Poetry
Hymn to Liberty
Ύμνος εις την Ελευθερίαν
Dionysios Solomos · 1825
Synopsis
A long song addressed to Liberty, personified as a young woman who rises from the bones of the Greeks and at last stands up against Ottoman rule. The poem hails the uprising, names its battles and its dead, warns the fighters against the discord that would ruin them, and asks the powers of Europe to let Greece regain its freedom.
Context
The poem has one hundred and fifty-eight stanzas and five hundred and seventy-six lines, and was composed in May 1823 in Zakynthos, two years after the start of the uprising, by a man of twenty-five who had only just learned to write in this language: Spyrídon Trikoúpis, future first head of the Greek government, had urged him to give up Italian and taught him Greek again. It addresses Liberty as a person one recognises by her gaze. Three editions followed in 1825, first in Paris and in French, then in London, then in besieged Missolonghi, two years after the writing. Nikólaos Mántzaros set it to music in 1828.
Who it is for
A long poem in short quatrains. Only the first stanzas are well known; the rest is little read.
Prizes and reception
Its first twenty-four stanzas have been the anthem of Greece since 1865 and of Cyprus since 1966, and only the first two are sung.