NICK VISITS THE ACROPOLIS

 

In Athens, Nick is visiting the ruins of the Acropolis for the very first time. Well, not really, for there exists a dog toothed photograph of him being held in his mother’s lap, she perched precariously upon a reclining column in front of the Parthenon. His miniscule right foot is dangling so that the heel touches the fluted marble. Nick has taken his mother’s word that it is in fact he in the photograph; the picture has been retouched by a hand so expert in symbolism that his image has been stripped of all distinction until it generically represents the approximation of an infant. But he remembers the cool of the marble on the heel of his foot, though he could not have been more than two years of age at the time – a last foothold upon his motherland before the voyage to Australia.

Nick is accompanied by his teenaged son Harrison. Harrison’s head is shaved except for a long top-knot and his blonde features and dark complexion make him a confluence of Mongol and Viking. He displays little interest in Nick’s grand homecoming upon this rock. In order to render the occasion solemn and spiritual, Nick has purchased the services of an expert guide – the archaeologist Mr Petros Malavanis, whose green eyes peer at them behind thick round glasses, as if in astonishment that thee exist kinfolk so estranged, so far across the seas willing to seek meaning in the stones that litter the rock. He twists the sparse amount of graying foliage that still adorns his scalp as he speaks.

Mr Malavanis begins with the premise that nothing is coincidental in this world. Destiny is all and the Greeks were destined for greatness. He offers mathematical proof by way of the fact that measured at the base of the stylobate, the dimensions of the base of the Parthenon are 69.5 metres by 30.0 metres. He adds that the cella was 29.8 metres long by 19.2 metres wide, with internal colonnades in two tiers.

“Shit Dad, do I have to listen to this? I could look it up in Wikipedia instead of getting roasted by the sun,” Harrison complains, digitally manipulating the screen of his telephone.

Nick doesn’t answer. He can relate to stylobates. His father was one. His mother brought him up also, to be, as she said, the “stylobate of your own house.” Everything rests upon a stylobate. Even ruins and the ruins of ruins.

Mr Malavanis is not perturbed by Harrison’s exclamation either. He continues his exposition unabated, for he is one of those few custodians of history that genuinely wish to impart upon their field of expertise, value for money, for their patrons. Thus Nick learns that on the exterior, the Doric columns measure 1.9 metres in diameter and are 10.4 metres high. He is told also that the Parthenon had 46 outer pillars and 23 inner pillars in total.

Nick is a builder by trade and will not accept anyone’s measurements without first checking them with his laser spirit level and tape measure. His father on the other hand, could measure a length just by looking at it so Nick is willing for the sake of argument, to concede that Mr Malavanis’ specifications are correct. Mr Malavanis is now postulating that celestial beings created the universe according to a geometric plan which is why the Parthenon is so perfect. He reveals that Plutarch held that Plato said that God geometrizes continually.” Nick can read a plan better than most, but he cannot conceive of a need for Sacred Geometry.

Nick looks at his son, playing Clash of Clans on his telephone. Mr Malavanis, oblivious, proceeds to divulge that the structural beam on top of the columns is in golden ration proportion height of the columns.  Each of the gridlines is in golden ratio proportion to the one below it so that the third golden ratio grid line from the bottom to the top at the base of the support beam represents a length that is pi cubed, .0236, from the top of the beam to the base of the column.

All this has to be taken at face value, for it would be hard for Nick to assert otherwise. He is too timid to ask whether the gridlines Mr Malavanis is referring to are those denoted by the scaffolding covering the face of the building, for they are the only lines that he can see. But it makes sense. The ancient Greeks were an ingenious people, far above us in intelligence. There is no way we could ever hope to understand their deeds or motives. And the apotheosis of their genius is this remarkable edifice, the image of which Nick has gazed upon every day of his life, in the form of a blue ceramic dish first hanging in his parent’s living room and now in his garage, decorated in low relief, depicting a foustanella-clad evzone blowing his trumpet at the Parthenon, as if rallying its’ still intact columns for an assault upon the present.

