A real city, in the worst winter of its life.
The Bread of the Stranger lives in a handful of real places — a courtyard, a basilica, a square, a harbour, a road out. Here they are in order, the way the story moves through them. Every one sits on the map.
The courtyard & the blue door
Two families, Greek and Jewish, four steps apart across the same paving stones, behind doors painted the same tired blue. Where the whole story begins — and what it is, in the end, about.
Áno Póli — the Upper Town
The steep old quarter above the city, its lanes running down toward the sea. Home ground: the baker's step, the soup line, the window above the courtyard.
Ágios Dimítrios
The great basilica of the city's patron saint, and Father Grigórios's parish. The saint keeps his place in the silver while the city goes hungry.
Plateía Eleftherías — Liberty Square
The square by the water where the city gathers — and where order, and the asking, arrive wearing a reasonable face.
The harbour & the Jewish quarter
The working port where Daoút carried sacks, below the old Sephardic lower town — the heart of a community that had made Salonica “the Mother of Israel.”
The White Tower
The city's landmark on the gulf, old even then — the fixed point on the shore that outlasts everyone who looks at it.
The railway station
The western edge of the map — the railhead, and the Baron Hirsch quarter beside it. The story knows what stands there, and looks at it the way the city did: sidelong, and too late.
The Jewish cemetery
On the eastern edge: one of the largest Jewish burial grounds in Europe, centuries old, broken up in 1942–43 — a loss inside the larger loss.
The Thermaic Gulf
The blue, indifferent sea in front of the starving city — “full of fish no one was allowed to catch.”
The road west to Véroia
One small road running off the western edge, up toward the mountains: the family's road out — and the way the next generation walks toward the sea, and eventually toward Australia.
The Corridor — Pakenham, and the patch Hannah walks
With the booksThe trilogy's places — the commuter corridor out of Melbourne, the hospital ward, the comfortable church, the unit Hannah and Josh share, and the quiet places a refused life has to be lived — will open up here, location by location, as the books are published.
The story this world was built for.
The Bread of the Stranger is a complete short story and the seed of everything here — free, and yours to keep. The readers' list is where the rest of the world arrives first.
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