The language of Crete to-day is a Dorian dialect, and preserves many characteristics noted by the ancient authors. The use of Kappa as c is used in Italian, either hard or soft (in terminal syllables generally the latter), the use of r for l, especially with the Sphakiotes, and the presence of many words in modern Cretan which have disappeared from modern continental Greek, with a comparative rareness of Turkish words, and entire absence of Albanian and Sclavonic, show how much less the Cretans have been affected by outside influences than other parts of the Greek community. I give a few of the words which retain their ancient form more closely than on the continent:
There are few Turkish words in use, and those mainly of objects brought by the Turks: βουδαλά, a lubber; τσιμπούχι, a pipe; τουφέκι, a gun, etc. A few Italian: καπιτανός, captain; βετέμα (vendemmia), olive crop; βίστατο (guastato); ματινάδα, a song, and some names of implements, with idioms which cling, as the use of πίυ, the comparative, instead of τέρος.
There is a trace of genuine Cretan literature, though its chief work, the "Erotókritos," is by an Italian colonist, Vincenzo Cornaro. They have, however, many songs and many bards, though to any but Cretan ears the music is far from agreeable. I knew one of the popular singers, Karalambo, poet and singer at once, as most of them are (and many are improvisatori of considerable facility). He was so much in repute that no wedding or festivity was considered complete anywhere in the range of a day's ride from Canéa unless Karalambo was there; and at other times he used to sing in the cafés on the Marina, screaming, to the strain of a naturally fine tenor, songs which, though to me not even music, used to melt his audiences into tears. He was a patriot as well as poet, and when the insurrection of '66 actually broke out, his songs were so seditious, and excited the Khaniote Christians so much, that he was driven into the mountains, and, joining a band of his neighbors, was one day wounded by the accidental discharge of a pistol one of his comrades was cleaning. The wound was fatal from want of surgical attendance.
The Cretan music is always of a plaintive character, and monotonous; in singing, they have a habit of incessant quavering, and this, with the drawling tone, makes it far from agreeable to an ear accustomed to cultivated music, but it has a decided character of its own.
There were in Kalepa before the insurrection two improvisatori of considerable repute, who were accustomed to carry on musical disputes, one singing a couplet, and the other replying in a similar one. Sometimes it was a match of compliments, and sometimes the reverse, but following with tolerable exactitude the metre, a four-lined stanza, the second and fourth lines rhyming. All the ballads I have seen are in this form, the music also differing but little to my ear, though possibly to a Cretan there may be wide differences.
The Cretans possess, in common with all the Greeks, the avidity for instruction and quickness of intellect which make of this race the dominant element in the Levant. They are tenaciously devoted to their religion and to their traditions, which have kept them up and preserved the national character against such a continuation of hostile influences as probably no other people ever lived through. The history of Crete is a series of obstinate rebellions and barbarous repressions, since the first conquest by the Saracens in A.D. 820, a conquest which was followed by an almost complete apostasy from Christianity—sword-conversion, and by persistent attempts on the part of the Byzantine emperors to reconquer it, until 961, when Nikephoras Phocas succeeded in driving the Saracens out. They seem to have made no considerable addition to the Cretan stock, since the population rapidly returned to Christianity, to which, judging from the known and more recent past, they had always probably remained devoted at heart. At the division of the Byzantine empire, Crete passed to Boniface, Duke of Montserrat, and from him was purchased by the Venetian Republic, 1204, from which time till its conquest by the Turks, completed in 1669, the Cretans were under a yoke that would probably have depopulated any other section of the Old World. The cruelties and misgovernment of the governors sent from Venice would be incredible if not recorded by Venetian historians and official records. The Venetians seem to have regarded the Cretans much in the same light as the English colonists of America did the Indians, and, when their wretched state came to the knowledge of the Senate, they sent commissioners to examine into it, from whose reports I translate some extracts (quoted in Italian by Pashley), who took them from the original documents in the public library of Venice. Basadonna, the first of these officers whose reports remain, says (1566): "The tax-gatherers and others dependent on them use against these unhappy people, in one way and another, strange and horrible tyrannies. It would be a matter worthy of your clemency immediately to abolish so odious and barbarous exactions, since to maintain them is to abandon these wretched men to most cruel serpents, who lacerate and devour them entirely, or oblige the few of them who remain to escape into Turkey, following the footsteps of innumerable others who, from time to time, have gone away from this cause." Then from Garzoni (1586): "In all the villages in which I have been, I have seen the houses of the inhabitants, in the greater part of which there is not be seen any article for the uses of dress or table; and for food, they are without bread or corn; they have no wine; their women are despoiled, their children naked, the men slightly covered, and the house emptied of