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On the Aegean island of Skyros, in the Carnival period immediately preceding Lent, a more ancient ritual takes place Male inhabitants don an animal-like costume, including a large number of goat bells hung around the waist, and, with a goat-skin mask flapping down over their faces, they prance around town with the aim of making as great a din as possible The cacophony echoes around the mountains, and for those in the town itself, it drowns out every other sound, almost every other sense The story goes that an old shepherd once lost his entire flock to the winter snow and, in his unspeakable sorrow, he put on all their bells and with their inhuman clanging drowned out his human sadness   Such stories abound in Greek myth and literature In the Iliad, when Achilles loses Patroclus he lets out an unearthly howl, before throwing himself into battle like a wild animal And the reader of Greek tragedy will know that the attempt to ‘speak the unspeakable’ is a typical trope of laments for the dead Questions of how we process loss – how we speak about it and most importantly, how we change and move on – are central to the Greek tradition Now, Greece’s writers are returning to this theme   In 2010 Christos Ikonomou published a collection of short stories entitled Something Will Happen, You’ll See One of these stories, ‘Placard on a Broomstick’, alludes to the story of Achilles and Patroclus, but the protagonist is no mythic hero, rather a supermarket employee in a poor suburb of Athens, whose best friend has just died from an electric shock while working overtime on a building site Finding himself alone at Easter, Yannis decides to make a placard, to protest against the injustice of the death and to express his own grief But, he realises, there is nothing he can write that will come close to expressing what he feels Like Achilles and the shepherd, his loss is unspeakable So he takes the blank placard into the street outside the building site and holds it high All day long he waits