With his words, Mr Malavanis evokes an image of the great gold and ivory statue of Athena, sculpted by the genius Pheidias. In Greek, it forms one word, chryselephantine, as if gold and ivory, well not really ivory, but rather, a substance pertaining to and deriving from an elephant, merge together to from one substance, commingled, perfect marble and perfect ivory, without confusion, mutation or separation. Nick is unable to see the statue; Mr Malavanis cannot tell him with absolute certainty whether it was positioned outside, or within the temple. Although Nick suspects that the main purpose of the statue, if it really existed, was the same as the first house with the six bedrooms and five bathrooms he lived in before his divorce – to shock and awe, Mr Malavanis is not able to advise him with certainty, what is was for.

Groups of corpulent bespectacled tourists, bulging in shorts and florid yoga pants circle the building devoutly. From the length of the shorts of their menfolk and their ramrod straight bearing, imbued with the kind of optimism that derives only from the possession of capital, as well as their pronunciation of the ultimate o in their Greek names as oh, this Spirohs, Nick knows them to be American-Greeks. One holds up his arms to the Sun and intones some sort of hymn to Apollo.  There is a darkness on the side of the temple now, and its columns cast a sinister shadow that remind Nick of a cage, or worse still, a jail. Save for the temple itself, and the hymn chanter, it is empty.

“We aren’t quite sure what the sculptures in the Parthenon frieze actually signify,” Mr Malavanis continues. “Generally, it is believed that they depict an idealized version of the Panathenaic procession from the Diplylos Gate in the Kerameikos to the Acropolis, to honour the goddess Athena with a new peplon.” Nick is looking at Harrison, who is standing at the Propylaea, watching tired and hot tourists march labouriously up the twisting path, bearing drink bottles like votive torches. He is conversing nonchalantly with a nubile South American girl, both of them feigning disinterest while sizing up each other’s potential.

Like Nick, most of the frieze sculptures have been removed from the Parthenon. He remembers seeing them in the British Museum while on a trip to England with a party of well to do friends. Nick recalls his friends exclaim in ecstasy when confronted by the teeming mass of marble in the room, whereupon, they all simultaneously shed a tear. He sat and observed them impassively. The only time he was ever moved to tears was when he chanced upon a private garden on the Isle of Capri, separated, delineated, grid-like and traversable with wooden planks, just like that in his parents backyard in Fawkner. He was not sure what these statues meant.

“Other archaeologists theorise that the frieze is based upon Greek mythology,” Mr Malavanis, resumes. “They say that these scenes depict the founding myth of Athens, the sacrifice of Pandora, youngest daughter of Erechtheus to Athena. This was a sacrifice Athena demanded  in order to save the city from Eumolpus, king of Eleusis, who was poised to attack the city. But in actual fact, we don’t really know what it means.”

Nick follows the American tourists with his glance. They are exhausted now and hanker after the creature comforts of the Athens Hilton, having abandoned their search for meaning among the metopes. It makes perfect sense to Nick why his ancestors of old would depict imaginary battles in their buildings. The interplay of interpretation, the multiplicity of allegorical readings, all these things serve to justify, obscure and coerce people to acts of violence that would otherwise be too nauseating to contemplate. Nick muses that he would be unsurprised if it was discovered that the metopes were installed weathered and chipped from the outset, in order to obfuscate the curves of meaning. Conversely, they are also atropopaic, intended to turn away harm of evil. After all they were not Christian and the evil eye had not been invented yet. “She was a good woman, Soula,” Nick laments. “She did not deserve what I did to her. I am a dog.”

In Nick’s mind, Soula, his first wife, assumes the form of a Caryatid, the one that in the architecture of the Acropolis in his mind, is missing from the Parthenon and Nick is disconcerted to learn that his consciousness has conflated the Parthenon with the Erectheion, when he circumambulates the Parthenon and realizes that the Caryatids are not there. They should be. The Erectheion is such an ungainly building.

