The world-famous poet Alexander Petofi was born on January 1, 1823 in Kiskőrös. The career of this young man who died at the early age of 26 has become a literary, political and human legend for the Hungarian people, and a symbol of Hungary, primarily in Europe but also for the entire world. Within the poet’s seven short years as a writer one can find practically a century of change and development in European literature, like the stations of the cross. The child of simple parents, it was only thanks to his own strength and genius that through his poetic and prose creations he entered the blood circulation of initially Hungarian and then European literature. He was a driving personality in the March 15 1848 bloodless Hungarian bourgeois revolution. He fell fighting for freedom, leaving a seven-and-a-half year-old male child and a twenty-year-old widow.
Since his death his personality and life’s work have served as a model to different ages and peoples, and his poems have been translated into more than fifty languages.
