Giorgos Seferis: Poetry, Memory, and Exile

This research investigates the work of the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis, examining the relationships between landscape, memory, myth, and historical experience in the Eastern Mediterranean. The study seeks to understand how Seferis’s poetry transforms ruins, displacement, wars, and collective losses into reflections on identity, belonging, and uprootedness.

Drawing on the poet’s continuous dialogue with the classical tradition particularly with Homer and Euripides the research analyzes how mythical figures, places, and traces of the past are mobilized to address contemporary issues such as nationalism, exile, political violence, and traumatic memory. Special attention is given to the presence of Cyprus, the Asia Minor Catastrophe, and the multiple experiences of displacement that shaped his intellectual trajectory.

By bringing Seferis’s work into conversation with debates on cultural memory, history, and comparative literature, the research aims to understand how his poetry transcends the boundaries of the Greek experience and engages with broader questions of loss, survival, and the human condition.

Katerina Hatzi - Giorgos Seferis, oil on canvas