Erotokritos is a romantic epic, comprising 10,052 fifteen-syllable rhymed verses, composed by Vitzentzos Kornaros, most likely in the early 17th century.

Although it first appears as a written piece, by a literate poet working with non-Greek sources, the poem clearly grows out of a tradition of creating long poetic narratives for oral performance. That is the way it survives still in parts of Crete, where it has become the preferred regional epic, and where some of the older generation can still perform the entire composition from memory. Many, if not most of those who can recite large portions of the poem have never read it; their knowledge comes soley from the oral tradition that the romantic epic seems to have created soon after its publication.

Seen from another perspective, the oral performance of Erotokritos and its written form are co- dependent phenomena, continually interacting over the last three centuries. The high literary Modernist tradition has also on occasion celebrated the early modern poem: "Upon a Foreign Verse" by Nobel prize-winning poet George Seferis (1931) in which the poet's vision of Odysseus, summoned through the rhythm of sea and verse, reminds him in turn of old sailors "who told me, in my childhood years, the song of Erotokritos, with tears in their eyes."

Go back to September 12, 2002, the Museum and the Home

Georgios Hadzidakis recites Erotokritos as part of his welcome

erotokritos greeting.mov

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