Fodor's Expert Review Cavafy Museum

Constantine Cavafy was ignored during his lifetime but has received international recognition since his death in 1933. His poetry, which focused on such themes as moral dilemmas and uncertainty about the future, resonated with the Greek-speaking community around the Eastern Mediterranean and has been widely translated. His poems, which include "The God Abandons Antony," and, most famously, "The City," are suffused with melancholy and a sense of alienation.

The small flat where Cavafy spent the last years of his life has been turned into a museum. Half of it is given over to a re-creation of his home, with a period-piece brass bed and some reputedly genuine Christian icons. On the walls is a collection of portraits and sketches of Cavafy that only the most vain of men could have hung in his own apartment. The other half of the museum houses newspaper clippings about the poet's life and a library of his works, in the many languages and permutations in which they were published after his death—a remarkable legacy for a man who lived so quietly. There is, as well, a room dedicated to a student of Cavafy named Stratis Tsirkas, who lived in Upper Egypt and wrote a massive trilogy set in the Middle East. And there is one last curiosity: a cast of Cavafy's death mask lying cushioned on a purple pillow.