In response to his question as to who put the Caryatids there and why, Mr Malavanis hastens to reply: “Some say the Erechtheion was built in honour of the legendary hero Ericthonius. Others maintain that it was built in honour of Erectheus, the king of Athens who is mentioned in the Iliad.” Nick muses about the relationship between the Iliad and a restaurant by that name back home which has been open for thirty years and yet never has any customers. “As for the Caryatid porch, some people claim it was built to conceal the giant fifteen foot beam needed to support the southeast corner over the Kekropion, but in terms of the Caryatids themselves, we don’t really know what they mean.”

 “There are caves under the Acropolis, dark places where the ancients revered their gods,” Malavanis tries in vain to maintain Nick’s evidently fading interest by introducing a spooky timbre to his voice. “Why would they need caves to worship their gods when they spent the entire contents of the Delian League’s treasury on temple bling?” Harrison asks smugly, for once, engaged. For Nick, the answer is self-evident. The Acropolis is just like his parent’s home in Fawkner, with the good toilet and kitchen for guests and the outhouse and garage kitchen for daily use. “Certain mysteries were performed in these caves,” Mr Malavanis whispers reverently, “But we aren’t quite sure what they mean.”

As the sun dips lower over the hazy city, casting the marbles in ochre, Nick looks for the overturned column upon which he rested before leaving the land of his birthplace, ostensibly forever. It is not there. But for the photograph he has in his hand and his memory, he would be convinced that it never existed.

“Was there a column lying on its side just about here?” Nick points with his foot. What did life, death, the thread of succession, the delineation of shape mean to a stone? The continuous passage of rocks from outcrop to temple, to church, to watchtower, to mosque, to ammunition store, to fetish object of civilization? Which of them morphed into icons, which came together to form a mihrab, which of the metopes relocated themselves into the wall of the Acropolis to buttress a tottering fortification from attack? Which of them pressed themselves against the heel of a two year old boy in valediction? Nick instinctively knows the need to adore objects, to imbue them with significance and gift them a tongue, to move from one phoneme to another and create words, to recite their names and carve them into a litany of contradictory analogies, as points of colour upon a broader pietra dura. To articulate place, to draw meaning from place, to be stone in place – that desire is irrepressible.

Nick can no longer see Harrison, but he is thinking of the bluestone wall he helped his father to construct in the early eighties on a searing hot summer’s day, with bluestones purloined from the lane-ways of inner-suburban Melbourne, when the answer comes.

“A column lying on its side, here? Possibly, but I don’t understand what you mean?”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 April 2024

THE OTHER TWENTY FIFTH OF MARCH

The Twenty Fifth of March, the day in which the Greek people celebrate the re-genesis of their nation should be a day of jubilation. Regardless as to whether chooses to commemorate the Greek Revolution on 23^rd March, as the Kalamatans do, or on the 24^th of February, when Alexandros Ypsilantis proclaimed the Revolution at the Three Holy Hierarchs Monastery in Iași, Moldavia, or as the vast majority of Greeks do, on the feast day of the Annunciation, one thing is certain: without the principled stand our ancestors took, at great risk, for freedom, equality and tolerance, it is arguable our people would not exist today, save as shadowy remnants of an ever diminishing past.

Yet for me, even as I attend the many ceremonies organised to commemorate the event, even as I ritually dress myself and my children in national costume to participate in our annual national day parade, my sense of pride is invariably tinged with ennui, a sense of uneasiness and deep disquiet. I have been carrying this sense of loss all my life, as if searching for a missing part of me, one that lurks in the background, only to remind me of its absence every March the twenty fifth, by jarring my soul.

I must have been there, that twenty fifth of March, and every twenty fifth of March prior to that, although as far as I know, I was never the recipient of the “aleph,” the mystical document created by a family member and then handed down, written in mystical codes for the purpose of warding off the wiles of Lillith, Adam's first wife.

