ECHOES OF 1821
Owing to certain circumstances, I was not living with my immediate
family, but was under the care of my father’s uncle. He and I lived
on one of those islands that rise high above the Sea of Marmora; and
our near horizon was the Asiatic coast of Turkey, which stretched
itself in the blue waters like a beautiful odalisk. We lived in an old
huge house, which belonged to him, and was far away from any other
habitation. The sea was in front, the mountains behind, and thick
woodland on the other two sides.
From the time I could remember my uncle conversed with me as if I were
grown-up, yet I felt that he held me in contempt because I was a girl
and could not carry arms. Life contained nothing for him beyond the
hope of waging warfare against the Turks.
He had been only a lad in 1821 when the Greeks had risen in desperation
to throw off the Mussulman yoke. Enlisting among the first, he had
fought during the entire nine years. Subsequently he fought in every
one of the uprisings of Crete. When not fighting, he was back in
Turkey, in his home, where he thought, studied, and sometimes wrote
inflammatory articles for the Greek reviews.
At times he had tremendous physical suffering, mementoes of his many
battles. On those days I did not see him. He possessed that noble and
rare quality of being ashamed of his bodily ailments. But after my
fifth birthday I was present on many days when mental anguish possessed
him. On such days he would stride up and down his vast gloomy rooms,
talking of the Greek race and of the yoke under which so large a part
of it was living.
He would stand by the window and tell me about Crete, pointing, as if
the island were visible from where he stood--and I believe that in
spite of the distance, he actually saw it, for it was ever present in
his mind, and he knew every corner of it.
“There it lies,” he would say, “lapped by the waves of the
Mediterranean; but were the mighty sea to pass over it, it could not
wash away the noble Cretan blood which drenches it. It is soaked with
it, and it will be blood-soaked until the Mussulman yoke has been
wrenched from it--or till there is no more Cretan blood to shed.”
Or he would cry out: “Don’t you hear the shrieks of the Cretan women
as they leap into the foaming sea, holding fast to their hearts
their little ones? Yes! they would rather meet their death in the
merciless but clean sea, than fall, living, into the hands of the vile
Turkish soldiery. Oh! my God--my Christian God--how can you permit it?”
He would bow his head on his arms and remain motionless, until the
feeling which was choking him had passed. Then, in a subdued tone, he
would resume:
“Crete! Crete! brave, indomitable Crete--always victorious, yet always
handed back to the Turks by Christian Europe. My beautiful Crete, when
shalt thou be free?”
It was on such days that he exhorted me to remember the little Greek
flag he had given me, and all that it stood for. On other days, when he
was calmer, he took me systematically with him through the entire nine
years of the Greek revolution, and by him I was carried through all its
glorious battles.
He had fought first under the leadership of Marco Bozaris, and he
entertained for this heroic chief an admiration amounting to worship.
“We were only a handful, mostly lads, at first,” he would say, with a
happy smile on his saddened face. “Yes, we were mostly lads, and Marco
himself a little over thirty. But how we did obey him, and how we did
fight!”
Here he would lose himself in memory for a while.
“I can see Marco now, seated cross-legged on the ground, a crude map of
his own make before him, we bending over him. ‘Here, boys,’ he would
say, pointing to the map, ‘here is where we fight the Turks to-morrow,
and by night time we shall carry our holy flag farther along. We do--or
we die!’ Then the handful of us would kneel and kiss the flag, and
swear by to-morrow to carry it farther along--or to die. And we always
carried it farther along.”
He described Marco Bozaris so vividly to me, that when one day he
showed me a picture which he had smuggled into Turkey for my benefit, I
instantly cried: “Why that is the great Bozaris--your Marco!”
I believe that I never pleased him more in my life than by this. He
actually kissed me.
Next to Bozaris, the man he admired and talked of most was the intrepid
mariner, Constantin Kanaris.
“The Turkish fleet was blazing with lights,” he told me, “for the
Kabitan Pasha was celebrating. One of the warships was filled with
Greek maidens, ranging from twelve to eighteen years. They had been
carried off that day without distinction of class or name. The
daughters of the great Greek chieftains and of the commonest sailors
had been herded together, and brought on this battleship to be made the
victims of the night.
“Word of this had come to us. We sat gloomily around a rude wooden
table, saying not a word. Then Constantin Kanaris spoke, his voice
hoarse, his face terrible to look at:
“‘Take them away we cannot--unless God sends us ships from heaven at
this minute. But if we cannot take them away, we can at least send them
to God, pure as he has given them to us.’
“We listened breathless, while he unfolded to us his daring plan. He
would go out in a small row-boat to the battle-ship alone. ‘Never fear!
I may not come back--but the battle-ship will be blown up.’
“He left us--so dumb with despair that for a long, long time none of us
spoke. Hours passed since he had gone; then a far distant boom made the
still air to tremble, and we, rushing to the shore, saw the sky bathed
in burning colours.
“We lads were for shouting for joy, but at the sight of the older men,
whose heads hung low on their breasts, we remembered that none yet knew
whose were the daughters just sent to God. Each father there, maybe,
had a child to mourn.”
My uncle’s friendship lasted as long as Kanaris lived, and at times he
went to see him in Greece. Once he reproached me bitterly for having
been born a few years too late to be taken to the home of Kanaris, to
behold the great chieftain and to be blessed by him.
After the untimely death of Marco Bozaris at Karpenissi, my grand-uncle
fought under other great leaders, until in turn, in the last three
years of the revolution, he himself became a leader.
Of his own exploits he never spoke. He entrusted this task to
posterity. It was of this and that other leader he loved to speak, and
as his narrative progressed all the names which have immortalized the
modern history of Greece passed before me--passed before me not as
names from a book, but as men of flesh and blood, in their everyday
aspects as well as in their heroic moments.
And I, seated on my little stool, with the big book I had brought him
to read me still unopened on my lap, would listen enthralled, wishing
that I might have lived when my uncle had, and might with him have
kneeled in front of Marco Bozaris, to kiss the Greek flag, and to swear
that I would do or die.
One day when he was more violent than usual against the Turks--when
he almost wept at the thought of living under the Turkish yoke--an
inspiration came to me.
“Uncle!” I cried, “why do we live here? Why don’t we go to live where
the Greek flag flies?”
Abruptly he stopped in his walk before me, his tall, thin figure erect,
his eyes aflame.
“Go away from here?” he cried. “Go away from here, and be a traitor?
Yes, that is what so many thousands did in 1453. They abandoned their
hearths and the graves of their ancestors. They abandoned their lands
and their schools, and above all they abandoned St Sophia. To go away
from here is to forsake our country--for ever to relinquish it to the
conqueror. We must stay _here_!” he thundered, “and bear with our
_patrida_ the yoke of slavery, till the day shall come, when again
strong, we shall rise to break that yoke, and hear again a Christian
priest in St Sophia!”
I was seven years old when he died; yet I felt almost as old as he.
Having never seen other children, and therefore having never shared in
childish frolics, my world consisted of the woes of Greece.
His death was a terrible shock to me, and yet I cannot say that I quite
understood what death meant. For days and days I pondered as to where
he was, and whether he were comfortable or not. I saw his body, wrapped
in a huge Greek flag, the icon of his patron saint clasped in his cold
hands, lowered to rest beside the men of his family, who, like him, had
lived and died under the Turkish yoke.