Messolonghi is a humid town sinking into itself. It evokes the American South and emanates the ambience of a place of exile where one withdraws to the wooden residencies so as to leisurely immerse into themselves. It suffices to read Gorpas, a poet from Messolonghi, to surrender oneself to the homely lyricism that this unique place emanates. The very same poet, heated in the blast furnace of life-struggle, has been fermented with the sorrows of the sea, with the sweat and salt of the working class. Born and bred of this saline land that raised so many poets, his bitter lyricism, his brackish humor, but also his directness and his lack of pretension are irrigated from Messolonghi’s subsoil. Having breathed since childhood the iodine, the injustice, the fog, the haze of his town’s legends, he has inherited, apart from anything else, an air of perpetual siege and malaise. There is no exodus in his Messolonghi, no escape from the mesh of the subsequent Nostalgia. A floating town that follows him everywhere, although not explicitly mentioned: “It has a closed heart and sun inside/And behind the sun, grey-blue mountains/And behind the mountains a sea with corals/And behind the sea of corals, the town of surprises/And behind the town of surprises, sea again, the sea.”