Missing Rose (9781101603864) (16 page)

Epilogue

Ephesus! City of duality. Home to both the Temple of Artemis and the holy House of Mother Mary. The city that embodies both the ego and the soul. The epitome of vanity and humility; the personification of enslavement and yet of freedom. Ephesus! The city in which opposites intertwine. The city that is as human as every living soul.

O
NE
O
CTOBER EVENING,
two people were sitting on the banks of the river Meles near that city—the ancient city of Ephesus. The sun was about to hide itself behind Mount Bulbul, dyed crimson by its rays. Those who understood the language of the skies had brought them the glad tidings of the approaching rain.

“Saint Paul is preaching to the people about Mother Mary,” Diana said. “Can you hear the crowd yelling, protesting and cursing him in anger? Thousands are rebelling against the new religion, which forbids them to worship their own goddess. Listen to them stamping their feet and shouting, ‘We don't want Mary! We worship Artemis!'”

“Artemis?” Mathias asked. “The goddess who the Romans call Diana?”

“Yes, but don't worry about her,” Diana said. “She's nothing but an illusion, shaped and worshipped by others.”

“You seem to know a lot about her.”

“I know her like I know myself.”

“Well, then, why don't you tell me about her?”

“She is the goddess of the hunt,” Diana began. “A true huntress who uses her arrow to offer a sudden sweet death to her enemy. Free-spirited yet enslaved, dependent yet proud. Supported by an olive tree, her mother Leto gave birth to her and to, to . . .”

After taking a deep breath, Diana added, “And to her twin . . .”

Touching Mathias's hand, “I'll come to her twin, Apollo, later,” she said. “I'll tell you about his temple and the most significant words ‘Gnoti Seavton' carved on its façade. I'll also tell you about the great philosopher, Socrates, who couldn't take his eyes off these two words when he saw them as he was passing by the Temple of Apollo one day.
Gnoti Seavton
, the two words which reveal the reason why the whole universe was created, the reason why we exist. But first, I'd like to tell you about the rose twin of Artemis, the twin that neither Artemis nor Homer knew of.

“According to legend,” continued Diana, “one day Artemis learns from her mother that she has a twin of a completely different kind. She leaves home to search for her, crosses an ocean and enters a rose garden where she is asked to offer herself to a sudden, sweet death. It is said that she would have to listen to the voice of roses in order to find her twin.

“After spending some time in the garden, Artemis returns home and finds a key which would lead her to her twin. She's overjoyed to find it, yet her joy is not unclouded. She can't help asking herself, ‘Was the art of hearing roses only a myth?' But then she remembers what the gardener had told her on her first day in the garden, and so her heart finds comfort. ‘A print placed in your heart,' the gardener had said. ‘It may not be apparent now, but when the right time comes, it'll be manifest.'”

Gazing at the rain clouds on the horizon, “Perhaps that time is this time, Jon,” added Diana. “Look, the October Rains are approaching . . .”

Serdar Ozkan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in August 1975, Serdar Ozkan attended high school at Robert College in Istanbul. He completed his university education in the United States, where he earned his B.A. in Business Administration and Psychology at Lehigh University. Ozkan has been a full-time novelist since 2002, dedicated to writing books that unravel the deeper meaning of life's journey.

His debut novel,
The Missing Rose
, has been published in forty-four languages in over sixty-five countries worldwide. Greatly cherished by readers from different cultures throughout the world from Canada to Japan, from Brazil to China, it has entered best-seller lists in many countries.

Staying at number one for weeks in Turkey,
The Missing Rose
remained on the best-seller list for eighty-four weeks and became the most read novel in Turkey in 2010.

In the world press,
The Missing Rose
received great praise, and was likened to all-time favorites like Paulo Coelho's
The Alchemist
and Richard Bach's
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
.

The Missing Rose
was also likened to Saint-Exupéry's
The Little Prince
by Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), one of the world's most important news agencies, as well as by
Helsingin Sanomat
, the most widely read newspaper in Finland, and was acclaimed as “the Turks'
Little Prince
.”

Published internationally by the world's most prestigious and distinguished houses—Penguin, Random House, Hachette, Bertelsmann, and Bompiani, for example—Serdar Ozkan's
The Missing Rose
has so far been translated into the following languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Croatian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovenian, Serbian, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Bulgarian, Italian, Icelandic, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Indonesian, Arabic, Swedish, Marathi, Chinese, Telugu, Norwegian, Indian, Estonian, Taiwanese, Thai, Urdu, Malaysian, Macedonian, Persian, Albanian, Danish, Uyghur, and Vietnamese.

For more information, visit: www.serdarozkan.com.