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Greeks finally honour poet Byron

The poet whose verse was more feared by the Ottoman Empire than insurgents’ bullets has won the belated honour of a “day of celebration” in the country he romanticised, Greece.

Nearly 200 years after George Gordon, Lord Byron, invoked the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae to “dream that Greece might still be free,” the government in Athens has announced a Byron day on the anniversary of the writer’s death.

Readings, drama, and school outings will celebrate the role of the British peer, who partly redressed a reputation for bisexual immorality by dying while preparing to serve in the Greeks’ revolutionary navy. More practically, he used his inherited fortune as the 6th Lord Byron to fit out the rebels’ fleet.

The new feature of the modern Greek calendar will fall on April 19, the date Byron died in 1824 at Messolonghi in Western Greece. He had chosen a high profile target to attack in the shape of the Ottoman fortress at Lepanto, scene of the greatest naval defeat ever suffered by the Sultan’s forces, in 1571.

Inaugurating Byron day in Parliament, the Greek government said the initiative would burnish the memory of “a man who believed deeply in democratic values and Hellenism.” Byron already has an archipelago of more modest memorials in Greece, including a chair-shaped rock on Cephalonia where he used to watch the sunset, sometimes clad in a nationalist uniform which was partly Greek and partly Scottish tartan.

Greeks admire him for his fury at Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon marbles. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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Greeks finally honour poet Byron

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