The great journey of Chateaubriand (1768-1848) to the East begins on July 13, 1806, in Paris and concludes on June 5, 1807, with his return to the same city.

For this edition, we have chosen the excerpt that concerns Chateaubriand's journey to Greece up to Constantinople. This piece, aside from being directly relevant to us as it provides the impressions of a great writer on Ottoman-occupied Greece, is also the most famous.

The exploration of the sites of ancient Greece, the search for and description of ancient ruins, impressions of contemporary Greeks, and deep criticism of Ottoman despotism were subjects particularly attractive to educated readers in the West.

The reader of the Travelogue should not expect pity or compassion for the still suffering Greek people. That people, in any case, will find its identity by conversing with the ruins and will shed its blood for it.

Chateaubriand is an honest observer. He records only what his eyes see, guided by the gaze of curiosity, the gaze of the mind that Euripides spoke of. "Ruins everywhere and not a single person within these ruins!" he writes in Sparta.

And later in Athens: "I thought I saw antiquities everywhere." And these ruins reflect the dawn that a few years after his visit will become the dawn of modern Greece. Modern Greece was born from the ruins of its antiquity, and Chateaubriand describes its birth long before History welcomes it into its maternity ward.

From the preface by Takis Theodoropoulos