also came to understand that Greece and its memories were not only dark and death-filled, and that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present.

Part travel memoir and part family saga, North of Ithaka is, above all, a journey home.

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ELENI N. GAGE is the child of a Greek-born father and an American mother, and has traveled between those two cultures her whole life. When she was almost three, her family moved to Athens, Greece. After five years there, they settled in Massachusetts, where Eleni lived until she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Folklore and Mythology, specializing in Modern Greek Folklore.

Now a freelance writer and the beauty editor of People magazine, Eleni has had articles appear in InStyle, Travel+Leisure, Elle, The New York Times, Parade, Real Simple, American Scholar, and many other publications. She divides her time between a tiny high-rise apartment in New York City and a tiny mountaintop house in the village of Lia, Greece.