free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
the saint’s day to prepare for the celebration, and a shipload of Barbary
pirates, seeing the lights twinkling, landed and shut them all up
in the church, intending to round them up in the morning. All, however,
escaped through a secret passage, except one small girl who had
fallen asleep in a corner. She was made personal slave of the captain in
consequence of her remarkable beauty; and was subsequently restored
miraculously by Niketas, who flew her home on a white-winged horse.
St George is credited with a similar miracle; he is sometimes pictured
on a flying horse, with the rescued girl sitting behind him, still holding
the pitcher from which she was pouring her master’s glass of water.
In later years the area has been haunted by other supernatural
beings. It was here that Hadzimichalis Daliannis, not to be confused
with Hadzimichalis Iannaris of the Omalos, led the last stand against
the Turks in 1828. Hadzimichalis, a typical palikari who had led his
private army around Greece and even as far as Beirut, in the course of
the war of independence, ended up in command of an Epirot garrison
(and thus of the local Cretans) at Frangokastello, when the Turks
controlled all Crete except this coastal plain. He unwisely defended the
castle against Mustapha Pasha’s vastly greater army, instead of resorting
to appropriate guerrilla tactics from the neighbouring foothills.
Hadzimichalis’s garrison was cut to pieces; their commander decapitated,
and mourned, it is said, by Mustapha Pasha himself, who came
from the same part of the Morea as Hadzimichalis.
Folk poetry has surrounded Hadzimichalis himself with a supernatural
aura; for instance:
When he rode, his horse wept
And then he knew how it was to be his death.
And like the shades which haunted the field of Marathon in Pausanias’s
time, Hadzimichalis’s 385 men still ride across the plain.
But still on 17 May the phantom army appears,
Hadzimichalis and his men; and in the mists
They fight again; and still is heard below the castle
The shouts of wicked Turks, the hoofs of horses.
Those with the gift of sight see them and are afraid,
But, may God rest them, they can harm no man.
The shades, some on foot, some mounted, with Hadzimichalis himself
prominent, appear on 17 May or soon after, in the dewy hour
before sunrise. Hence their name drossoulites, ‘dew-shades’. Fielding,
who spent these days waiting for them to materialize, and was disappointed,
concluded that they were probably an optical illusion, the
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