A London neighborhood is transformed for a few minutes into a small Soviet Union, the last Ecumenical Council of 787 AD secures the narrator a visa for the US, Kafka’s Prague will have to wait, as during a nighttime stroll through the narrow streets of the old town, the Greek post-civil war state insidiously emerges, while in a playground, ironically, the author realizes that he cannot be ubiquitous, not even omniscient.

Memories, thoughts, and associations, sometimes triggered by images, lyrics, books, and music, form a parallel reality that intersects with actual reality. This shakes up the ideas of space and time, which, as Albert Einstein says, “are just ways of thinking, not conditions we live in.”

Oumbikicus‘ prose texts balance between narrative literature, essays, and autobiographical fiction. Thanks to the author’s oblique perspective and the distance provided by humor, the paradoxical, unexpected, or comical dimension of events is often brought to the fore, which, in any case, is rarely devoid of tragedy.

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Giorgos Tsaknias was born in Athens in 1968. He studied history at the Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he completed his postgraduate studies in the Department of History and Culture of Slavic Peoples. He works at the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive of MIET. He has translated literary books from English and Russian. He is also involved in photography and his works have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions.

Kichli Publications has released his book Stalin’s Pipe and Other (Anti)Soviet Anecdotes (2018). He has also written the Concise, Practical, and Useful (Anti)Terrorism Dictionary (Stigmi, 2002), as well as two children’s books: Once Upon a Time, One Foot… (Patakis, 2017) and A Squid Wants to Go to the Moon and Other Poetic Stories (Papadopoulos, 2024).

Pages: 192 • Technical Features: 13,7 x 20,7 cm. •  ISBN: 978-618-5976-01-9