The Empire Awaits the Barbarians: A New Perspective

When Nikos Kazantzakis traveled to Alexandria as a newspaper correspondent in 1927, a most interesting part of his travel was the visit he paid to C. P.Cavafy at his house. The encounter of the two major Greek writers was narrated by Kazantzakis in a travel article on Cavafy. This travel text interacts mainly with Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" and provides the space for a new approach to Cavafy's text. Introducing the themes of the nomad/barbarian and the empire, later found in the perspective of the theories of nomadology and glo calization, Kazantzakis's travelogue reterritorializes Cavafy's poetry and its scholarship, and provides a new space for the generic identities of texts.