International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

71

Greece

Vassilis D.Anagnostopoulos

The Beginnings

The quest of the first roots of the Greek children’s literature leads us to the depths of
antiquity, to the Homeric era and the classical times (fourth and fifth centuries BC).
During the ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras, and during the Turkish
domination of Greece (1453–1821) ‘children’s literature’ comes under the heading of oral
and written tradition.
To the oral tradition belong the popular myths, tales, and children’s songs, such as
‘the swallow’s song’, a song for the coming of spring, variants of which are preserved
today. It appears that children also liked, besides Aesop’s myths, excerpts from Homeric
epics and other popular stories. The oral tradition was enriched, especially during the
Byzantine epoch, by heroic narratives about the Akrites (the guardians of the eastern
borders), prayers, and (mainly) by folk songs. During the period of the Turkish
occupation, the enslaved Greeks preserved their ethnic consciousness and the mother
tongue through lullabies, lyric verses, popular songs, tongue-twisters, and so on. These
constitute the first beginnings of children’s poetry. The oral children’s literature
continued unimpaired until recently, when it seems to have gone into decline.
During antiquity the best-loved reading-matter for children consisted of texts such as
the Homeric epics, Aesop’s myths and the comic poem The Battle of Frogs and Mice.
During Byzantine times the main reading was the Bible, hymns, and legends. Metrical
‘novels’ which had as heroes animals or plants, such as Poulologos [Bird watcher], were
popular although they were not intended for children.
During the period of Turkish and Viennese occupation, ignorance and poverty
prevailed, and children’s reading-texts were scarce. School texts such as Catechism, the
Psalter, and Primers, as well as texts not intended for schools, such as the Lives of
Saints, or the story of the Macedonian Alexander (first published in 1529) the
Characters of Theophrastos, and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were circulating.
During the second half of the eighteenth century the Greeks elsewhere in Europe
(Vienna, Trieste, London, Budapest, Venice and so on) published children’s books which
were sent to schools in Turkish-occupied Greece. These books were largely translations
of such writers as Fenélon, Kampe and De Beaumont; in this way Greek children’s
literature was touched by the European Enlightenment.