BALKANI Publishing

Balkan Library

"Seven Times the Ring", Ismini Kapandai

The seven independent stories of Seven Times the Ring are related to real episodes from Greek history. The preservation of the Greeks’ strong sense of self is the recurring issue explored in the book through the author’s skillful treatment of the story. She unfolds it, mixing facts and characters with legends, oracles and rumors stored in the collective memory, revealing the singular effect these have had, along with Christian faith, in shaping people’s cultural awareness and their understanding of their collective identity. The author has transformed her notes on history into powerful fiction. Kapandai’s explorations into how complicated issues such as race, class and religion shaped the Greek world of that period are arresting. Her secret is that she endows her characters with her own exceptional gifts of language. In Greece the book had several editions within the first year of its publication, and several more since then.

In Seven Times the Ring, our own understanding grows as the stories progress and so does our grasp of what it was in the centuries of the Ottoman rule that drove people to fight for freedom, for a place of their own, for a country, against overwhelming odds at such high price. The tangible symbol of all this is a very old carved ring of no material value which happens to be worn each time by the fictional hero of each story. Preceding and future events in this story, full in background information about characters, are introduced by flashbacks and flashforwards and sustain the reader’s interest unabated. Language, images and tone of voice respect both the time of each story and ours and offer a remarkably believable perception of the world they depict. For the Bulgarian readership there is one more reason the book will be of great interest – it refers to the common for both countries period of history – the Ottoman rule and the struggle for their liberation.