The Greek house: the story of a painter's love affair with the island of Sifnos

When Christian Brechneff first set foot on the Greek island of Sifnos, it was the spring of 1972 and he was a twenty-one-year-old painter searching for artistic inspiration and a quiet place to work. There, this Swiss child of Russian emigres, adrift and confused about his sexuality, found something extraordinary. In Sifnos, he found a muse, a subject he was to paint for years, and a sanctuary. In The Greek House, Brechneff tells a funny, touching narrative about his relationship to Sifnos, writing with warmth about its unforgettable residents and the house he bought in a hilltop farm village. This is the story of how he fell in love with Sifnos, and how it became a haven from the complexities of his life in Western Europe and New York. It is the story of his village and of the island during the thirty-odd years he owned the house-from a time when there were barely any roads to the arrival of the modern world with its tourists and high-speed boats and the euro. And it is the story of the end of the love affair-how the island changed and he changed, how he discovered he had outgrown Sifnos, or couldn't grow there anymore. The Greek House is a celebration of place and an honest narrative of self-discovery. In its pages, a naive and inexperienced young man comes into his own. Weaving himself into the life of the island, painting it year after year, he finds a place he can call home.