The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8

by William James Stillman

The soldiers, gathered round their camp some half a mile away, had eaten their suppers and were at ease, the shouting of their merriment coming to us occasionally above the general hum. Presently we saw them taking fir-branches, and, each lighting one at the nearest campfire, come running to us at full speed, making a long madcap procession of torch-bearers, the pitchy fir giving out an immense flame; and, making for the headquarters, followed by the battalion band playing, they threw their branches in a pile on a level space before the Pasha's tent, and then, turning to the right and left, sat down in a semicircle open towards us. A detachment was told off to keep up the fire, and a sort of glee club, accompanied by rude instruments, drums beaten by the hand, and a kind of flute and mandolin, commenced singing at the top of their voices the plaintive monotonous songs which all who have been in the East know.

This was the overture to a terpsichorean and dramatic entertainment most unique and amusing. The programme opened with a dance of Zebeques, the barbarous race who occupy the country behind Smyrna. They are wrapped in a sash from the armpits to the hips, with a sort of baggy knee-breeches, and bearing long knives thrust crosswise through their sashes. They formed a circle, and began a movement which seemed like a dance of men in armor, half stage-stride and half hop. The music struck up an appropriate air, and the dancers, joining in the song, circled slowly two or three times in the same staid and deliberate manner, then, drawing their knives, brandished them in time, quickening their pace, and hurrying around quicker and quicker as the song grew more excited, when they finally came to a climax of fury, rushing in on each other at the centre of the circle as if to cut each other down. But the raised knives were arrested by the opposing empty hands; and, the paroxysm passed, the song died down to its lower tone and moderate time, and the dance began a new movement, each dancer thrusting his knife into the ground at the centre, and then repeated the quickening circles; this time, rushing, at the climax, on their knives and drawing them from the earth, they threw themselves on an imaginary enemy outside the circle, and, having hypothetically demolished him, returned to their gyrations, varying the finale by lifting one of the company into the air on their hands, and dropping him simultaneously with their voices. This lasted half an hour.

After an intermission, in which the soldiers, unawed by the presence of the Pasha, laughed and joked and shouted to their content, a soldier entered the circle dressed as an Egyptian dancing woman. He was one of the tallest men in the regiment, capitally travestied, and all who have seen the dance of the Almah can imagine the bursts of laughter with which his grave, precise imitation of one of them was received by the circle. I have never seen anything more exquisitely ludicrous. His figure seemed lithe as a willow-wand, and he twisted and bent, and bowed and doubled, with the peculiar expression of physique which seemed impossible to any other than the slender Egyptian girl.

Roars of applause followed this performance, and the next was a pantomime—"The Honey-Stealers." Two men enter dressed as peasants, one carrying a gun on his back, and begin groping about as in the dark, run against each other, stumble and fall, and finally, by much listening, find a box, which had been placed to represent the hive. The thief lays down his gun to be more free in his motions, and a soldier runs into the circle and carries it off. Enter presently a third honey-seeker, blacked to represent a negro or some diabolical personage, it was impossible to say which, and, stumbling on the other two, an affray ensues, in the course of which the bees get disturbed, and come out in swarms, the luckless black getting the lion's share of the stings. At this moment an alarm is given, and the gunner misses his gun, upon which he falls on the black as the thief, and between the stings and the blows the intruder expires, the play ending with the efforts of the two living to carry out and dispose of the one dead, interfered with greatly by a spasmodic life remaining in the members, which refuse to lie as they are put. But this finally subsiding, the body is satisfactorily disposed of, and the pantomime gives way, amid the most uproarious laughter and applause, to a Circassian dance. The dancers were few, and the dance tame, and, not meeting any appreciation, gave way to a repetition of the Zebeque saltations, of which they seemed never disposed to tire.