everything, without any sign of human habitation. And this wretched people ('quella meschinità de' huomini') is compelled by established custom to give to the cavaliers two 'angarie' [twelve days' work] each per annum, and is obliged also by ancient regulation to work as much more as the cavalier may need for the pay of eight soldini a day, which amounts to a 'gazetta' [two Venetian soldi, or about one penny] and a fifteenth, introduced by them two hundred years ago, and not since increased. They are obliged to keep chickens and hens according to the number of doors [I do not feel sure of having properly translated this expression, obscure in the original], their masters having applied the term of doors to houses, which are built by the peasants themselves, and have no kind of use of doors, because the Cavaliers, industrious for their own advantage, make doors as frequently as possible to increase the number of royalties. The beasts of labor, called donnegals, are obliged to plough a certain quantity of land, for which, planted or not, the peasant must pay the third. The donnegals are also obliged to work two angarie per annum. Mules and other beasts of transport must make two voyages to the city for the master. Animals of pasture the tenth, and a thousand other inventions to absorb all the productions of the land. If the peasant has a vineyard planted (the ground always belonging to the Cavaliers) and trained by him, although on land before wild, he must pay to the master, before marking the division for the royalty (which by ancient regulation gives one-third to the Cavalier and two to the peasant), five measures, called mistaches, for each vineyard, under pretext that he has eaten part before the vintage, for the use of the pattichier [in Crete, even now, an open shallow kind of vat built in the fields, of flat stones, and cemented, in which the grapes are trampled], and under other most dishonest inventions. And to increase still more the royalty, they divide the vineyard into so many parts that few return more than fifteen mistaches, in such a way that with fraud founded on force they take two-thirds for themselves and give one to the peasant.
"There are chosen for judges of their country, as I have said, Castellans—writers who serve as secretaries (cancellieri); and 'Captains to look after the robbers,' who all set rapaciously to rob these poor people, taking what little any of them may have hidden from the Cavaliers under pretext of disobedience, in which the peasant abounds, by reason of his desperation, so that he is in every way wretched. The Castellans cannot by law judge the value of more than two sequins, although by some regulation they are allowed authority to the sum of two hundred perperi, about fourteen sequins; and because they have eight per cent. for the charges they make, all causes amount to two hundred perperi, however small it may be, in order to get their sixteen of charges, with thousand other inventions of extortion to eat up the substance of the poor. The Captains, whose name indicates their functions, have their use from robberies, and always find means to draw their advantage from the same, plundering the good and releasing the guilty, to the universal ruin.... The men chosen for the galleys are in continual terror of going, and those who have the means, with whatever difficulty, from some vineyard, or land, or animals, throw all away unhesitatingly for a trifling price to pay for their dispensation, which costs fifteen or twenty sequins—expense which they cannot support. The poorest, hopeless of their release, fly to the mountains, and thence, reassured by the Cavaliers, return to their villages, so much the more enslaved as they are fearful of justice, and by their example make the other villagers more obedient, attributing to the Cavaliers the power of saving them from the galleys.... To which, add the extortions to which they are subjected by a thousand accidental circumstances, execution of civil debts, visits of rectors and other officers, to whom they are obliged to give sustenance at miserable prices.... So that the peasantry, oppressed in this manner, and harassed in so many ways, annoyed by the reasonings of the Papists, and made enemies of the Venetian name, ... are so reduced by the influences I have enumerated, that I believe I can say with truth that, with the exception of the privileged classes, they desire a change of government, and though they know they cannot fall into other hands than those of the Turks, yet, believing they cannot make worse their condition, incline even to their tyrannical rule."
I extract from the opinion of Fra Paolo Sarpi (1615), a more Jesuitical, and, it would seem, more palatable advice to the Senate, since it was, in the end, and to the end followed: "For your Greek subjects of the island of Candia, and the other islands of the Levant, ... the surest way is to keep good garrisons to awe them, and not use them to arms or musters, in hope of being assisted by them in extremity; for they will always show ill inclination proportionably to the strength they shall be musters of.... Wine and bastinadoes ought to be their share, and keep good nature for a better occasion.... If the gentlemen of these colonies do tyrannize over the villages of their dominion, the best way is not to seem so see it, that there may be no kindness between them and their subjects; but, if they offend in anything else, it will be well to chastise them severely, etc.... And in a word, remember that all the good that can come from them is already obtained, which was to fix the Venetian dominion, and for the future there is nothing but mischief to be expected from them."
What a pity that Sarpi had not lived before Dante, that he might have been niched in the "Inferno":