Page 316 - Beholding Liberty!

II.8.Β
Byron the Grecian
«If I am a poet,
the air of Greece has made me one»
Lord Byron
LORD BYRON (George Gordon Byron, 6th baron Byron, 1788-1824), British poet and politician, developed into a fer- vent Philhellene and emblematic figure of 1821. He had visit- ed Greece already in the pre-evolution period (1809) and had drawn inspiration from the land, the history but also its people for important works, such as the Curse of Minerva (which he composed in Athens in 1810) and the Pilgrimage of Childe Har- old’s Pilgrimage (1812), that «made him famous overnight».
His work Giaour (1813), a romantic story set in an orientalising scenery, will become a symbol of the Struggle of the Christian Greeks against the Muslim Ottomans and will inspire dozens of visual recreations of it.
Byron, accepting a proposition of a Greek delegation for ac- tive support, came in 1823 to Greece, settled in Missolonghi, a city that was identified with him, and created a private armed corps of Souliots. At the same time, he promoted the Greek cause, through the network of his acquaintances and aided economically the Struggle. On 19 April 1824, at the age of just 37, he died and the whole of Missolonghi grieved for his death.
The dynamic personality and stormy life of Byron, incarnation of the romantic man, rendered the hero-symbol internationally recognizable. His figure served as personification of the Greek Revolution, was praised and depicted in dozens of written and visual artworks.
316 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!
II.8.B.1
Lord Byron
The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale.
The fourteenth edition.
London: Printed for John Murray, Albemarle-Street. 1815. Library of the Hellenic Parliament
LORD BYRON had already published, before the outbreak of the Greek Revolution, a series of works explicitly or implicitly related to Greece, including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [cat. no I.1.7], The Curse of Minerva [cat. no I.1.9] and a number of Greece-related poems [cat. no I.1.8].
This is the experiential, emotional, ideological and chronological context of The Giaour, a fragmentary narrative poem conceived