free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
Byzantine general of the Doukas family. The Emir carried off the girl,
settled within the Empire, and was himself baptized. A son was born
to them, named Basil, and later, because of his birth and calling, called
Digenes Akritas; for Digenes means ‘twyborn’ of double birth. The
best of both defender and invader was combined in him. His task was to
pacify the marches of the Empire; and the epic describes how he accomplishes
this, how he marries, and how he finally dies.
There is little of this to be found in Crete. The short ballads of the
Akritic cycle, transmitted from Pontus and Cappadocia through
Rhodes and Cyprus to Crete – all the way from mouth to mouth –
preserve a different atmosphere: an atmosphere of the magical and the
marvellous, where Digenes’s fists smash rocks, and birds can speak
human words, and horses can weep, and Digenes himself is only one
among many heroic borderers – Porphyrius, Andronicus and so on.
Many of these ballads are found in Crete. But Digenes has caught
the imagination in a way other heroes have not. He has become the
giant hero of Cretan folk lore, and the countryside is dotted with his
memorials.
The Cretans are fond of giants anyway. They call them the Sarandapechi,
the ‘forty-cubit ones’, and they associate them with a legendary
heroic age, as in this story preserved by the noveiist Kondylakis.
On Psiloreiti and its roots there lived originally the Sarandapechi, who were
tall, very tall, and strong. When the flood came, they went up to the top of
Psiloreiti to avoid drowning. They were tall, the mountain was tall, the water
didn’t come up so high as to envelop them. Many days they stood up there,
water up to the neck; and worms emerged from the mud from under their
footprints, and gave them no rest. And where they bent lo catch them, they
slipped and fell and drowned, because they could not raise themselves up
again, whether from their great weight or because their backbones broke.
Of these giants, who are sometimes regarded as ancestors, Digenes is
the greatest. A saddle on a mountain will be ‘the saddle of Digenes’.
The marks on a rock are the prints of his horse’s hooves. There is a
tradition which I heard repeated by a boy on the Messara plain that the
great saddle above Kamares on Psiloreiti (Mt Ida) marks the place
where Digenes rode the mountain. Further down the mountainside
there is a cavity – the spot where Digenes put his foot when he was
thirsty. One foot here and one foot on the mountain opposite (right
the other side of the Messara) and he would bend over the plain and
drink from the river that ran below him. But his beard blocked the
river, so that it would overflow and flood the Messara.
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