The entertainment lasted till eleven o'clock, when, each soldier taking a branch of fir, the actors and audience raced off like a demoniac festival breaking up, the band following with a blare of trumpets and bang of drums, and we were left to our dignity and the dying embers of the theatre fire. Although in July, the night was so intensely cold that, sharing the Pasha's tent, and with all the covering he could spare me, in addition to my own Persian carpet over instead of under me, I was almost too cold to sleep, and the morning found me well disposed to put my blood in motion by vigorous exercise. Coffee served, we rode over to the Xyloscala, and, after more coffee-and-pipe compliments, we began the descent of the new zigzag road. It was so steep that no loaded beast could mount it, and it took me two hours' walk to get to the bottom, where the road straightens and follows the river, here a dancing, gurgling stream, rushing amongst boulders and over ridges, under overhanging pines, as though there were no tropics and the land had not had rain for two months. The whole gorge was filled with the balsamic odors of firs and pine, which covered the slopes wherever the rock would give them place; and above that, bare splintery cliffs overhung the gorge, so that it seemed that a stone would fall three thousand feet if thrown from the summit. A few Turkish soldiers, lazily felling or trimming pines for the blockhouses, were the only signs of humanity we saw. Above, in the pines, we heard the partridge's note, as the mother called to her young brood to follow her. The gorge widened to a glen; the slopes receded slightly, and then, after another hour of walking, we came to a sharp turn in its course, where the high mountains walled up the glen to the east with a sheer slope of five or six thousand feet from the peaks to the brook bed, and the rocks on each side shut in like the lintels of a doorway. Here is the little village of Samaria, so long the refuge of the women and children of this section of Crete, and where, so long as arms and food lasted, a few resolute men might have defended them against all comers. I doubt if in the known world there is such another fortress. No artillery could crown those heights, no athletes descend the slopes; while the only access from below is through the river-bed, in one place only ten feet wide, and above which the cliffs rise perpendicularly over a thousand feet; the strata in some places matching each other, so that it seems to have been a cloven gorge—the yawn of some earthquake, which suggested closing again at a future day—and for two hours down from the glen there is no escaping from the river course, except by goat-paths, and these such as no goat would care needlessly to travel.

Pashley has described the village of Samaria, and its magnificent cypresses and little chapel, as they are now. No destruction, no sacrilege, has entered there; and perhaps this is the only church in Crete, outside the Turkish lines of permanent occupation, which has not been desecrated. The roof of the chapel is made of tiles, which must date from the early Byzantine Empire.

The river below here, the St. Roumeli, is a rapid perennial stream, which at times of flood shuts off all travel by the road. Lower down is a tiny village of the same name as the river, in a gorge into which only an hour's sunlight can enter during the day—damp, chilly, and aguish—the residence of a half-dozen families of goat-herds. Pashley identifies a site near the mouth of the river as that of Tarrha, the scene of Apollo's loves with Acacallis, who, if bred in this glen, must have been of that icy temperament which should have best suited the professional flirt of Olympus.

To travellers who care to visit Samaria, I would give the hint to leave their horses at Omalos, and have a boat to meet them at the mouth of the St. Roumeli, as the ascent is long and painful, even by the new road, which, since I saw it the torrents may have demolished. They may thus visit the Port Phœnix of St. Paul, which lies a few miles to the eastward, and landing at Suia, west of St. Roumeli, have their horses come down by the pass of Krustogherako, and so return by way of St. Irene—a very wild pass of the Selinos mountains—to Canéa.

We had made no such provision, and so we were obliged to toil back in the intense heat of the July sun beating down into the gorge, and, arriving past noon, to be refreshed by sherbet and coffee by the hospitable commander of the station at Xyloscala, the snow of the sherbet being brought from the opposite cliff two hundred yards away, but an hour's climb to get to it. The commander was a more intelligent man than it is usual for Turkish officers to be, and he related how during the insurrection he had led a detachment round to the top of the opposing cliffs, and how when they got there they were like the twenty thousand men of the King of France, and had to come back by the way they went.