Once upon a time in 2001, two cousins living on opposite sides of the world - one in NZ and one in the UK - began to exchange emails about the ancestral roots of their common grandparents.

These grandparents had died within months of each other in 1920 during the turbulent immediate years following the Great War, leaving three children orphans to be raised by their Nanny in Tunbridge Wells.

Both cousins knew little about the lives and circumstances of these forebears and each had his own agenda for delving deeply into the background.

The sole source of immediate information was the only surviving sibling of the grandparents, then in her 90’s, and a ‘hatbox’ with photos and letters compiled by her deceased elder sister.

Research into the backgrounds of the grandparents, especially the Grandfather, seemingly a wealthy trader of apparently ‘Greekish’ origin from Smyrna (Izmir) in what was then part of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, proved difficult. Conflicts abounded in the stories passed down by the Nanny to the siblings.

Was it intended that the identity of the three children remain ‘secret’? Was it a danger that their safely might be compromised? What was the status of the family’s existence in England? As ‘exiles’? Why had apparently extended family and close and influential friends in business and government ‘disappeared’ following the deaths of the siblings’ parents?

Was the Grandfather, Michael Panoyoti Nicolaidi under contract to the British Government as a licensed supplier of Turkish opium during World War 1? Even more, was he an important source of Aegean wartime ‘intelligence’ to the Crown? What had gone disastrously awry around the time the war ended?

Mike Nicolaidi’s painstaking research, taking almost ten years, mixes fact and fiction in what might best be described as a 21^st century novel blending genres of history, travel, detection and mystery.

While the book is not exactly a memoir, events from Mike’s past and present personal life are also contained within it. His own description of the work is: ‘a devoted or bonded love story of overlapping worlds of so-called reality and the imagination’.

Mike Nicolaidi has spent much of his working life as a journalist in both New Zealand and overseas. He was the founding president of Playmarket, an agency for emerging NZ playwrights, set up in the 1970s.

He has also been a board member of the NZ Film Commission, and has written and directed several short films.

He lives near Feilding in Aotearoa New Zealand.

His cousin, Chas Hill, who lives in Norfolk, in the UK, contributes to the Levantine Heritage website. He describes his ‘recollections’ pages as ‘on the trail of the Nicolaidi family: one of the Universe’s greatest unsolved mysteries.’

Mike Nicolaidi

Chas Hill

May, 2012