On March 19, 1996, Elytis, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature of 1979, passed away. "To Axion Esti" is his main work, which was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and which he referred to as the "Bible of Greece." It is more than that: it is a book for humanity. The Greek poetry of antiquity, the Psalms of the Bible, the Orthodox liturgy, the folk poetry of the Balkans, the symbolist and surrealist modernity of Western Europe—these are the sources from which the linguistic artistry of "To Axion Esti" draws. It is an art of high poetic pathos, as can be found in Europe only in Greece.