Appendix

Dionysios Solomos (8 April 1798 – 9 February 1857) was a Greek poet, best known for writing the poem ‘Hymn to Liberty’, the first two stanzas of which became the national anthem of the Greeks (Greece and Cyprus). A central figure of the Heptanese School, Dionysios Solomos was and is regarded as the national poet of the Greeks, not only because he wrote the National Anthem, but also because he drew upon the earlier poetic tradition (Cretan literature, folk song) and was the first to systematically cultivate the vernacular and pave the way for its use in literature, raising its standard even further. According to his own views, he created ‘from Romanticism combined with Classicism a [...] kind of hybrid, yet legitimate [...]’.Apart from the Hymn to Liberty, his most significant works are: The Cretan, The Free Besieged, Porphyras, The Woman of Zakynthos, and Lambros. The defining feature of his poetic output is its fragmentary nature: none of the poems he wrote after the Hymn to Liberty is complete and, with very few exceptions, none was published by him. Kostas Varnalis aptly described the fragmentary nature of Solomos’s work with the phrase ‘...(Solomos) always wrote them, but he never wrote them down’.