Kostis Palamas

Palamas was born in Patras on 13 January 1859. Both his parents died when he was about seven, and he was sent to Missolonghi, the town of the famous siege of 1826, to be raised by an uncle. The lagoon and the memory of the Greek War of Independence stayed with him for life. In 1875 he went to Athens to study law at the university, but he soon gave up the law for journalism and poetry, writing articles and reviews for newspapers to earn a living.

His first collection, Τα τραγούδια της πατρίδος μου (The Songs of My Homeland), appeared in 1886, and with Georgios Drosinis and other young writers he formed what is now called the New Athenian School, the generation of 1880 that turned away from the stiff romantic verse of the previous decades. In 1887 he married Maria Valvi; they had three children. The death of the youngest, Alkis, in 1898 at the age of four produced Ο Τάφος (The Tomb), a cycle of short, simple laments. From 1897 Palamas was Secretary General of the University of Athens, a post he held for about thirty years, writing in the evenings in his house on Asklipiou Street.

He was a founding member of the Academy of Athens in 1926 and became its president in 1930, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times without winning it. He died in Athens on 27 February 1943, during the German occupation, aged eighty-four.

The poem most people have heard without knowing it is the Ολυμπιακός Ύμνος (Olympic Hymn). Palamas wrote it for the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, Spyros Samaras set it to music, and since 1958 it has been the official anthem of the Olympic movement, played at every opening ceremony.

His major works are long poems built from ideas. Ασάλευτη Ζωή (Life Immovable, 1904) contains lyrical sequences on ancient Greece, the Greek landscape and the poet's own task. Ο Δωδεκάλογος του Γύφτου (The Twelve Lays of the Gypsy, 1907), set around the fall of Constantinople in 1453, follows a gypsy musician who rejects work, homeland, religion and love in turn, and finds freedom and meaning only in his art. Η Φλογέρα του Βασιλιά (The King's Flute, 1910) is a Byzantine epic: a flute carved from an emperor's bone tells of Basil II's pilgrimage to the Parthenon, then a church of the Virgin, and binds ancient Athens, Byzantium and modern Greece into one story. He also wrote the novella Θάνατος παλληκαριού (Death of a Brave Young Man, 1891) and the play Τρισεύγενη (1903).

His style is rhetorical and musical, with long rhymed lines, learned references and strong rhythms, very different from the dry voice of his contemporary Kavafis. His lasting cause was language: he wrote in demotic, the spoken Greek, and defended it against katharevousa in essays and polemics for decades, which is why schoolbooks present him as the poet who made demotic respectable.

Listen to the Olympic Hymn at the next opening ceremony: the Greek words are his, and every Greek pupil learns the first line, «Αρχαίο Πνεύμα αθάνατο». His funeral on 28 February 1943 is one of the stories of the occupation: thousands followed the coffin to the First Cemetery of Athens, the crowd sang the national anthem in front of German and Italian officers, and Angelos Sikelianos read his poem «Ηχήστε οι σάλπιγγες» (Sound the trumpets), with the line «on this coffin leans Greece». The short poem he wrote for Greek youth in 1940, «μεθύστε με τ' αθάνατο κρασί του Εικοσιένα» (get drunk on the immortal wine of 1821), is quoted at every 25 March school celebration. His house at Asklipiou 3 in Athens is the Kostis Palamas Foundation, and the house where he grew up in Missolonghi is a small museum; almost every Greek town has an Odos Palama.

• The Olympic Hymn he wrote in 1896 was only adopted as the official anthem of the Games in 1958, fifteen years after his death.
• He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times in the 1920s and 1930s, more often than any other Greek writer, and never won.
• He ran the administration of the University of Athens for about thirty years while writing some of the longest poems in Modern Greek.
• At his funeral in 1943 the mourners sang the Greek national anthem in defiance of the occupying troops; the day is remembered as the first mass protest of the occupation.