free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Nineteenth Century
and bargaining for plots of land they had never seen, whose people
they did not understand, in the name of some sacred principle (‘the
integrity of the Ottoman Empire’), is not a pleasing one. It is true that
without the intervention of the Powers, Cretan independence would
have been still further delayed. Nevertheless, concessions had to be
squeezed out of the Powers one by one, just as they had to be squeezed
out of the Turkish rulers. Thus autonomy was bought with Cretan
blood; the blood shed after 1828. Once Greece was an independent
kingdom, and once the Great Powers were interested, it was only a
question of time; and every revolt, by weakening the hold of the Porte,
brought independence nearer.
In a sense, then, these palikaria did not die in vain. Why is it, then,
that nineteenth-century Cretan history is so depressing? Why the
overwhelming feeling of waste? Partly, I think, because to us who look
back on it autonomy seems so inevitable. Need so many lives have been
lost for something which had to come? But also, because the profits of
each revolt - and this is true of all Cretan history - were so meagre;
and the distant goal, liberty, poor comfort to the wives of those who
had died.
That period when Crete was governed by the four Great Powers,
and the fleet with its four admirals rode at anchor in Suda bay, is one
of the oddest in the island’s history. The English in Heraklion, under
Colonel Chernside, seem to have left a favourable impression. They
succeeded in pacifying their zone of influence and in increasing the
revenues; and to judge from Mr Elliadi’s delightful account, they administered
justice with an ethic which would have been incomprehensible
to the Cretans. For instance: ‘A person having discovered that
his servant was stealing from him, he discharged her without giving
notice to the police, with the result that, to the great astonishment of
all, he was fined, the reason being that though he rid himself of her, she
was thus allowed to continue her bad practice elsewhere, whereas a
good citizen should not only be a guardian of his own property, but also
that of others.’
Down in the west meanwhile, in Suda bay, the admirals were behave-
ing in a very different way. In Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek there is a
pathetic, old and ever-hopeful character named Madame Hortense,
whose fondest memory is of the time when she was wined and dined
and treated as a queen by all four foreign admirals. This French
Madame, young and beautiful in 1897, had pulled the admirals’ long
silken beards and implored them not to bombard the wretched
Cretans – ‘Oh, Canevaro, my little Canevaro, don’t go boom! boom!’;
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