I must have been there, from the beginning, when my dust was kneaded into a shapeless husk, an unfinished human being, incapable of speech, when the aleph from the word of truth incised upon my forehead was removed, bringing about only death, so that I was unable to hear the command: “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.”

I must have been there, a leaden seal verifying the privileges granted to them by Emperor Andronikos II in 1319, by way of a chrysobull, for on them was set the seal of approval.

That Pesach, there was no hyssop to be found to daub the blood of a slaughtered sheep on the lintels and door posts, so that the Angel of Death could pass over them, for one among the many betrayed them.

On 25 March 1944, the day of Greek Regeneration, the Annunciation which in Greek translates literally as “the giving of the Good News” and of the onset of Jewish Passover, the 2,000 Jews of my mother’s city of Ioannina were gathered by the Nazi occupiers in the town square. Debates had been raging in the community for a while now. Should they take up arms, as some of them had already done so, joining the ranks of the guerillas in the mountains, or did safety and salvation lie, as it had always done, for centuries uncounted, in strict adherence to the law?

It was cold that day, a biting wind picking up the damp of the great lake of Ioannina, a vast brooding repository for the bitterness of the ages, subsuming and sequestering all evidence of man’s ability to be brutal to his own kind within its toxic mud, arising through the reeds that fringed its shores only to throw itself upon the townsfolk’s faces, marking them out as victims. One by one they were torn from their slumber, and given the news, as Esther Stella Cohen remembered:

“I go downstairs, open the door and there was a gendarme. “Read it!" he says. In two hours you are leaving. I close the door on him and go upstairs I knock on my brother's door crying. He gets up, opens the window and that scream is heard, those laments, those knocks on the windows on the doors, the people were deflated, in two hours they had to chew everything they had, what could they take, what could they take?”

Snow was on the ground as they dragged themselves to the square, like lambs to the slaughter. How does one pack up a life within a space of hours? Which memories, what intensity of feeling is shut out and left behind arbitrarily at the last moment, when the suitcase of resolve is deemed overflowing and barely able to shut? Which baggage, cultural, religious or social is deemed worthy of remaining a continuous burden as one looks down at the bed which framed one’s dreams and out at the window that has framed one’s hopes, for the very last time and then passes through the door frame, forgetting to touch the mezuzah, not looking back, never looking back, out into the cobblestoned streets with ice like steel repositories of hatred lurking between their crevices, towards the slaughter-yard? Which prayers, which lamentations, which expositions of law and lore serve to ward off evil as the icy wind penetrates all human endeavour and renders it completely futile?

On that day, 25 March 1944, the Jews of my mother's home-town of Ioannina were herded into the town square and from there, onto trucks where they were transported to Larissa. After a week of privation and suffering, they were forced onto cattle-cars and sent to the death camps of Auschwitz. They arrived there on 11 April 1944. The vast majority, upon arrival, were sent directly to the gas chambers.

My great-grandmother was there on that day, and she couldn’t stop them taking away her friends, our people.  We were all there that day. We shrug our shoulders, lift up our palms skywards and offer condolences, regret the suffering and offer up excuses. What a terrible thing to happen. If only we could have done something. But what could you do? The enemy was too powerful, too terrible.  Of course we should commemorate them, it is such a dark mark upon the copybook of humanity, not outs of course, we weren’t responsible, but how horrific it was. And some of us remember the words of Kolokotronis: “When we decided to make the Revolution, we didn't think about how many of us there were, or that we didn't have weapons, or that the Turks were besieging the castles and cities,…. our desire for our freedom fell upon all of us like rain…and we all resolved  to  this purpose… and made the Revolution,” and others remember the time he said: “People called us crazy. If we were not crazy, we would not have made the Revolution, for we first would have considered the question of munitions,” and we shrug and say “That was different.”

And I remember a young, sickly bespectacled poet, Joseph Eliyah who mercifully died before all this came to pass, writing by flickering candlelight in a room overlooking the field of Death in a poem about Purim:

“Your son won’t be bringing you candles or flowers from shul tonight, mother.  And if your crying is bitter, don’t lament too deeply.  My Fate has been decided, and poverty — poverty, mama – has no feel for sympathy.”

