On 10 May 1936 the 27-year old Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos saw a newspaper photograph of a woman weeping over the body of her son, a Thessaloniki tobacco-factory worker killed by police during a strike. Two days later the Communist Party newspaper Rizospastis published a long poem by Ritsos. Dedicated `to the heroic workers of Thessaloniki' and drawing on the sixth-century Greek Orthodox Epitaphios Thrinos, the poem combines Mary's lament at Christ's tomb with popular Greek folk traditions of resurrection and Spring to create a universal lament sung by every bereaved mother. This is the first time Epitaphios has been published in book form in English. Translated from the Greek by Rick Newton.