Look at this monument, dear, and ask who’s the person who built it;

O, Hermogenes it was, who was grieving for me and our daughter,

Thecla, the curly-haired girl who was taken by Fate with no mercy.

Pure she was, for indeed she had never laid with a husband,

God, please accept her like this, unblemished by passion or marriage.

Now let me tell you the names of the two other people that rest here.

It is my brave little boy who was known by the name Demosthenes,

Son of Matrona – that’s me, and I live in the city of Nike.

Fourth in the grave, by his son, the father and husband was laid down.

It’s time to go, Hermogenes thought. He would go searching for another Nicopolis, he felt banished from this one, deprived of everything that he’d held dear.
There was nothing to keep him in the city by the river Nestus where his family, Greek immigrants from Asia Minor, had come to settle before he was born. Hermogenes had grown up in this city, between Via Militaris to the north and Via Egnatia to the south, among the din of the forum where from sunrise to sunset toothless old men chattered on and on about the glorious past and the degradation of men: it’s horrible, it’s shameful, nobody respects the elderly anymore, politicians have grown corrupt and the youth can’t recite a single line of the Iliad or the Aeneid by heart, and so on, and so forth. As a child, Hermogenes used to play among the blocks of marble waiting to be loaded on ships, blocks transported here on ox carts from the quarries on the hills; he used to shuffle among the columns of the temples and to steal a piece of bread or a chunk of meat from gifts meant for the gods. And in Nicopolis there were plenty of gods, indeed! The city coins bore the faces of Apollo, Ares, Artemis and Asclepius; there were temples dedicated to Zeus, Poseydon, and Pluto, all without match in grandeur; locals worshipped the Horseman too, the river deity that slightly resembled Dionysus. Hermogenes’ family had brought along the name of that new god, the one they’d had to worship in secret until recently. Now people turned to Him more openly, getting bolder by the day. Still, great tortures awaited those who worshipped the Saviour, and the roads of the Empire were lined with torches that illuminated Christians on crosses, scapegoats for all evil. But times change and men change with them.
It was at a local Christian gathering that Hermogenes had met young Matrona. She was born here, in this city, founded – if the elderly on the forum were to be believed, – by Mark Antony himself to mark his victory at Philippi, before Augustus turned a new page in Rome’s history. But could we believe them, these old men with their eyes fixed on the past, desperately looking for something to be proud of, for their bodies had run out of strength and manly power? Anyways, everyone was grateful to the happiest emperor, Trajan, for honouring their city and granting it certain privileges. One such privilege was the city’s new name, Nicopolis ad Nestum.
Both Hermogenes’ and Matrona’s families were of wealth, educated, eager believers in Christ. Their union was blessed from the moment their hands touched over the sacred bread.
Hermogenes was happy. But one should not dwell on happiness, for the gods are jealous, old and new alike. How many lines should he dedicate to the blissful days when he would welcome the rising sun and see off the sunset together with his beloved, humble wife? Matrona bore him two children, Demosthenes, a curious and loquacious boy much like the rhetor whose name they chose for him, in the hope that he would use words and not swords; and curly-haired Thecla who was gentle and strong at the same time, stubborn and determined like Thecla the Martyr from Iconium, the first to follow Saint Paul. She was put to great torture but men and beasts alike ceded before her faith.
One line, one line should be enough, Hermogenes thought as he stood in front of the slab under which now lay everyone he loved, taken before their time by the illness. “This is where happiness lived.” But then he changed his mind. He decided to let Matrona speak; she deserved to be remembered in this city. He ordered the carver to set his name by the names of those he shared his love with, those that were one blood with him; a lone ‘Hermogenes’ on a clean slab later on didn’t feel right. And then he left.
Where would his feet take him? This he didn’t know. The road built by the Romans – wide, with large, flat stones, would carry him far away; the Empire was vast, and its roads wove a gigantic web cutting through mountains, crossing mighty rivers. He could go to the other cities that bore the name Nicopolis, the one on the Ister, and those in Epirus and in Egypt, to look for his other selves, his doppelgangers, in the hope that they would still be living a happy life.
He pronounced the words he’d chosen for the beginning of the epitaph, aloud. ‘Look at this monument, dear, and ask who’s the person that built it…’ He imagined passersby wondering, were these real people? The next lines hinted at Hellenic glory, and eastern piety, of Thracian stubbornness and Christian hope. This was not, it seemed, an epitaph for Matrona and Hermogenes’ family; it was a map of the city itself. A city that existed and didn’t exist at the same time; a Nicopolis that is the first one but one of many too; the home of a family whose members bore names so diverse that it seemed they were taken from a collection of famed stories – told by Homer, copied from the speeches of ancient rhetors, woven into Christian legends.
What Hermogenes didn’t know was that centuries later barbarians would arrive in these lands.
They would come in numbers, on horseback, in carts, with fair hair, and dark hair, some tall, some short but all merciless, avid. They would swarm the land and no rivers, no hills, no fortresses and towers would stop them. The city by the Nestus would cease to be a symbol of victory, it would cease to be a city. The newcomers would lift its stones and carry them away, to build their homes elsewhere.
But one stone slab they wouldn’t be able to take away. Buried in the ground, it would remain there, as if stuck in the dirt by magic. The barbarians wouldn’t know what it said; the strange names it spoke of would travel from mouth to mouth, year after year, century after century, and children in the area would whisper a legend to each other: if one were to utter these names during the night by the stone slab, they would hear the marble speak and weep, weep with the tears of a city that refuses to be forgotten. The old women would add that a maid used to live there, by the name of Thecla, and she was taken by fate before she could marry, and presented herself to God pure; she was the sacrifice that the city offered in the hope to be saved. It is rumoured that the marble stones taken from this city – wherever they may be today, – are wondrous, for at a certain angle the light would reveal strange writings, only for the briefest of moments.
‘Matrona – that’s me, and I live in the city of Nike.’ Hermogenes walked without turning back. He could not foresee any of the things that would take place in the future. But he knew that a city stayed alive not as long as its walls kept but as long as the names of the people that lived in it were remembered.
And he knew that whoever read this epitaph would bring the life back to this city.

Author: Paoulina Micheva
translation into English: Alexander "Sancho" Marinov