“When the world was going wild over the Pirateers after the national team’s victory at Euro 2004, we simply looked at each other and smiled with a silence that only the lab’s graduates understand. For years we had been sailing our own Pirateer, hidden inside the Photonics Laboratory at NTUA — a small armada taking on giants such as MIT, KDDI, ETH, Bell Labs, UCSB, and BT Labs. It was the only way to stand against teams with a hundred times our funding. And yet, we were always at the forefront of photonics research. With ideas that claimed space at the world’s greatest conferences, with publications that travelled further than we could have imagined. A small Pirateer, that nonetheless learned to cross oceans.”

“Of course we learned photonics, and we wrestled with equations and experimental setups that built small worlds on laboratory benches. But what I gained from those years was not confined to physics or engineering. My mentor taught me something unique: how to think. And, even more importantly, how to give my thoughts order and clarity. How to weave them into a logical sequence and express them with precision. It sounds simple. In practice, however, it had a decisive impact on every step of my professional journey. How many people can, for instance, summarise the history of humanity in just thirty-five words? Try it. You will see. Twenty years on, I continue to use the tools I acquired in the laboratory. My quiver still holds the arrows that Heracles gave me. They remain sharp. And when needed, they remain equally effective.”

“The laboratory light was almost always on. It did not matter if it was a holiday; the deadline was immovable, and the desire to see our idea become a publication — to acquire a voice at a conference — was even more relentless. All doors locked, midnight. And yet, resourceful as we were, we had devised our own system: we would order food and coffee, tie it to an improvised pulley, and hoist it up through the window like a secret cargo that kept our vigil alive. There was no money to travel to conferences. And yet, we were there. A convoy of cars set off from Athens and crossed Europe all the way to France, England, and Switzerland. We shared rooms, food, anxieties, and joys. We essentially shared our lives. They say that the bonds formed during military service are strong and lasting. Personally, I found that the relationships with my laboratory colleagues were far deeper. We grew so close that we felt like a family — a family built not from blood, but from shared toil, unexpected victories, and countless nights under the same laboratory light. We knew details about each other’s lives that even our parents did not know. And even now, so many years later, one phone call is enough. The ‘thorns’ appear at the speed of light, ready to support, just as they did back then. A team that never disbanded; it simply grew.”