remains of the original number of works, yet the ones we do hold today were famous enough to have existed in enough copies to survive. The most well known oral songs were written down and copied in great numbers, the most exceptional case being the Digenes Akritas which was well known even in Western Europe, outside the Byzantine Empire. The most important Acritic romances are: Digenes Akritas (Διγενής Ακρίτας) Andronicus' Steed (Ο Ανδρόνικος και ο Μαύρος του) Son of Andronicus (Ο υιός του Ανδρόνικου) Song of Armouris (Το άσμα του Αρμούρη) Legacy Acritis, as a representation of Acritic poetry, is greatly influential in modern Greek literature. Besides its prose of popular idiom which went on to influence and shape modern Greek, the poems themselves were nationalistic enough in character that they became a symbol of Greek continuity. Byzantine nationalism during the formation of the Greek state and in the age of the new "Megali Idea" was widened and intensified. Kostis Palamas, among the greatest of Greek poets, was preparing his own version of Digenis Acrites before his death. Byzantine history as part of Greece's wider history derives from historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos and it is that which inspired Palamas in one of his poems ("Iambs and Anapaests") to praise the hero of Digenis Acrites as the connecting link between the Greece of the Greco-Persian Wars and the 1821 Greek Revolution: With the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) signaling the death of the "Megali Idea", and along with population exchange that emptied Anatolia of Greeks, the legend of Akritas was weakened, although not completely erased. After World War II, Nikos Kazantzakis planned on writing his own poem centered on Acritas, who this time would not be the personification of a nation but of the higher and continuous spiritual fight of man. Its historical context would not be Byzantine. Sources Byzantine culture