The Black Sea revisits the "Great Catastrophe" of the Pontic Greeks through a series of “sonnet-monologues” or voices from the past. Priests, prostitutes, soldiers, and a strange collection of characters relive through this poetic revival of imagination a tragic chapter of Greek History.

Based on the author's family history, as well as a fantastical retelling of scenes from the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the poems move from the tragic to the absurd humor and focus on the human madness of war, on suffering, and on uprooting.

Fascinated by the idea of a "hereditary memory of war" and by old family photographs, the poet traveled to the southern coast of the Black Sea, exploring the old Greek villages and monasteries of the Pontians, and traversing landscapes still inhabited by the ghosts of Strabo, Xenophon, and Alexander the Great.

"I am neither a philologist nor a historian, and these texts are certainly not the history of the Black Sea. I do not wish to make nationalist or political statements about an event that marked world history. These here are simply poems about human pain, a tribute to those who were exiled or exterminated, to all the victims of the futility of war." S.P.