Vitsentzos Kornaros

Almost all we know for certain comes from the last lines of the poem, where the poet names himself: Vitsentzos, of the Kornaros family, born in Sitia, married in Kastro, the Venetian capital of Crete that is today Heraklion. Scholars now broadly accept that he was Vincenzo Cornaro, born in 1553 at Trapezonda, an estate near Sitia, into a family of Venetian origin that had lived on the island for generations and spoke Greek as its mother tongue.

Around 1590 he moved to Candia, where he married Marietta Zeno, held public offices during the plague years of the 1590s and belonged to the Accademia degli Stravaganti, a literary society founded by his brother Andrea. This was the world of the Cretan Renaissance: Crete had been Venetian since 1211, and its educated class read Ariosto and Tasso while hearing Greek folk songs in the streets. He died in Candia in 1613 or 1614, half a century before the Ottomans took the city after a twenty-one-year siege.

Some scholars have doubted the identification, since the name was common among the island's nobility, and the question of whether he also wrote the religious drama Η Θυσία του Αβραάμ (The Sacrifice of Abraham) is still open. What is not in doubt is that a single poet produced, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the finest long poem in Greek between Homer and modern times.

Ερωτόκριτος (Erotokritos) is a romance in five parts and about 10,000 rhyming fifteen-syllable verses, the metre of Greek folk song, written in the Cretan dialect. Erotokritos, son of the king's counsellor, loves Aretousa, daughter of Herakles, king of Athens. He serenades her secretly at night; the king holds a joust in which he defeats the knights of the Greek world; when he dares to ask for her hand, the king exiles him. Aretousa refuses every other suitor and is thrown into a dungeon. Then the Vlachs invade, and a dark-skinned stranger, Erotokritos disguised by a magic potion, saves Athens in single combat. He tests Aretousa's faithfulness, reveals himself, and the poem ends with their wedding.

The plot is borrowed from a French medieval romance, Paris et Vienne, probably through an Italian version, but Kornaros rebuilt it entirely: the setting is an imaginary ancient Athens, the characters think and speak like Cretan villagers, and the moral centre is the constancy of the lovers against fortune's wheel. Long passages are monologues of love and grief that stand on their own as songs.

The language is rich and musical, full of proverbs and images from nature, and it is the reason the poem survived: it was printed in Venice in 1713, but Cretans had long since learned it by heart.

Erotokritos is sung in Crete to this day, in the slow, winding melody of the Cretan lyra, and couplets from it are used as μαντινάδες at weddings and feasts. Listen to Nikos Xylouris's 1976 recording of the opening lines, or Psarantonis's rougher version, and you will hear why. Extracts, usually Aretousa's farewell or the joust, are in the Greek Lyceum literature anthology, and Seferis devoted an essay to the poem. In Sitia a summer festival, the Κορνάρεια, carries his name, and in Heraklion the square called Πλατεία Κορνάρου has a modern sculpture of Erotokritos and Aretousa. The opening line, Του Κύκλου τα γυρίσματα, is as familiar to Greeks as the first line of a national anthem.

• The poem was written around 1600–1610 but first printed in Venice only in 1713; for a century it circulated in manuscript and by voice.
• Kornaros names himself in the poem's epilogue; this is almost the only biographical document we have about him.
• The story is set in ancient Athens, yet the heroes fight a joust, the medieval sport of knights, and the king's enemies are the Vlachs.
• Kornaros's family spoke Greek although it was of Venetian noble origin; the Cornaro were one of the oldest families in Venice.