THE ASCENT

This is the first edition of a classical author’s newly discovered masterpiece. As in any time of social and humanitarian crisis, Nikos Kazantzakis's uncompromising, insightful pen awakens, inspires, comforts and validates the feelings and sensitivities of the few Warriors of Peace and healers of our world.

Written in the tragic aftermath of World War II and the holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is a heartbreaking post-war story, written by Nikos Kazantzakis in a small room in Cambridge in 1946. Alarmed about the future of our world, he had travelled to England in search of a platform from where he would appeal to the intellectuals of the entire world. He would show them the wounds of war and would call for the establishment of an international organization for peace. He was worried that humans do not learn much from History, that wars would continue to devastate and ravage our world, and that the innocent and helpless would continue to suffer and pay the price.

He was mocked, persecuted, and worse, ignored.

Today, once again being trapped in the hellish fires of another destructive war, and in countless humanitarian crises across the world,  Nikos Kazantzakis’s post war masterpiece is miraculously found in a drawer at the Kazantzakis Museum in Crete, more relevant than ever; as it turns out, Humans don’t learn anything from History at all.

This book was masterfully translated in English by Panos Dimakis, and is being published in the Anglophone world for the very first time.

“The forces of evil have been mobilized. Let us also call upon the forces of Good. Let us call to alert what humanity still survives in and around us. Let us fight with all our strength for peace and brotherhood of man.

This is why the responsibility of man today is immense; he now knows that every action he takes may bear an impact on the human fate; he knows that humans, all humans, white, black, are One. If at the edge of the world, one man is hungry, we are to blame; we cannot be free even if one man at the edge of the world remains a slave”. Nikos Kazantzakis’s acceptance speech, Peace Price of 1956 in Vienna.