The poet of “Erotokritos”, the main exponent of the Cretan Renaissance, is one of the greatest poets of all time and declares in the epilogue of the poem that he was born and wrote in Sitia.

Vicenzos was the youngest son of Iakovos Cornaros. He was born on March 26, 1553, in the village of Trebizond in Sitia, his family’s ancestral estate, and was baptized in the summer of the same year.

He stayed in the area of Sitia, mainly in the villages of Trebizond and Piscokefalo, until 1587-1590, i.e. until he was about thirty-five years old “living the life of a feudal landowner, in a multifaceted world of servants and serfs, who were all Greek Orthodox”. .

Shortly before 1590 he settled in Khandaka near his brother Andreas who was the founder of the Stravaganti Academy, an association of scholars with notable philological and literary activity during the heyday of Cretan Literature. There he marries Marietta Zeno, he actively participates in the public life of Khandaka, while during the terrible plague of 1591-1593 he assumed the duties of sanitary supervisor in the city and district of Khandaka. Financial documents and wills, published by Professor Yiannis Mavromatis, show that the Kornari were linguistically Hellenized.

After his permanent settlement in Khandaka, Vicenzos regularly visited his hometown, Sitia, until his death. In fact, for a long period of time, from the end of 1598 to the end of 1600, he was mainly in the area of Sitia, where he still kept a significant property.

He died in Khandaka after 12 August 1613 and before 24 April 1614 and was buried in the monastery of Saint Francis.

The parents of Iakovos Kornaros and Zambeta (Elisabet) of the former Ioannis Demezzo of Markos, whose marriage contract was drawn up in Sfaka in Sitia in 1542, are buried in the monastery of Agia Ekaterini tis Fragiki in Xoporto (suburb) of Sitia.