Exhibition for June at Yakovateio library
GERASIMOS MAVROGIANNIS: A COLLECTION OF POEMS
Panagi St. in the archive. Patrikiou from the Yakovate Library is a poetry edition of Gerasimos Mavroyiannis’ Poetical Collection, published in Athens in 1858.G. Mavroyyannis was born in 1823 in the village of Kurkoumelata in Livatos. He joined liberal circles from a young age and soon became an active member of the Municipal Store, a political club of radicals in Argostoli. The origin and adoption of the name “Radical” is due to the fact that in 1849, in a letter to Philleftero, in response to the Corfu reformist “Patris” newspaper, he signed himself as “Radical Kefallin” and “Almost all of us in Kefallinia are such radicals.”
During the British Protectorate he published mainly patriotic poems, some of which were set to music by Nick, while publishing in radical newspapers. Tzanni was read at national events of Metaxas and liberal and radical clubs. Among them, the “Radical Enthusiast” (1849), composed by the above composer and which became the Anthem of the Radicals, occupied a prominent place. In the next period, he moved to the field of unionists, where he was a strong activist.
For economic/livelihood reasons, he settled in Athens and in 1861-1862 he published the newspaper “Voice of Freedom”. He was among the twenty deputies Kefalonia sent to the Second Greek Revisionist National Assembly (1863–1864), and was also elected as a member of parliament for the Krania region of Kefalonia in the 1865 elections. He was the consul of Greece in Marseille and Trieste and taught at the “School of Arts” for about three years. In the last years of his life, he settled in Corfu, where he continued to read and write. He died there in 1906.
G. Mavroyiannis was engaged in painting and studied with his father, a painter-hagiographer. He was an eminent technical critic and theorist of art in general, and his studies on it were published in Athenian journals. His two-volume historiography, The History of the Ionian Islands from 1797 to 1815, published in Athens in 1889, remains valuable.
He also wrote and published poetry collections. In general, his poetry was influenced by the Athenian school, of course, he did not lose the characteristics of the Iptan school. In Kefalonia in 1848 he published a collection of verse works and the following year a collection of Lyrical poems, and in Athens in 1858 a Poetical Collection, in which some of the patriotic poems from his earlier collections were republished together with newer epic and love poems, the following year Lyrical Poems.
Petros Petratos