An image of a young woman's outpouring of grief of has haunted me most of my life. Taken by way of historical record by a methodical Nazi, it is housed in the German Federal Archives. She carries nothing with her. Instead, her hands are crossed as she emits a cry of fear and despair. All my life I have contemplated the terrible things that she must have experienced and have agonised over how she met her end.

Just recently, I learn that the girl in the photo has a name: Fani Haim and she was nineteen on that last day. Happily, she was one of the few who survived. Alone of her family, she survived the death camps and returned to our town. Fani married, had children and grandchildren before dying in 2008. If memory serves correctly, she lived near my great-aunt’s house, in the Castle of Ioannina, around the corner from where  Jewish inscription, a revenant of a past that is refused rest, was clearly visible until about a decade ago.

There is a hole in Ioannina and in our hearts, the size of all those who were uprooted and transported to their deaths. They are always with us, for they refuse to leave us, and we cannot forget them. Every twenty fifth of March, Joseph Eliyah appears before me, his book of unfinished poetry wide open:

“It’s Purim tonight!  The thrill and joy of the great feast!

Light in our souls, and a smile on the lips of all.

And I, my orphaned mother, the refuse of exile

Waste away in a chill joyless corner.”

 

There is no other kaddish.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 April 2024

GREEK SCHOOL DAZE

“I’m taking my child out of Greek school,” my hyperventilating friend spluttered in outrage. “I think someone needs to tell the people that run these establishments that this is the twenty first century.”

“You mean in terms of setting Αντιγραφή and Ορθογραφία?” I asked.

“No, I mean the complete absence of any LGBTI role models. My son come home the other day in tears because his teacher told him off for stating that Alexander the Great was gay.”

 

When I on the other hand, mentioned the topic of Alexander’s sexuality to my Greek teacher aeons ago, remained unpunished. By way of reply, he told me instead about Aphroditus, who, originating from Amathus on the island of Cyprus, was a male counterpart to Aphrodite, celebrated in Athens through a transvestite ritual. Depicted with a feminine form and attire resembling Aphrodite's, Aphroditus also possessed a phallus, hence being given a male designation. Apparently, this trans deity arrived in Athens from Cyprus during the fourth century BC. According to Macrobius, part of his worship entailed an exchange of clothing between men and women, with women assuming “male” roles, and men acting as “females."

 

“Well now Queer is completely missing from the Greek narrative,” she complained. “It’s disgraceful. I won’t have any of it.”

 

There is no accounting for what outrages citoyennes who reside in Brighton, but I thought that by way of being emollient, I would set out the benefits of not having one’s son attend Greek School. I referred by way of example to the Homeric Hero Achilles, who prior to becoming infatuated with Patroclus, missed out on hooking up with Helen, the most gorgeous woman ever to walk the Hellespont, simply because he was at Greek School., being tutored along by a half naked old man who was also a horse. At least so maintains the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women which tells the story of of Helen's suitors, explaining that Menelaos won Helen's hand because of the magnitude of his wealth. The fragment, however, does not stop there, explaining the reason why Achilles didn't make the cut:

“Atreus’ war-loving son Menelaos conquered everyone

Because he gave the most gifts. Kheiron took Peleus’ son

of swift feet to wooded Pelion, that most exceptional of men,

when he was still a child. War-loving Menelaos wouldn’t have defeated him

nor would any other Mortal man on the earth who was wooing

Helen if swift Achilles had come upon her when she was still a maiden

As he returned home from Pelion.

But, as it turned out, war-loving Menelaos got her first.”

 

Alexander the Great is the reason why another of my friends pulled her child out of Greek school. “They keep on going on about how he is this great Greek hero and my daughter goes home and tells her dad and it does his head in and he starts yelling at me, saying that they are preaching hatred,” she complains, adding by way of explanation: “He is Maco.”

