free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Nineteenth Century
Pasha, the Governor-General, wisely attempted no violence, and the
Assembly’s numbers gradually diminished as more and more drifted
home to work. But some remained, unsatisfied with the assurances
they had received. Two months after the Assembly had met together,
therefore, Mehmet ordered the execution of some of these who remained;
and the pashas, having vainly interceded with Mehmet for
mercy, had ten of the demonstrators hanged on 3 December, while
twenty-one others were executed in different parts of the island simply
to strike terror into the inhabitants.
Robert Pashley’s travels took place shortly after this incident.
Curiously enough, although the picture he paints is a grim one, of a
land desolated almost beyond repair by the recent war, the times were
not too bad; Mustapha Pasha (1832-55) was one of the more humane
and farsighted of governors. But it required more than a reasonable
governor to set right such a multitude of wrongs. The population was
halved between 1821 and 1834. Think of this through people and not
numbers; at Vithias, ‘the only male inhabitant... is a young Mohammedan.
. . . The rest are all widows. In many places in Crete the
number of widows is large; and in one village of Lassithi they actually
form the entire population.’ Charred ruins, roofless houses told of the
recent destruction.
The island was a strange, colourful place in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Mehmet Ali’s intervention had brought in new races.
His fighting men were Albanians, who could be distinguished from the
Cretans by their dress, as well as the muskets they carried and the pistols
hung from their girdles. ‘Idle and licentious’ Pashley calls them. Long
after the suppression of the ’28 revolt they lingered on, small groups of
them quartered in the villages as a kind of militia; with nothing to do
except to ‘attend to their horses, smoke their pipes, and visit the house
of any villager when he is absent. . .’. At the same time there sprang up
an Arab community of between 2,000 and 3,000 strong on the shore
west of Canea; the inhabitants, most of whom were boatmen, porters
and servants, came from Egypt and Cyrenaica. This African village
was fringed with Bedouin tents.
Then, in 1859, the most extraordinary incident in the modern history
of Crete. Of the powers, England was least favourable to Cretan
aspirations. Russia’s attitude fluctuated; although Orthodoxy was a
strong tie with Greece, the Tsar had recently suggested that should the
Ottoman Empire break up Crete should become English. The French
had generally shown themselves friendly to Crete; and their com-
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