free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
the wheel, iron shoes studded with red-hot nails, and poison (‘But
George, he drinks it down like water!’), After any one of these tests a
rational man would have concluded that George was under divine
protection, and given up. But the King just got madder and madder.
The tortures hurt abominably, but George never gave up. Finally in
his exasperation the King tried to kill the saint – but even this he found
impossible.
The King therefore organized a test to discover whether George’s
God is the only true God. ‘They take four men, a lame man, a paralytic,
a blind man and a dead man. And first the priests of the idols try to
cure these men, but they can’t manage it.
‘So George says, “King,” he says, “no wonder they fail, because the
idols are artificial,” he says, “they are gold, bits of metal, ordinary
human products.”
‘And then he calls on God and God helps him to cure the lame man,
so he walks, and the paralytic, so he gets up and moves, and the blind
man, so he sees, and the dead man, so he comes to life again and sings!
And the King is amazed and says, “George,” he says, “George, how
do you do it?” ’
And the story ends in wholesale conversion and light.
I went up to visit Pavlos Gyparakis, the best singer I heard in Crete,
and one of our supper-guests of three years back; intending to work
with him on the origin and transmission of these old songs. But conversation
turned to war, and he put into my hands the record he had
written after it was all over – a document of classic simplicity, and worth
more, every page of it, than notes on his repertoire of songs. He had
written:
The Germans occupied Crete in May 1941.
At that time there was in Crete, unfortunately, a party of men who said that
the Germans were a kind and civilized people. It was not long, however, before
we saw the opposite. They made mass arrests of Greek patriots and executed
them, they burnt whole villages on any pretext. By all this they gave us to
understand that they had come not merely to enslave us but to exterminate us.
The situation was desperate because it was not only the Germans but also
the misfortune of hunger and lack of clothes.
People began to give up hope, but not all. Those who believed in their faith
and their country were mastered neither by fear of the Germans nor by hardship
and hunger; these gave them strength and courage, and they had a secret
hope, that one day our country would be free, however few of us were still alive.
As for those who gave up hope or wished to avoid hardship, I do not know
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