On his 1972 off-road adventure, the young Swiss painter Christian Brechneff discovered the remote Greek island of Sifnos, a gleaming white stone on the blue Aegean, 15 hours from Athens on a rusty ferry. With beautifully evocative prose, The Greek House recounts Brechneff’s discovery of an island where goats outnumbered people, cars were old and few, the wine and food delicious and cheap and the hospitality incomparable. As an artist, he found the sunlight a powerful source of inspiration, and as a gay man, the atmosphere relatively tolerant. Brechneff made his home on Sifnos as he built a career in New York. However, with time came tourism, consumerism, economic refugees and the Internet, turning his narrative into a mediation on aging and change and places lost forever.
