Two men came into the room carrying a lamb made ready for roasting. They held it while a third impaled it on a long iron bar. Then the bar was laid across two iron projections, over the bed of embers, and a handle was fitted to the end of the bar. One of the brigands squatted down and began slowly turning the spit, and the others shovelled more embers into the cavity underneath the lamb. We could feel the heat even where we sat.
We all watched with interest the man rhythmically turning the lamb over the fire. Gradually he began to hum a song in time to his turning. It was one of the folk songs about the Armateloi and Kleftai, those patriotic bandits who waged a guerrilla warfare against the Turks for years before the Revolution broke out in 1821. It is a period dear to the hearts of all Greeks; for it prepared and trained the men who, during the terrible nine years of the Revolution, were to stand up against and defeat the enormous armies of Turkey.
It is a period unique in the history of any nation, a period full of grandeur of individual achievement, and it has been immortalized in Laïk poetry. I do not believe that there is a Greek to-day who does not know at least some of these long poems, composed by the Armateloi themselves, put to music by themselves, and transmitted to us by word of mouth, from father to son.
As the brigand at the spit went on with his song, it was taken up like an anthem by others, who began to swarm out of little cubby-holes in the sides of the cave, which were hidden from view by hanging sheep-skins. They squatted around the roasting lamb, or stretched themselves on the ground, and snatched at the song, here, there, anywhere; and the fumes of the meat mingled with the song, and the song became part of the meat; and all blended with the vaulted room, and the glorious white fustanella gleaming in the firelight.
One must be born under an alien yoke to understand what the love of one’s fatherland is. Until the last year the Greeks may have gained little in the estimation of the world, since a small portion of them wrenched themselves free from the Turkish yoke. But those who condemn them must remember that since the time of Alexander the Great, the Greeks have passed from one conqueror to another—escaping annihilation only by rendering their conquerors themselves Greeks in literature and thought. At last they fell under the yoke of a race which neither could learn their language nor cared for their civilization, and for four hundred years they dwelled under this Asiatic dominion.
On this night, in the brigands’ cave, I understood the power Greece had over her sons. These men were nothing but cut-throats. They would kill or mutilate a man for money: yet as they sang the songs of those other, more glorious brigands, who had striven for years in desperate fighting against the conquerors of their race, they seemed to be touched by something ennobling. Their faces shone with that light which comes from the holiest of loves—patriotism.
They sang with fervour, and when they came to the parts relating victories over the Turks, they clapped their hands and shouted, “So! so!”
From one song they passed to another, while the lamb ever turned in time to the music, and men brought chestnuts, potatoes, and onions, and roasted them in the edge of the smaller fire—always singing.
Of a sudden one man broke into a gay little song of the monasteries:
“How they rubbed the pepper, those devilish monks!”