Greece
Lefkada Greece: The Soil of Hearn’s Soul
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born June 27, 1850, on the Greek Adriatic island of Lefkada, son of an Irish army officer and a Kytherian Greek woman, Rosa Cassimati. He was not yet four when he saw his mother for the last time. He would spend the rest of his life, and the rest of his writing, looking for her face in other faces.
In Dublin, in the cold house of a great-aunt who raised him, a Greek icon of the Virgin and Child hung in his room. No one told him what it meant. He decided, privately, that the Virgin was his mother, and the Child was himself — a small boy inventing his own icon of a woman he could no longer remember. It would not be the last time an image gave him back a face he had no other way of keeping. Decades later, in Japan, a woodblock print of a cherry-blossom spirit would do the same thing to him again.
More from Lefkada
A short tour of Lefkada town today — still recognizably the place Rosa knew, and the place Lafcadio never stopped picturing.