 

Upon hearing the forbidden word I jump three times of the spot, do the sign of the Cross and sprinkle salt over my left shoulder. “So what are you going to do?” I ask. “Take her to Slav school?”

 

“No bloody way,” she sniffs. “I don’t want her learning that blockhead language.”

 

Appalled, I advise her that when Amphicrates the rhetorician visited Seleucia in modern Iraq in 85BC, he was asked to create a school of rhetoric for local Greek students. He refused stating that a dish could not hold a dolphin. She responds by stating that she has no idea what I mean.

 

Yet another of my friends has contemplated taking their children out of Greek school, thought not because of the curriculum but rather because of what he sees to be a clique of favourite parents that surround the teaching staff, ensuing preferential treatment for their progeny, including their pick of roles for the end of year school play. Indeed, he alludes to organised nepotism on a grand scale, hinting at money and foodstuffs changing hands, railing at the existence of the sycophants which apparently exist in Greek schools in plague proportions.

 

One of my early childhood memories is of visiting Patriarch Bartholomeos on the occasion of one of his visits to Melbourne when he was still the Metropolitan of Philadelpheia.

Commenting on intrigue and gossip, Patriarch Bartholomeos stated: "What I detest most in the world, are sycophants."

-         Αυτό που απεχθάνομαι όσο τίποτε άλλο στον κόσμο, είναι οι κόλακες.

This remained etched in my memory, because it was the first ever time that I heard the words: "απεχθάνομαι" and "κόλακες."

The week after, I went to Greek school and told my teacher:

-         Απεχθάνομαι τους κόλακες και την αντιγραφή, causing her to burst out laughing. She gave me homework regardless.

 

When I taught at a Greek school a decade ago, parents would drop off their children having first regaled them with graphic stories of savagery meted against them by sadistic vitsa-wielding educators. This was not my experience, and I suppose since those times, the saying attributed to the great Pythagoras, “educate the children and it won’t be necessary to punish the men,” is adhered to, though I do recall being punished for daring to comment to one of my teachers that the Babylonians discovered the Pythagorean theorem centuries before the sage did. I was made to stand in the corner on one leg for what seemed like an age causing my hypotenuse to throb most acutely in angles I never even knew existed.

 

I will never forget, however, the response of one of my teachers when I asked why we being made week after week to conjugate verbs in nauseating succession. Stretching himself to his full height of five feet and two inches, he intoned: “The great Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” Given that said teacher had a habit of rubbing himself on the corner of his desk as he delivered the lesson, the words of the philosopher opened unlooked for pathways, especially when the more intrepid pupils rubbed chalk on the desk corners prior to the lesson’s commencement.

 

You cannot but love an institution where the teacher, instead of telling you your mark for your Greek history exam, reveals that the word for brick in Greek τούβλο is derived from the Latin, tubulus, referring to the tube-like holes within the bricks themselves. And all this because I stated in my essay that ELAS resistance leader Aris Velouhiotis originally came from Baluchistan in Pakistan, because this in Greek is rendered as Βελουχιστάν.

 

The Greek School I send my children to completely captivates them to the extent that I am fully convinced that they would murder me should I ever contemplate to remove them from it, even after disagreeing with the modern parvenu Greeks’ propensity to write αβγό instead of αυγό, or after jostling with parents in order to secure optimum position during pickup. Nonetheless, even it were not so, I have had two seminal experiences that ensure that come what may, I will ensure that my children attend Greek School until the bitter end:

The first was a few years ago, when I had just dropped off my daughter at Greek school and was talking to my then infant son. A band of rather scruffy gentlemen rounded the corner. Hearing us babble to each other, their faces contorted in rage as they screamed:

“We don’t speak f....n wog, alright?”

“I know,” I replied. “That’s why no one is talking to you.”

