free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Revolt of Daskaloyiannis
Of this the folk poet says nothing; in his account Daskaloyiannis
offers to give himself up.
Pantzelios is wrong too about the protopappas, who in the poem starts
hostile to the revolt and ends up voluntarily accompanying Daskaloyiannis
to the pasha. A further letter from the army’s secretary, written a
fortnight after the preceding one, tells how the priest was captured and
gave the Turks much information. The secretary quotes the priest’s
words:
Daskaloyiannis sent a message to the Muscovite: ‘The Mani, like Crete, is
inaccessible land; and we have many men; we shall master Crete on our own,’
On the basis of this the Muscovite sent powder and shot. . . and said that soon
he would send cannons, shells etc.; ‘For the time being, prepare yourselves and
collect your army.’ . . , But instead of coming first to Crete, the Russian ships
sailed to the Mani., ., After some time Daskaloyiannis sent another man to the
Morea: ‘Why haven’t you appeared? Send us two ships. With them we could
do wonders.’ The Muscovite general said in reply; ‘You are inferior to the
Maniot army. They told me I could take Mani in three days, bat I can’t. . . .
Mani must be taken first, and then I will come in person to Crete.’ So the
Sphakians prepared, and they’re still waiting for the Russian ships.
Lastly, Pantzelios gets the date of the execution wrong. In fact
Daskaloyiannis lay in prison for about a year and was put to death in
June 1771. In the poem his martyrdom immediately follows his defiance
of the pasha.
Now all these points, where Barba Pantzelios departed from the
historical facts as we know them from Turkish documentary evidence,
serve one purpose; they help to make a heroic story. We can see just
how Pantzelios does his own primitive plot-making. He rounds off the
jagged corners of real life and constructs, half unconsciously, a story of
irony and tragedy. The ingredients - a prosperous, untaxed, privileged
community taking up arms for the sake of the Christians of Crete; the
Christians’ representative forsaking his materialism, his arguments of
expediency and compromise, at the last minute, and joining the rebel
leader: and the rebel leader, Daskaloyiannis, showing the priest what
his duties are.
The plot is good. In Daskaloyiannis the poet portrays a character
who took a step beyond the conventional arete - or simply, extraordinary
bravery - to which his audience was accustomed. Christian selfsacrifice
is part of his character. Daskaloyiannis, unlike his colleagues,
who are typical Cretan palikaria, cannot see the point of fighting on
when his surrender might save lives. Yet in the end, having made the
noble gesture of surrender, he fails to see the implications of it; for if he
87