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The Song
The peculiarities of this list are obvious. Not many peoples could
boast such a high proportion of patriotic songs, which would seem to
be the antithesis of art. (Papagregorakis includes in this category
‘heroic, war and historical songs’; it is of course those songs which are
overtly ‘patriotic’, rather than personal or narrative, which fail.) The
mother fixation is illusory; many of these songs merely begin with an
invocation to the mother. Most important, there is a whole class which
is missing in many folk cultures – the songs of xeniteia. We in England
have songs of separation (a lover goes away to sea, etc.) but we do not
have this nostalgia, this homesickness of the Cretans.
Xeniteia is part of the stock in trade of Greek folk song for simple
historical reasons. The Greeks are, and always have been, indefatigable
travellers. There are large expatriate colonies nowadays in America,
Australia, West Germany and elsewhere. Under the Ottoman Empire
there were Greek colonies all over Europe, in Venice, Paris, Marseilles,
London, Manchester and other great cities. But the Greek does not
usually travel for pleasure, nor because he dislikes Greece. He travels
because his own country seems to have become too hard for him, and
life is easier elsewhere; and usually he returns in his old age with
money. When he is away he sends money to his family. He is continually
thinking of his home. There is more than one apparently serious
report of Cretans exiled for revolutionary activities by the Venetians
dying of homesickness; and they were always petitioning to be allowed
back. Travel means homesickness. There are no songs which exalt
the excitement and joys of travel for its own sake, in the ‘Give to me
the life I love’ manner. That is sophisticated.
The Greek sings of xeniteia:
To be abroad, to be an orphan, to be sad, to be in love,
Put them in the scales, and the heaviest is to be abroad.
The man who is exiled abroad should put on black,
For his clothes to match the black fire of his heart.
And a typical Cretan song combines the fear of ‘abroad’ with the
Greek insistence on proper burial:
I beg you, my fate, do not send me abroad,
And if you send me abroad do not let me die there;
For I have seen how they bury them abroad
Without incense and candle, without priest and deacon,
And far from church.
The idea of xeniteia is not confined to folk poetry. It has eaten its
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