In May 1929, while the Kazantzakis couple were travelling by train from France to Prague, a coal miner told them about an area of Czechoslovakia called Gottesgab. They lived there for a year, in a house “all alone in the forest”.

In June 1931 they returned to Gottesgab and lived in the same house for one more year, at the end of which Prevelakis visited them.