The Alchemist (novel) follows the journey of a shepherd from Andalusia, Santiago. Santiago, believing his recurrent dream to be prophetic, decides to travel to a gypsy in a nearby city to understand his interpretation. She tells him there is a hidden treasure in the Pyramids of Egypt.

Early on his journey, he meets an old king, Melchizedek, who tells him to follow his personal myth, that is, what he always wanted to accomplish in his life. Then he says to him the characteristic phrase of the book: When you seek something, the whole universe conspires to become as you wish. This particular phrase is the central philosophy and the saying of the book. Thus, determined to be able to reach his personal myth, sells his flock and begins the long journey that he would not have come back to.

During the trip, Santiago faces love, danger, opportunities, destruction, and learns a lot about himself and the world. He knows people of different mentalities and shares his views with them. On his journey, he knows Fatima, a beautiful woman from Arabia, who explains that if he follows his heart he will find what he is looking for.

Santiago later encounters a lone alchemist who talks about personal myths. He says people want to find only the treasure of their personal myth and not their personal myth. Santiago feels uncertain as he hears the lessons of the alchemist. The alchemist says: Those who do not understand their personal myths will fail to understand their teachings.

My journey is not finished yet.
I am still catching my personal myths.  (Photos and text by Alexandros Tsiolis)

Where It’s been already fourteen years since I moved out of my parents’ house, the family home I was given birth to and raised, and I decided to find my own place, to establish a new home. But following the events with the difficult economic conditions of my country, soon I came face to face with the ghost of unemployment and later forced to return back to my childhood house, the parental home, leaving behind many of the thing I had created and put on the shelf any future plans.

Returning home I realized that everything has been transformed through the passage of time. There was this new scenery in front of my eyes, intimate but strange one. Objects standing there for decades, long ago forgotten from my memories, now struggle to take place into my everyday routine.

I decided to use my camera in order to capture this new reality, to photograph this old house trying to be my new home. Into this struggle, astonished, every day I reveal new things and new statements of what intimacy is. (Photos and text by Makis Makris)