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Return to Asi Gonia
Corsairs have become an irrelevancy, next to parachutes. The old
metaphors are ceasing to speak clearly, and it is left to men like
Psychoundakis and Gyparakis, with their unsophisticated prose, to
express the agony of the war.
Even so, although nearly fifty years of freedom, only briefly interrupted,
have sapped the force and inspiration of folk expression, the
formulae and the philosophy survive. It would not occur to Cretans of
the mountains to express themselves in terms other than those taught
by a thousand years of subservience to foreigners, and handed down
by so long a line of poets. The personification of Crete as a hard,
beautiful, demanding mother, the heroic attitudes, the insistence on
Freedom, have been built into the philosophy. And when freedom
came, bringing with it the need for new attitudes, there was no room
for them. As it became apparent that there was no longer any foreigner
to blame for the difficult life, the poverty, the unproductive land, it
began to appear too that all the time there had been another enemy –
the land. So each barbarian invader begins to look like a ‘kind of
solution’.
What are we waiting for, assembled in the market-place?
The barbarians are to arrive today.
Why such inaction in the senate house?
Why are the senators sitting without legislating?
Because the barbarians will arrive today.
What laws will the senators make from now on?
The barbarians when they come will legislate.
The barbarians engaged most of the activities and energy of Crete for a
thousand years; what was left went into the land, but it was recognized
that until the barbarians were expelled, other problems were secondary.
Cavafy’s poem expresses exactly the dilemma of a society in a state of
transition, loaded down with a set of attitudes which will no longer
completely serve. The questioner asks why the streets are emptying,
the people returning to their houses deep in thought.
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some men have arrived from the frontiers,
And said that there are no barbarians any more. . .
And now what will become of us without barbarians ?
These people were a kind of solution.
It is possible that the barbarians might one day return, and the old
attitudes flicker into life again. But so far as one can foresee, Crete is
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