The Hellenic Residence in Mayfair opened the Seferis Study, where Greece’s first Nobel laureate in literature worked as Ambassador, for a curated exhibition on his life and career.
The Hellenic Residence in Mayfair opened the Seferis Study, where the Nobel laureate George Seferis worked as Greek Ambassador, to the public on Wednesday 18 February 2026.
Born Georgios Seferiadis in Smyrna in 1900, then part of the Ottoman Empire, Seferis rose through Greece’s foreign service. He was Ambassador in London from 1957 to 1962, the years the study preserves.
He wrote through his diplomatic postings. In 1963 he became the first Greek writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, for verse shaped by his Asia Minor origins and by the classical past. He died in Athens in 1971.
The permanent exhibition opened on 24 October 2023, the 60th anniversary of the Nobel announcement, at the initiative of Katerina Sakellaropoulou, then President of the Hellenic Republic. Anna Londou and Nikos Paisios donated its founding core of 32 objects, photographs, drawings and letters.
Loans from the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic and Historical Archives, the Gennadius Library, the George Seferis Photographic Archive and the Louth Museum have since enlarged it. The display occupies the study much as he kept it, in three sections: the poet, the diplomat and the man.