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the poet, which he expresses himself in the first person throughout. This is a way to highlight this
relationship with him.
After the lapse that is not narrated, the civil war and military dictatorship in Greece, our author
goes back to her autobiography from the moment that Constantine Tsatsos assumed the Presidency
of the State. Moments and Memories is a diary in which she informs us about the Greek democratic
transition, about Tsatsos Presidency and Constantine Karamanlis government. In the prologue she
points out that she wants to highlight the great work of a man during those years. After reading the
book, it is not clear whether that great man is Constantine Tsatsos, as perhaps is expected, or
Constantine Karamanlis, whom she admired deeply. Her aim, in any case, is to highlight the great
work that was carried out in Greece towards the restoration of democracy and Greece's entry into
the EEC. The author refers also to her own work, not only as wife of the President, but also in other
areas such as literature. She presents herself as a woman of letters and she exposes her doubts
about her own literary production. She wonders, for example, if she is really good at writing.
In Moments and Memories we can find an Ioanna Tsatsos, not only in her role as First Lady, but
also in her role of a simple wife. Thus she reveals herself, sometimes, as a wife concerned about the
health of her husband accompanying him to the hospital for surgery, «the doors opened and C. pale
on the surgery table. I stroked his head» 15 . A specially tender passage is this in which she presents
herself in her role of grandmother. During her official visit to Paris, she received an unexpected visit
by her granddaughter Elli, who was studying in Paris. After bringing flowers to the grave of Stelios
Seferiadis, the Greek First Lady accompanied her granddaughter to her student room in the Latin
Quarter and we can see the image of the wife of the President of the State uphill accompanied by her
bodyguard, the steep scale to her granddaughter’s student room.
There were two trips that the author made in her life and that inspired two of her literary works
Hours of Sinai and Hindsight respectively: the first trip was at Mount Sinai in 1980 and the second in
Jerusalem in 1984.
In the prologue of Hours of Sinai, she stands out that her intention is to provide information about
Saint Catherine's Monastery for the reader. That is the reason why she makes an exhaustive
description of the monastery and its history from its founding. She had travelled to the Monastery in
a difficult moment because of the controversy between Israelis and Egyptians for possession of the
Sinai, to emphasize, as the wife of the Greek President, that the Monastery belonged to Orthodox
Greece. At the end of the book she includes several letters, which highlight the important role that
she carried out in this matter.
In her last work Kidathineon 9, she speaks about a lot of intellectual people of letters, whom she
had a friendship with. When she speaks about her wide circle of friends, she is implicitly speaking
about her own personality. Although she does not make mention of this fact, it has been said that
Ioanna Tsatsos was the centre of intellectual meetings at Kidatineon 9.
In this work, she speaks also about her daughters and grandchildren, presenting them proudly, so
that we can find the two aspects that we find in her whole work: autobiography and history. Her
work has an evident historicity and the author presents herself as a personality into the historical and
intellectual context of Greece. She is an attentive observer and analyst of historical events. Thus, in
the early twentieth century she is attentive to policy Venizelos, whom her father collaborated with.
Later she presents herself alongside other historical personalities such as Archbishop Damaskinos,
Constantine Karamanlis, Constantine Tsatsos or heroes of the Occupation as Georgios Kartalis or
Dimitrios Psaros. In the intellectual sphere, she presents herself as the centre of the gatherings of
Kidatineon 9, but also as an intellectual, alluding to her own literary production and assisting to the
process of translation of her works. In relation to the autobiography she presents herself first of all as
George Seferis' sister and later as a wife, a mother and a grandmother. Once more, her
autobiography is combined with historical events.
As we can see, literature supposes to Ioanna Tsatsos' a way of expressing her own conscience and
to give an evidence of the time she lived, so that each of the autobiographical episodes she narrates
is also an episode of the history of Greece.
In this sense, her work may be taken as a historical perspective. We could even say that works
such as The Sword´s Fierce Edge, or Moments and Memories are, without any doubt, a real historical