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The Great Island
Now Gyp ark is Emmanuel [a cousin] was not with us, but as soon as he heard the
shots he came to the house where he expected us to be and asked ‘What of my
uncle?’, and they pointed out where we were and he came to meet us.
As Emmanuel was walking, he had his gun slung on his shoulder, because as
I wrote earlier gunshot could not dazzle his eyes; and when he reached a certain
point in the central street the Bulgarians saw him and saw well that he was a
Greek; and since German bullets had been ashamed to kill him in the battle at
Tsilivdika, it had to be the Bulgarians that killed him.
They shot him, and he took his gun in his hands and without wasting time
or protecting himself, he stood upright and shot at the place where the Communists
were and at the same time he moved towards them.
He fell to about thirty armed men under cover; he fell to thirty guns, and
he alone and upright and exposed, he was killed in the central street without
succeeding in meeting us.
Pavlos writes with difficulty. This account, from which I have
omitted most of the narrative details, since a fuller, richer story is in
George Psychoundakis’s book, must have cost him great labour. It is
one of many similar records kept by Cretan patriots to remind them of
those momentous days; and it sums up the philosophy which I have
traced through a thousand years of history. Throughout these years
there have stalked two enemies; the invader, Venetian, Turk or
German; and the traitor Ephialtes, the betrayer of Candia, the man
who sold the Aradaina gorge to the Turks in 1770, the treacherous
Thymakis whose information caused the death of Marko, another of
Pavlos’s cousins. Thymakis, says Pavlos, was ‘no Greek’. The communists
were ‘Bulgarians’. Pavlos’s account, in theme and attitude, is rooted
in the Cretan heroic tradition.
But perhaps it is the last of a long line, for even the short taste of
liberty which Crete enjoyed between 1913 and 1941 was enough to
weaken this tradition. Proof of this is to be found in the folksongs
which date from the war. In formula and even sentiment they are like
the older rizitika, but the inspiration has gone. This, for instance, is one
of the better examples:
A bird from the plains flies to Epanomeri,
Bringing fearful news, bringing bitter news.
The Germans have borne down with a thousand aeroplanes.
They throw down cannons, soldiers with parachutes
To take Crete and to enslave her.’
‘Fly away, bird, to your plain and tell your people
To endure the war until we come down,
And show the corsair Germans how Crete makes war,
How she fights and how she strikes for her Freedom.’
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