 

The second is perusing an early twentieth century photograph depicting Greek and Armenian students in the only school for deaf children in the Ottoman Empire in Merzifounta of Pontus. In the photograph, they are forming words and looking at their mouths in hand mirrors. The teacher looks at them with the tenderness that my children’s Greek teachers gaze at them. Her love and sensitivity as to their disability, as well as her positivity emanate from the image. Not long after, most, in not all of these children would be dead, victims of one of the most barbarous crimes of the age. Looking at their optimistic countenance and knowing the ultimate price they paid for being who they are makes me resolve to be steadfast in supporting the Greek educational institutions of our community.

 

But don’t take my word for it. Rather, take that of Virginia Woolf, whose stance on the Greek language is so visceral, so sensuous, that it makes me want to undergo Greek school again and again and again:

 

“Every ounce of fat has been pared off... Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly... Then there are the words themselves which... we have made expressive to us of our own emotions, θάλασσα, θάνατος, ἄνθος... so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet fittingly without blurring the outline..., Greek is the only expression. It is useless, then.. to read Greek in translation.”

 

Now that, mes enfants, is sexy.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 30 March 2024

STRUGGLING AGAINST IMPERIALISM: THE 1848 IONIAN REVOLT

 

The revolt in the Ionian Islands in 1848 was a significant episode in the island's history, closely intertwined with the broader revolutionary movements that swept across Europe during the tumultuous year of 1848, often referred to as the "Springtime of Nations" or the "Year of Revolution." While not as well-documented or celebrated as some of the revolutions in mainland Europe, the events in the Ionian Islands nonetheless shed light on the aspirations and struggles of its people for greater political rights and autonomy.

 

At the time of the revolt, the Islands were under British rule, having been part of the United States of the Ionian Islands, a British protectorate established after the fall of the Venetian Republic. The Treaty of Paris having promised the inhabitants of the Ionian islands a constitution, a “Constitutional Charter” was issued by Britain’s first Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland. This provided for an elected assembly and a senate. However, delegates were generally politically reliable grandees ‘suggested’ by the Commissioner himself, who were expected to rubber stamp whatever legislation was put before them by Britain. Further, franchise was based on the amount of property owned effectively restricting those eligible to vote to 1% of the male population. As George Ferguson Bowen, a senior bureaucrat in the British administration in Corfu wrote, “By the constitution of Sir Thomas Maitland, the press was more restricted and parliament was more submissive than in England under the Tudor Princes.”

  Consequently, the British administration, despite bringing some economic development to the island, was viewed by many Islanders as oppressive and exploitative. There was a growing sense of discontent among the local population, fuelled by grievances such as heavy taxation, restrictions on trade, as well as the lack of political representation. A particularly perennial grievance was the semi-feudal system of tenant farming where farmers were obliged to pay to the owners of the land they were cultivating, a proportion of their produce by way of rent, coupled with an entrenched culture of predatory lending that led to the practical serfdom of much of the productive population. The transition, encouraged by the British, from a diverse agricultural base to the cultivation of cash crops such as olives on Corfu and currants in Zakynthos also led to impoverishment as farmers became susceptible to extreme price fluctuations with no back up if the crops failed or there was a market oversupply.

 

The outbreak of revolution in mainland Europe, commencing in neighbouring Greece and later on Italy, served as a catalyst for dissent on the Islands. The liberal and nationalist ideas that permeated these revolutions resonated with many islanders who yearned for freedom and self-determination. The British were extremely wary of the Ionians desire for union with Greece, Commissioner Maitland admitting that the Ionian Islanders: “displayed the strongest sympathy in favour of the insurgents, who were of the same religious persuasion with themselves, with similar habits, language and manners.” Nationalist dissent was however dealt with harshly, where in one instance, martial law was declared and ‘offenders’ were executed, their corpses being displayed in iron cages on hill tops to act as a deterrent to the rest of the population. However, these measures had the opposite effect, radicalising the populace, which began to organize and mobilize against British rule, forming the Ριζοσπάσται (Radicals) who openly began to question the legitimacy of colonial rule and demanding self-determination.

