Museum of Solomos and Eminent Zakynthians

The Museum of Solomos and Eminent Zakynthians on Solomos Square commemorates Dionysios Solomos, the island's most famous son, who wrote the poem that became the Greek national anthem. The museum occupies a neoclassical building that replaced the one destroyed in 1953 and holds manuscripts, personal belongings, portraits, and editions of Solomos's work alongside material relating to other notable Zakynthians.

The museum also covers Andreas Kalvos, another major 19th-century Greek poet who spent much of his life in exile, and includes a display on the Renaissance humanist Andreas Vesalius, who died on Zakynthos in 1564 while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. For visitors with an interest in Greek literary and cultural history, the museum gives a good sense of the island's outsized role in the 19th-century Greek national awakening.

things to do museum
A story
Dionysios Solomos wrote the Hymn to Liberty in 1823, a 158-stanza poem inspired by the Greek War of Independence. Only the first two stanzas were set to music — and those became the Greek national anthem. Full versions are essentially never performed. Solomos wrote almost entirely in Greek rather than Italian, which was the literary language of educated Zakynthians, a deliberate political as much as artistic choice.

Other places in Things to Do