Everything must have started in 1907. On a winter afternoon in December, at the time when the gendarmes were escorting at bayonet point to the investigator a young troublemaker from the Law School named Georgios Papandreou. At that moment, Sophia, a student of Philology, was standing next to the statue of Rigas Feraios. "You seemed to me like a porcelain doll," he would write to her about that moment, three years later.
My Dearest Sophia is the mural of an era. Through the youthful letters of Georgios Papandreou to Sophia Mineiko, his later wife and mother of Andreas, which do not simply describe a love story, but the story of an era, thirteen riveting years at the beginning of our century are illuminated.

The love story of these twelve years, which emerges from the letters of the young and restless Georgios Papandreou, is certainly a fascinating story. Of course, the backdrop of the era helps as well. Rarely have two lovers had the fortune to live their personal myth on the front line of our political history. They tasted the great events along with great love.
"You others knew the politician. I knew the poet..."

Georgios Papandreou must surely have fallen in love other times in his life. But something tells me he never loved again in the way shown by these hundred or so letters. We never love in life as we do the first time—perhaps because we are never again the same as our first self. "That is the beauty of life," Grandma Sophia told me one winter afternoon in Kastri. "And perhaps that is its bitterness..." And it was as if she told her whole story in those two winter phrases...