• Nicias is not a historian, he is an eyewitness and a survivor, and while the book is written in the context of his personal experiences, knowledge and conjectures of the events of the time, Nicias's son Homero has enriched the narrative with plausible fictional episodes and reports by journalists and written testimony by men and women who lived through the Smyrna Catastrophe.
• Aridijs is a world-famous environmentalist, President of International PEN, former Mexican ambassador to UNESCO, Switzerland and the Netherlands--and son of a Greek immigrant to Mexico following the Greek-Turkish War of 1919-1922. The book is historical novel about the near genocide of the Greek and Armenian citizens of Smyrna (then a Greek port) by Turkish irregular troops. It's an event burned into the memory of all Greeks and Armenians. 2022 is the 100th anniversary of these events.