Acritic Songs - Legacy

Legacy

Acritis, as a representation of acritic poetry, is greatly influential in modern Greek literature. Besides its prose of popular idiom which went on to influence and shape modern Greek, the poems themselves were nationalistic enough in character that they became a symbol of Greek continuity. Byzantine nationalism during the formation of the Greek state and in the age of the utopian new Greek Great Idea was widened and intensified. Kostis Palamas, among the greatest of Greek poets, was preparing his own version of Digenis Acrites before his death. Byzantine history as part of Greece's wider history derives from historian Constantine Paparregopoulus and it is that which inspired Palamas in one of his poems ("Iambs and Anapaests") to praise the hero of Digenis Acrites as the connecting link between Greece of the Persian Wars and Greece of 1821:

Ο Ακρίτας είμαι, Χάροντα,
δέν περνώ μέ τά χρόνια,
Είμ' εγώ η ακατάλυτη ψυχή τών Σαλαμίνων,
στήν Εφτάλοφην έφερα το σπαθί τών Ελλήνων.

It is I, Acritas, O Death;
years can't fade me away.
I'm the indestructible soul of Salamis,
bringing the sword of the Greeks to the Sevenhill.

With the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) signaling the death of the Greek Great Idea, and along with population exchange that emptied Asia Minor of Greeks, the legend of Acritas was weakened, although not completely erased. After the Second World War, Nikos Kazantzakis planned on writing his own poem centered on Acritas, who this time would not be the personification of a nation but of the higher and continuous spiritual fight of man. Its historical context would not be Byzantine.