Who was Hermes?

Hermes was the   messenger of the gods of Greek mythology. He was also the transmitter of souls, the one who lead the souls of the dead to Hades  (as we learn in the  Odyssey ), but he was also the patron of Thieves, Games of chance and Commerce. According to the prevailing myth , his father was  Zeus  and his mother  Maia , one of the  Pleiades , the daughters of  Atlas , the giant who held the sky on his back.

Why … Hermoupolis?

After the catastrophe of Chios and the conquest of the eastern islands of the Aegean by the Ottomans, Syros opened its arms and accepted all the persecuted Greeks of these islands, offering them a new homeland, itself enjoying a beneficial neutrality and protected by the agreements between the West and the Pope of Rome with the Ottomans, since its inhabitants were Catholics.

Within this context, the new inhabitants, in a few years after their settlement, managed to create a new city having as their weapons, their determination, their industriousness and their commercial spirit and to make Syra the first commercial port and the first industrial city of the Greek territory of that time.

The assembly for the naming took place in the forecourt of the Orthodox Cathedral  Church of the Transfiguration of the Savior, just four years after their arrival in this new place, in 1826.

And it became Polis…Hermoupolis

“…Gentlemen, under the auspices of Hermes, Curator of Commerce, this city was founded and promoted, I think it is fair and proper for this reason to dedicate it to Kerdoon Hermes (the Lucrative) and to give it the name “Hermoupolis”.

(Loukas Rallis – Prominent citizen of Syra society, originally from Chios, who later served as Mayor of Piraeus from 1855 to 1866 offering important work as well.)

Hermoupolis! Hermoupolis! Everyone’s voices echoed everywhere and from then on the name of the new city “Hermoupolis” was established!