In the Gilbert and Sullivan parade of heroes and goats the heroes of the revolution are succeeded by the lackeys for all denomination, including the monarchy (an absurdity in the country so small barely emerging from the fiefdom of the Ottomans), with the occasional man of sense and rigor emerging on the scene, a Trikoupis, a Venizelos, a Metaxas—who inevitably lose power or die just when the country needs them most.

It’s a melancholy tale of a small, impoverished country trying to live up to a glorious legacy it can hardly support—and undergoing upheavals not once every generation but once every election cycle and still endure without vanishing into the sinkhole of history.

And yet Greece has endured, and Greeks have more than endured: there is practically no corner of the globe that Greeks have not populated and where they have prospered. That’s the bittersweet legacy of modern Greece: that her most celebrated sons and daughters have flourished abroad, though Greece itself, for such a small country, has had its share of notoriety and luminaries.

I am visiting Greece this summer after a very long absence. I’m taking my family and showing my two daughters where I came from, as Greeks have done throughout the ages, and I’m sure nothing of the places where I lived will be the same.

The farm where I grew up with my grandparents on the island of Chios has long fallen into ruin. It was sold to our neighbors and the house where I lived might have been bulldozed by now. The green door with the lion’s head knocker and the black key deposited over the ledge and everybody knew about (talk about security), my grandmother’s yiasemi by the shutters of her bedroom (which scented our nights), her taratsa lined with the square olive oil cans which she used to plant her flowers, the well on the taratsa where we drew the water to wash down the flagstones every afternoon and water the flowers every evening, the room where I slept with the bone-hard bed and the oak cabinet with the two cannon shells my father had brought back from the war and my grandmother used to hold decorative sprigs of wheat, her kitchen with the inevitable fly strip hanging from the ceiling and the stone sink with the brick of lard soap that never lathered and the windowsill where the cats perched to beg for pickings and once stole my grandfather’s biftekia right off the table—they may be nothing but a memory now.

And if they’re still standing will anything else be the same? Will crumbling walls and dusty rooms, will derelict stables and empty apothikes seething with dust, bring back the life I once knew, without the people I knew that gave it color and life?

The old cliché may be eternally true—you can’t go home again—but the other old cliché might also apply—home is where the heart is—and if your heart remembers those days they will live on a little longer, at least in your memories.

Dimitri C. Michalakis