Abstrakt

The author concentrates upon the symbolic connection between the Garden and the Death in Modern Greek culture and literature beginning with the real garden of Empress Sissy, Achilleion, which after the tragic death of her son prince Rudolph underwent a sudden change from locus amoenus to a cemetery-like hermitage. Then the author passes on to Missolunghi Heroon to analyse Kostis Palamas’s poem Young Girl on the tomb of Marcus Botsaris (He Pedoula) full of motifs and allusions both to the ancient learned tradition and to the Modern Greek folk-songs. The traditional popular image of the Other World is clearly akin to the one known from the Homeric epic, a Medieval Byzantine poem Digenis Akritas or a Cretan Renaissance katabasis poem Apokopos by Bergadis. It finds its most original realization in the Greek folk songs −moirologia, where the popular imagination has created highly emotional descriptions of the horrible garden of Charos − Death, where deceased children “grow” as flowers, dead youths as trees and elders serve as its fence.