The first excerpts from Alexis Tsipras’s book titled “Ithaca” have been released, which will be available in bookstores at the end of November. “This book was born from such a need. Not from the need for personal vindication. It was not written to beautify decisions, embellish events, or construct a narrative convenient for its author,” one of the excerpts emphasizes. Regarding his governance period and specifically about 2015, Mr. Tsipras writes, among other things: “Many urged me to avoid responsibility, to transfer it to others so that I could inherit as a ripe fruit a completely exhausted country. I did not hesitate. I took on the responsibility when Greece was at one of the most critical turning points in its modern history. The decisions that had to be made did not simply have political cost; they had moral weight, social ramifications, historical dimensions”.
Reflecting on the past, he writes: “When in 2008 I assumed leadership of a small leftist party, at just 34 years old, many spoke of a “leap into the void.” I saw it differently: as a personal challenge, but also a necessary act, not only for me personally, but for a generation of people seeking a voice, who felt that the established political map didn’t accommodate them. I knew there was no safety net if I fell, neither political nor personal. But there was that mixture of faith, stubbornness, and responsibility that pushes you forward even when everything around you tells you to stop”.
It’s worth noting that explaining why he writes “Ithaca,” the former prime minister, connecting the initiative with the future, emphasizes: This book is not only a deposit of experiences. It is also a proposal. It is the attempt to transform the knowledge acquired in the fire of crisis into thought, into a plan, into a vision for tomorrow’s Greece. A Greece that will not proceed frightened or resigned, but will dare to think, to claim, to change.
Alexis Tsipras: Excerpts from his book “Ithaca” – Pre-publication from the prologue
There are moments in life when you reach a knot. Not a simple hesitation or a difficult decision of daily life, but that critical point where every inner certainty of yours is tested. In my political journey so far, I have found myself many times facing such knots. And each time, the weight was much greater than what one person could bear alone. Because when your decisions don’t simply affect your own life, but shape the fate of thousands or millions of people, responsibility becomes almost existential. There’s no room for hasty moves, but neither for delays. There’s no space for simplifications.
When everything tightens like a vise around you, logic and emotion seem inadequate. It’s not enough to calculate the data or listen to your heart. There’s something more fundamental that, each time, determines the choice: an instinct, not crude and spontaneous, but deeply shaped by experience, forged by events and the sense of responsibility. Something that operates almost silently, but pushes you toward a direction that you recognize within yourself as the only honest and correct one.
Every critical moment is accompanied by this internal impulse. Not to accept the knot as the final limit. To find the way, with responsibility, with stability, with cost, to pass through to the other side. This strength doesn’t arise from ambition, but from the need to remain faithful to a mission that transcends your person. To serve not what benefits you, but what you consider right.
This book was born from such a need. Not from the need for personal vindication. It was not written to beautify decisions, embellish events, or construct a narrative convenient for its author. The reader will quickly realize that the book was written from a sense of internal obligation: the need for testimony. To tell the events as I lived them, to capture the conditions, the conflicts, the dilemmas, and the cost.
Because I had the certainty for some time that we don’t owe History to appear vindicated; we owe it, however, to speak. With responsibility, with clarity, and without fear. This is what I tried to do with this book.
When in 2008 I assumed leadership of a small leftist party, at just 34 years old, many spoke of a “leap into the void.” I saw it differently: as a personal challenge, but also a necessary act, not only for me personally, but for a generation of people seeking a voice, who felt that the established political map didn’t accommodate them. I knew there was no safety net if I fell, neither political nor personal. But there was that mixture of faith, stubbornness, and responsibility that pushes you forward even when everything around you tells you to stop.
When I took responsibility for the country in 2015, reality was relentless. Many urged me to avoid responsibility, to transfer it to others so that I could inherit as a ripe fruit a completely exhausted country. I did not hesitate. I took on the responsibility when Greece was at one of the most critical turning points in its modern history. The decisions that had to be made did not simply have political cost; they had moral weight, social ramifications, historical dimensions. I felt I was carrying on my shoulders the ghosts of yesterday’s unrequited struggles, but also the hopes of an entire generation that dared to believe that things could change. It wasn’t simply the responsibility of governance. It was responsibility toward a collective need for change and dignity.
In 2019, I was not the same. Most importantly, Greece was no longer the same. The country no longer resembled the Greece of paralysis and fear, that shadow of itself that dragged its humiliated steps endlessly. It had regained its economic autonomy, had healed, to a degree, its wounds, had stood on its feet again. Not without losses, not without mistakes, but with head held high. I had lived experiences that shaped me deeply. I now knew, experientially, what it means to govern with breath cut short and under melting conditions: to bear the weight and attacks, to endure questioning, to protect what can be saved and build what didn’t exist.
