Census

Set in the middle of the twentieth century in a mountainous Cypriot village, Census follows the pregnancy of cancer patient Maria. She conceives after a night with the angelically handsome Michael, visiting from Patmos, the island of John's Revelation. The gestation culminates in the "nativity" of an invisible Christ in a Nicosia clinic. Though incorporeal, scentless and colourless, the life-giving force that is liberated from Maria's womb, brings about premature efflorescence and a diffusion of aromas across the clinic's flower pots. Akin to healing energy, it begins curing the spiritual and psychosomatic ailments of all those it overshadows, urging the island's medical community to dedicate their life to studying and utilising this unknown new energy. Census is both a heretic allegory of the nativity and a cathartic retort to the satanic messages of Roman Polanski's renowned horror film Rosemary's Baby. Boasting repeated editions in Greece and Cyprus, this award-winning novel by Panos Ioannides, replete with magical realism, is riveting in terms of conception and execution: a sacred metaphysical thriller that redeems and purifies the reader. A masterpiece in the art of fiction and the recipient of the Cyprus National Prize for Literature, 1973.