Book - Realm Known Solely To Me

Since my last cycling journey in Japan 2018, I began envisioning a ride across Europe. My initial plan was to start in Kyiv, Ukraine, and travel across the continent to Lisbon, Portugal, on the western edge. However, with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I was forced to change my starting point. By the end of 2022, I arrived in Athens, Greece, and set off on my cycling journey from the southeastern corner of Europe.

In the post-pandemic world, reality has proven far more clamorous and crowded than I had ever imagined. I once believed that after the unprecedented stillness of a global standstill, humanity would learn to befriend solitude—that in the long quiet of isolation, we might come to understand the necessity of being alone, the quiet worth of silence. Naively, I thought that the plague would offer civilization a chance to pause and catch its breath, if only a little that the echo of history would linger just a moment longer. But the opposite unfolded. Isolation had compressed our yearning for connection to its limit, and when the barriers fell, it all burst forth—like a dam breaking. Crowds surged into streets, into restaurants, airports, and foreign boulevards hungry for touch, for gathering, for visibility.Short videos flooded social media like a new contagion—fast, shallow, viral. Tourists, like a spreading epidemic, replicated identical itineraries across the cities of Europe, occupying the streets with cloned desires.

As always, I traveled alone. Beyond the borders of nations flooded with tourists, the moments of solitude felt all the more precious—so much so that I often found myself striving to withdraw, to drift away from the crowd and into quiet seclusion. Other than choosing a starting point, I had no detailed route planned—only a general direction of heading north or south. There were places I wanted to visit, but I hadn't researched which cities or countries I would pass through. I wanted to embrace the unknown, the uncertainty, because it is precisely these ambiguities that push people to leave home and explore. Before landscapes that do not yet exist unfold before my eyes, before untold stories become memories, I continue moving forward—tracing the stars, treading the earth, collecting moments of wonder known only to me.

My eyes have taken in countless breathtaking sights, yet the most profound are those quiet, ineffable moments of solitude. These are moments only I can understand, secrets I cannot share—locked deep within my heart, with only myself holding the key.

The long journey was, inevitably, accompanied by long stretches of tedium. Yet within those dull, in-between moments, fleeting visions arise—a flicker of starlight beneath the morning haze, a chill wind slipping quietly across a mountain ridge, the first light of dawn falling upon an empty roadside bus stop, waiting silently for someone. These glimpses, small and transient, will return to me time and time again throughout my life—vivid, unrepeatable, and impossibly clear. Certain landscapes, unknown to anyone else and seen only by me, touch something deep within the soul. They are not grand wonders, nor famed destinations celebrated in verse and guidebooks, but rather, they dwell quietly beyond the noise—in an ordinary town, on a nameless highway, beneath the hush of trees. And there, in those unassuming places, my heart is stirred and I am overwhelmed by a silent, wordless kind of awe.

No one else has witnessed how deep and dark the sky was at that very moment, nor how the distant mountains intertwined with one another. No one else has felt the wind travel across half the world just to stir a single strand of my hair.

Just the thought that "these moments are mine, and mine alone", lends the journey its deepest meaning. The most beautiful landscapes are never found in crowded places but hidden within the serendipitous encounters of the journey, tucked between the seams of time and space—revealed only to those who bury their heads deep into the passage of time, who stare into the abyss day after day, searching.