“The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres”

Platres became one of those winter resorts where people believed history had been suspended. During the British colonization of Cyprus, it functioned as a hill station: a deliberately depoliticized space, idealized for escape from reality, for the suspension of history, for distance from politics.

But there are many nightingales, and they do not let you sleep. Not even in Platres. Above all in Platres.

Platres ceases to be a mere toponym; it becomes a place where everything is suspended. Literally. A mountain village located 1,200 meters above sea level, it had consolidated itself as a retreat, with mild summers and snowy winters. It gradually became a space increasingly conceived as a refuge from conflict, condensing the modern fantasy that it might still be possible to delimit zones of “normality” or “neutrality”: places where the historicity of things would thin out, where history would demand neither response nor reaction.

But… is it possible to separate zones of normality — where one may rest, forget, live as though history had never occurred — from zones of violence and genocide, confined either to the past or to specific regions?

(Pause. I suddenly thought of the Gaza Strip.)

Seferis writes “Helen” at a particularly tense moment within this impossibility: during his diplomatic mission in Cyprus, coinciding with the founding of EOKA (1955) and the beginning of the armed struggle for the union of Cyprus with Greece.

The poet turns to Euripides’ tragedy in order to think through the persistence of violence in the name of historically discredited causes. In Euripides’ version, Helen had never been in Troy; only her simulacrum had, fashioned from clouds by the gods. Only after ten years of war is Helen finally seen with Menelaus in Egypt. “I never set foot in brave Troy,” she says. Paris had lain with a shadow for ten years, “as though it were something real.”

The poem points toward a tragic temporality in which the truth about the futility of war emerges only when it can no longer prevent the massacre nor symbolically reorganize the thousands of human losses.

For five months now I have been carrying out a textual and contextual analysis of “Helen,” following the poem in its original sequence, examining how the refrain of the nightingale, the figure of Teucer, the scene of the encounter with Helen at Proteus’ court, and the “empty tunic” each construct one aspect of Seferis’ critique of war — but above all of his denunciation of the silence surrounding Smyrna, the genocide of the Pontic Greeks and Armenians under Atatürk, the Nazi occupation of Greece, the Great Famine of Athens, the Aegean Sea blooming with corpses…

Greece appears layered with martyrdoms and sacrifices, and Seferis ultimately compels us to think about the modern experience of genocides and wars founded upon “empty causes” which nevertheless continue to demand sacrifice even after they have become historically indefensible.

Moving toward the past Seferis lived through, while projecting itself into a future he never lived to see, the nightingales of his poetry do not let me sleep in Rio de Janeiro in 2026.

There are too many martyrdoms. Far too many.

Too many wars in the name of things so empty. Ideas made of clouds. Simulacra of reality.

Today, the nightingales will not let you sleep in Beirut, Tehran, Ashdod, Tel Aviv, or Gaza.

Alexandre Belmonte