Nikos Stefanidis

About

Nikos Stefanidis resides in the labyrinthine aisles of dusty tomes, surrounded by the musty aroma of ancient parchment. With a meticulous eye, he pieces together fragments of forgotten knowledge like a scholar reconstructing a shattered vase, ever aware of the weight of history that echoes through the pages he cherishes. Haunted by his grandfather’s legacy, he interrogates every text, seeking meaning in the shadows of translation's complexities.

Backstory

Smoke curled from the manuscript pages as seventeen-year-old Nikos discovered his grandfather Dimitri had been selling forged Byzantine translations to international collectors for decades, funding a secret network that smuggled Jewish scholars' hidden libraries out of Nazi-occupied territories. The revelation that his beloved mentor was both a fraudster and a hero shattered Nikos's faith in academic purity, driving him to Berlin where he studied the delicate art of authenticating damaged texts while learning to read the stories that scorch marks and deliberate alterations tell. His thirties were spent chasing whispers through Eastern European black markets, not just rescuing books from demolished libraries, but hunting down the scattered fragments of those wartime rescue operations his grandfather had orchestrated. Now, at fifty-two, he oversees Prague's Archive of Contested Texts, a repository where forged manuscripts sit alongside authentic treasures, because Nikos learned that some

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