In 1848, news flowing in from the rest of Europe, as to revolts in Austria, Hungary, Germany, France and Italy, these being democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states, as envisioned by romantic nationalism, led to the creation of political clubs and newspapers who directed their ire at Britain, being as George Ferguson Bowen admitted: “full of the most bitter abuse of England… and openly advocating annexation to… Greece.”

The revolt on the islands was characterized by protests, demonstrations, and sporadic acts of violence against British authorities and symbols of colonial power. The insurgents, comprising a mix of peasants, workers, intellectuals, and nationalist activists, demanded political reforms, including the establishment of a representative government, the abolition of oppressive policies, and greater autonomy for the island. Thus in September 1849, as the price of currants fell, a revolt broke out in Cephallonia, with bands of armed peasants turning of their landlords. The newly arrived Commissioner, Sir Henry Ward declared martial law and despatched 500 troops in order to suppress the revolt, which they did swiftly and ruthlessly, given the divisions among the insurgents, lack of coordination, and external pressures that undermined the revolt’s effectiveness, resulting in 44 death sentences, summary executions without trial, and some three hundred pubic floggings for offences of disturbing the peace, obstructing soldiers or refusing to respond to soldier’s questions. The floggings, administered with the infamous cat-o’ nine tails, was considered a cruel and unusual punishment by the islanders who fulminated against such barbarities which they associated with Ottoman practice and many of those flogged eventually died from infections arising from their punishment.

The British soldiers then engaged in deliberate acts of terror in order to cow the local population into submission. Houses of dissidents were burned down, crops and plants were destroyed and mock executions performed with little discrimination being shown between those actively involved in the revolt and ordinary inhabitants. Further, in 1851, prominent Ionian personalities with a leadership role in society were exiled to Kythera, an island at the time that was practically deserted, with no infrastructure.

While Sir Henry Ward justified his repression in a speech to the Ionian Assembly by stating: “I had to deal not with an ordinary insurrection…. but with the congregated ruffianism of the community.”  Elsewhere he stated that he “had seen… many of the same breed in Spain and Mexico and felt satisfied that nothing but the most rigorous measures would do.” The contemporary press was sceptical however, with the Daily News commenting that the amount of death sentences meted out: “certainly does not look like an error in the side of leniency,” stating further that Sir Henry Ward had “aped the cruelties and rigour of Austrian and Russian commanders,” while the Morning Chronicle also commented on the extreme nature of the punishments given to the locals. Nonetheless, Sir Henry Ward was never censured by his superiors and a few years later was promoted to governor of Ceylon.

In his magisterial work: “Revolutionary Spring, Fighting for a New World 1848-1849, historian Christopher Clark highlights how in the case of the Ionian Revolt, colonialist attitudes were prevalent among the British even though the Ionian Islands were not a colony but a protectorate. He provides ample evidence to suggest that the British saw the local inhabitants as lazy, idiots, thick, savages, orientals, ruffians, removed but one degree from donkeys, pointing out that this is the vocabulary colonial powers drew from when seeking to turn others into racial others.

Predictably, the harshness of the British suppression of the Ionian Revolt was cited by other repressive European Powers, when called upon to temper their own conduct. In 1851, for example, when British Prime Minister William Gladstone sought the intercession of the Austrian Government in order that political prisoners in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies be released, Prince Schwarzenberg wrote back stating that he saw no reason why he should be preached at by Britain on human rights considering the way it had suppressed the Ionian Revolt.

Despite its failure, the revolt in the Ionian Islands left a lasting impact on the island's political consciousness and historical memory. It served as a poignant reminder of the enduring struggle for freedom and self-government, inspiring future generations in their quest for independence and national identity. Additionally, the events of 1848 contributed to the gradual evolution of political discourse and activism on the Islands, paving the way for later movements advocating for democratic reforms and territorial unification with Greece. As such, while short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful, it remains a significant chapter in the island's history, highlighting the aspirations, challenges, and complexities of the struggle for liberation and self-rule in the context of 19th-century European revolutions.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 23 March 2024