The Giaour - A Fragment of a Turkish Tale

A woman drowned for loving the wrong man, a Turkish lord cut down in revenge, and a Christian stranger left to live with it: the first of Byron's Turkish tales.

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) had not long come home from two years in Greece and the Levant, and The Giaour grew out of what he saw there. Leila is thrown into the sea in a sack for her unfaithfulness; Hassan, who ordered it, is killed by the giaour – an unbeliever, in Turkish – who then ends his days in a monastery, unable to repent and unable to forget. John Murray published it in 1813. It went through fourteen editions in two years and swelled from about seven hundred lines to more than thirteen hundred as Byron kept adding to it.

He built the poem as a fragment and handed it to three voices in turn – a Turkish fisherman, a monk, and the giaour himself – so that the same events reach us twice over from opposite sides of a religious divide. The lines move fast, in short irregular runs of rhyme that suit a story told in pieces. In one passage the fisherman curses the giaour to rise from his grave and prey on his own family, which makes this one of the earliest appearances of the vampire in English verse, six years ahead of Polidori's The Vampyre and out of the same circle.