Google with today’s Doodle has decided to honor the great Greek poet, Dionysios Solomos. The biggest search engine of the world did not forget the 216th anniversary since Solomos’s birthday and the today’s doodle depicts a woman figure upon the sea that the Greek poet mentions in his work “The Cretan.” The work describes the story of a Cretan who left from Crete after the revolution was lost in 1826, the shipwreck and his efforts to save his beloved from the tempest. A central point in the work is the apparition of an oracle, the Feggarontymeni (meaning the one dressed by the moon).
A few words about the poet
Dionysios Solomos was born 216 years ago, on April 8, 1798 in Zakynthos, as the illegitimate child of a wealthy count, Nikolaos Solomos and his housekeeper, Angeliki Nikli.
He is a famous Greek poet, best known for writing the Hymn to Liberty, of which the first two stanzas became the Greek National Anthem in 1865.
Dionysios Solomos is the main figure of the so-called Hepatanese School of poetry. He is considered as Greece’s national poet not only because he wrote the Greek National Anthem, but also because he contributed to the preservation of the earlier poetic tradition and highlighted its usefulness to the modern literature. In addition, he was the first to use the demotic Greek.
Other great poems of his are “The Cretan”, “The Free Besieged” and “O Porfyras”. A characteristic of his work is that none of his poems were completed, except of course the Hymn to Liberty, and none were published during his lifetime. Solomos died in February 1857 from apoplexy.
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