Politics, when not exercised as a role you inherit but as an internal mission, has the power to transform you. It’s not the management of everyday life but the art of transcending it. The ability to expand the limits of the feasible until what yesterday seemed impossible becomes reality. This politics is an assault on heaven. Politics wears you down, yes, but it grants you something precious. The rare opportunity to truly connect with your era. To leave behind an indelible mark, a legacy that will transcend time and your person. To see your beautiful country standing upright and its people having risen a little higher.
Much has been written about the dramatic events of that period. Journalists, analysts, political opponents, comrades and allies, foreign observers, all have deposited their own version of the Greek crisis that shocked not only our country, but all of Europe. Everyone, except one: the man who was called to make the decisions.
The time has come, therefore, for my voice to be heard too. The time to tell the truth as I experienced it. My truth.
I write this book because I believe politics is the field where the vision for a just world is tested with reality, thus giving meaning to the limits and essence of a society’s struggles for a better tomorrow. Because I believe this world can change for the better. No struggle is in vain, as the cynicism of conservatives urges us to believe. This experience I try to capture in this book.
I write to deposit the experience of a country and its people, who, in one of the darkest moments of its modern history, dared to claim dignity, violating the rules, those rules that had been imposed not to protect the weak, but to ensure the permanence of the power of the strong.
I write about a collective effort that did not hesitate to challenge an establishment that considered itself the permanent owner of this country. An establishment that had never imagined that its power could be temporary. I write because this collective effort, with all its mistakes, excesses, contradictions, dared to try to change the flow of history.
In an era where politics had become management of decline, we attempted to articulate a different narrative. We didn’t always succeed. Not all battles were victorious. But every step was accompanied by the dream of a better, more just world for the many, for the most vulnerable. I write because I want to show that I may have made mistakes, but I never lacked courage, nor did I fatalistically let my country be pushed over the cliff by those who would then point their finger at us as responsible for the catastrophe.
I write because I want to show that I put myself in service of my country but also in the cause of social justice, pursuing with all the flame of my soul, and with the last drop of my strength, a better fate for this suffering people.
My Ithaca is not simply a narrative of the past, it’s not the narrative of return. It wasn’t written only to record events, as a kind of account. It is, first of all, an attempt to understand the present: to see how we got here, through what journey, what choices, what small or large victories, what defeats. And simultaneously, it reflects my pursuit to speak about the future, not in terms of abstract wish, but to describe it as analytically as possible and with the faith that history has not ended.
This book is the testimony of a man who lived governance from within during stormy times; who was called to negotiate with Europe’s powerful; who made critical, harsh, controversial decisions that affected the lives of millions of our fellow citizens. But it’s not only that.
This book is not only a deposit of experiences. It is also a proposal. It is the attempt to transform the knowledge acquired in the fire of crisis into thought, into a plan, into a vision for tomorrow’s Greece. A Greece that will not proceed frightened or resigned, but will dare to think, to claim, to change.
We often speak of tomorrow as something distant, abstract. Here, I want to see it differently: as a field of responsibility. To speak about tomorrow in terms of justice, with social content, with clear priorities. What country do we want, what economy, what rule of law, what work, what education, what democracy? There are no neutral answers to these. There are only political choices. And this book is, in its own way, such a choice.
I also write because I want to speak not only to those who have memories from yesterday’s events but also to young people, to those who didn’t live through all those difficult and exciting times that defined us. Young people who have no memories of the day Alexis Grigoropoulos was murdered, Pavlos Fyssas was killed, who didn’t feel the tightness in their heart when it was announced that the country was entering the Memorandum in 2010. Today they seek their own paths, primarily with the anxiety to understand a world that changes radically day by day.
Today it is very different. Unfortunately not better. Knowledge of the real events of our country’s modern history is a prerequisite for understanding the difficulties but also the possibilities that open before us. The foundation to build tomorrow’s struggles.
Because the effort for social change is not theory, nor utopia, but the practice of daily small or larger ruptures and progressive compromises. And governance is not the job of the “class enemy,” nor does it mean abandoning ideas, but fighting for their implementation within the adversities of reality.
And radicalism is not a psychological state, nor a pose, but the understanding of the problems of the most vulnerable and weak and mainly the effort to solve them.
Finally, I write this book because I feel I don’t have the right to leave history in the hands of those who believe it belongs to them, just because today they are considered the winners. History is not a trophy, nor a field of ownership. It is our common ground, a space of memory, responsibility and truth. And if you don’t claim the truth, if you don’t deposit your own testimony, then you abandon without a fight not only yesterday but mainly today and tomorrow. And this tomorrow of our homeland, but also of our collective struggles for a just society, I am not willing to abandon, at least not without a fight.
The future lasts a long time. And our country needs memory. Not as a museum relic, but as a living political tool. Memory of struggles, sacrifices, difficult decisions, victories and defeats. Memory of moments we bent and those we stood upright. Only with this knowledge can we build something better. Learning from mistakes, not to forget them, but not to repeat them. And inspired by moments we dared to dream and claim.
That’s why this book is an act of responsibility toward the past and a claim for the right to the future.
