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This article has been postponed by almost a decade, for reasons that are beside the point. The time has come to get on with the task at hand and some words definitely need to be said about somebody I met in Bulgaria in the autumn of 2009. I was in the second half of my forties and decided to roam across the Balkans according to no established plan; a chain of events hard to explain led me to Rila, Bulgaria’s most famous monastery, where I stayed a couple of days as a guest. After one of the ceremonies I had the opportunity to attend – during which poetry, music and visual arts praised the Creator in perfect Bizantine unity –, a man in the middle of his thirties visibly wanted to speak to me. And so he did. Olivier was his name and French his nationality, notwithstanding a Bulgarian background. His Bulgarian grandfather was still alive, and that was one of the reasons why he was there, at that time, in that ex-communist country. Devoted both to communism and to atheism (which is its corollary), Olivier’s parents did their best to keep him away from religion. During three decades or so, they were extremely successful in convincing their child that mater was the only thing that really mattered, and that the only immaterial being to be worship was the State – almighty entity revealed by Danton, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Guevara, Pol Pot and other “prophets” of the Revolution. In their bringing about the “socialist paradise”, what they really did was to establish hell on earth, provoking the death of more than 150 million people; in the eastern side of the Iron Curtain alone, communism claimed the lives of no less than one million people – never forgetting that “Communism is fascism, without fascism’s ability to make the trains run on time”.1

A word about somebody I met in Bulgaria (from the primacy of matter over spirituality to the primacy of spirituality over matter)