Editorial of Karanos 4 (2021)Editorial de Karanos 4 (2021

Antela Bernárdez, Borja

English

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Karanos 4, 2021 5-6   eISSN: 2604-3521  ISSN: 2604-6199     E D I T O R I A L       Life and death. This can be the key circle to any approach concerning Alexander the Great, the main Argead king History ever faced. Life and death are also the two sides of History, and I use to guess, as a theoretical staring point in my research on History, that remembering time is an essential feature of being human. Let me then argue that Time is what lies between life and death. We are essentially Time beings who remember other times. Time can also be a dimension of space, of course. Or is it possible the moving of space without time? What would happen if we stopped the time (how I wish sometimes to do it!)? Shall the world be possible outside time? I know these concerns are usually outside our fieldwork, and Physics probably can say a word, at least, on these thoughts, but I cannot avoid wondering about the Time and how it works in the human dimension of our living experience.  I guess Time has now a heavy weight in our concerns, as they have too the frontiers of life and death. Our stranger times of Covid Era, year two after lockdown and pandemics, force us, as a global community, beyond our many differences, to face together what remains, what we all lost, and how to manage our present days to let life get back in our world. I feel, just my own opinion, that in some way this new issue of Karanos (2021) is deeply crossed by the unspeakable feelings concerning life and death, collective trauma of fear and pandemic illness, restrictions, and recoveries.  Last year I began my Editorial, a text I confess I love to write, talking about survival, beyond grief, is a way to be alive, and a clue of life itself. Survivors review our world around, and we can decide to offer our esteem and respect to those masters who have a deep impact in our research and our understandings about Antiquity. I feel now closely attached to every scholar in my fieldwork around the world, after the pandemic, because we all share one common interest and live in the same troubled age. Likewise, I also like to share with them my respectfully admiration for common masters, kind, and enjoyable persons after all, beyond books and sources and evidence and discussions, who make me feel proud of being myself and of enjoying with them life and time. This is the case, in fact, of the author who we involve for this issue in our section of Main Voices in Ancient Macedonian Studies, prof. Francisco Javier Gómez Espelosín, my former master (with my beloved X. C. Bermejo) during my PhD. I have enjoyed his advice during the last decades, but also, I share with him life moments that make me the person I am (and uses to allow me to guess about the person I want to be). I also have the honour of sharing this tutorship of Gómez Espelosín with the other two persons behind the curtains in Karanos’ Staff, my dear colleagues Antonio Ignacio Molina Marín and Mario Agudo. Our common link concerning Gómez Espelosín’s close influence has always being a strong steppingstone in our relationship, and of course, in the project of making Karanos becomes a reality (a challenge we face every year, on each new issue). We three are very proud of having our own master sharing his experience and knowledge within the pages of this issue.  EDITORIAL  Karanos 4/2021  6  Gómez Espelosín is also the author the Editorial Staff of Karanos chooses to publish this issue’s Flashback. The paper “Alexander and the Ocean” was firstly published in Spanish, and now, with the permission of his author, we can publish it here in English, and we hope you all enjoy it. The aim is to keep in the future issues this close link between the two sections, the Main Voices’ interview and the Flashback, in order to allow a better understanding of the Main Voices scholars at the light of their own words and research.  But Gómez Espelosín is not the unique master who deserves recognition in this year’s issue. The sad news about the death of the Main Voice in Ancient Macedonian Studies we missed during 2021, Eugene Borza, drive us to try to recognize him in some few words, both of respect and grief. Time, again, in the lap between life and death, and in the memories that survive. Times of mourning. Let us send their relatives, friends, colleagues and disciples around the world, our kind respect. We are very sorry for your lost. We share this great lost with them all.  Other masters are also involved in our issue. We are very glad to publish, after the usual double-blind peer-reviewed process, papers by authors of the level of Waldemar Heckel and Nikos Akamatis, authors with such an authority as that of Altay Coşkun, and even new voices with the young illusion like that of Christian San José. As director of Karanos, I want here once again to show my debt with them all for choosing to publish their works in our journal. Also, let me remember here with gratitude everybody who still believe in the effort of helping each other in academics, and in helping a young journal so small as Karanos. Our new issue is just a result of a lot of very small gestures of lovely and kind care and confidence. We cannot do it (and I am pretty sure it does not deserve to be done) without all these elements. Sometimes I feel surpassed by the harsh impact of our reality, which surrounds us showing a great violence, producing a fierce fear and merciless pain. Bad times indeed to dream. But memories and dreams were sometimes kind of brothers, in the same way as death was to sleep in Greek Mythology. So let me get back to the circle between life and death, a place I can now imagine as the round lounge Dedalus built to Ariadna, a dance hall where people twist in precious, full of olive-like golden flashing clothes: (Hom. Il. 18.590-605). This circle of life and death is, in fact, at the center of our worries and concerns as human beings, and as Historians. Just a few years ago, my wise master Gómez Espelosín say to me, in a very bad personal time, to try to find shelter in Antiquity to my soul pain of that days. Not a bad advice. At all. And not a bad shelter, after all, for our present times. Enjoy, thus, this issue while I try to shelter myself at some point of Ariadna’s dance floor.  BORJA ANTELA-BERNÁRDEZ Director of Karanos. Bulletin of Ancient Macedonian Studies borja.antela@uab.cat   Bellaterra (Barcelona), December 14th 2021 

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