He sat down with a dour face. “Ah, Shqipëria!” he said dropping his head. “Albania will never become Albania with Albanians in it!” He glanced at Jude. “Don’t ask.

A chipped concrete bunker shaped like an infantryman’s helmet was tilted insolently on a mound at the track’s edge.

We can’t all be Byronic adventurers like you Jude. Have you been wrestling with any brigands in the mountains there?” “No, but you’ve got to watch the drivers! Funny you should mention the poetic lord. He used to take his holidays down here, you know?” “What… picking up last-minute bargains with ‘EasyFrigate’?

You’re trying to help them… that’s a good thing. But you can’t always count on seeing their gratitude,” he said wanting to comfort her before he added a grain of salt. “You know what Tolstoy said… if you are unhappy with your life, you can change it in two ways… either improve the conditions you live in or improve your inner spiritual state. The first isn’t always possible but the second is… In the end, Alex, people need to go directly to the source of Grace for themselves.

You have a powerful story, Mehmed. It’s a great witness, and the writer, Edona, did a fine job of telling it. Sales are doing OK, in a modest way, but I wish it was doing better. With many things we do in faith, we don’t get to see the fruit with our own eyes. There may be much more out there that we don’t know about.

Without God, the universe is an empty space, and emptiness is the most terrible feeling you can have." – Ernesto.

I was just thinking about Byron,’ said Jude. ‘He went to Greece, you know, Athens, during his gap years. A young man doing the grand tour; loved ancient Greece and all it stood for; put it all down in a poetic travelogue, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage … yeah. There’s a bit about Albania in it too.’ Jude covered his mouth and coughed lightly. ‘“Morn dawns and with it stern Albania’s hills … birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear … and gathering storms around, convulse the closing year.

Out past the pimple of Lycabettus Hill the concrete apartment blocks in shades of beige, grey and white glinted in the morning sunlight, as if shards of broken glass had been strewn in among them.

Jude leant on the hotel balcony railing looking down over the rooftops of central Athens. Below him was a dense plantation of TV aerials, and a building with air-con units slung on the side like finger holds up a climbing wall.

As they climbed towards Delphi, the cypress trees lined the road like javelin heads, and when they passed its sanctuary of Apollo, a place pagans once thought of as the navel of the world, the light was beginning to fade with the sun…