The word "Greece" conjures up a myriad of associations, and with this volume Günther Komnick takes us on a voyage through the centuries, harmonising the ancient and the contemporary. Images of the Greece we have come to know as "the cradle of Western civilization" live in harmony with the impressions of the people going about their daily lives, their day-to-day rituals.
    Komnick, as he has done in his other photographic explorations, shows us the life that gives context to the monuments of the past. In this case the past is indeed glorious, with so much of what we take for granted having had its origins in the architecture, philosophy and myths of Ancient Greece. Somehow the wisdom of the past seems almost legible on the faces of the men and women captured by his lens, young and old, a continuum  that has asserted itself and survived for millennia. One senses the reassuring function of the presence of the past in the faces and gestures of the characters depicted here. At the crossroads of empires and indeed different worlds, nestled at the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula, the history of Greece is laden and shaped by its history with its neighbours across the sea, from Persia and Asia Minor, Egypt and Europe, where in Southern Italy Greek culture flourished and was adopted in many of its aspects by the Romans.
    A pre-Christian Greece, in all its austere dignity is overlaid with the manifestations of earliest forms of Christianity, as can be seen by the churches and monasteries which also feature prominently in this visual homage to an ancient land. Ways of life seem unchanged and grudgingly allow space for the modern, with its dubious trappings.Greece's relationship with the sea is also acknowledged, wittingly, as the sea played host to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the all-embracing world of Greek mythology.
Greece and its island worlds are endless in their allure and fascination, which Komnick has lovingly embraced in all their enchantment.