free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Cretan Renaissance
and proceeds to explore the characters concerned: Abraham, Sarah
and Isaac. The Sacrifice is therefore unlike the English plays of the same
name; it is neither a mystery nor a morality. I can vouch for its effectiveness
on stage, since I saw it at the Athens Festival. It was played,
quite rightly, fast and naturalistically, and despite the disadvantages
of confining scenery, consisting of a set of rocks based on the iconography
of Cretan painting, and some over-acting from Katina Paxinou
as Sarah, it held the multi-racial audience. But then the story, with its
miraculous denouement, is a ‘natural’ for the stage; and especially
moving in the Greek because of the beautiful speech of young Isaac -
played by a girl - as he waits bound for his father to sacrifice him. He
moves from prayer to resignation. He asks Abraham to kill him gently,
caressingly. He wishes his mother were there for him to kiss and say
goodbye:
Mother, no more will you come to my bedside to dress me,
To wake me tenderly and to caress me.
I am leaving you and you are losing me - like melting snow,
Like a candle which you hold and the wind blows it out.
He tells Abraham to come near, to leave off tightening the rope, and
for a moment he seems to take courage – for his mother’s sake. ‘And tell
her how I go to find Hades full of joy.’ Then the last request: whatever
of mine is left in the house, clothes, papers both written and unwritten,
and the basket which contained them, give them all to Eliseel, our
neighbour, because he is my playmate and companion and best friend
at school. I have nothing more to say, he says, just my goodbyes. But
at the last moment his nerve breaks:
Sir, you fathered me, can you not pity me?
God who created me, help me! O Mother, where are you?
The Sacrifice of Abraham is almost certainly by Vincenzos Kornaros,
the author of the Erotokritos. (Apart from the superiority of these two
works over all other Cretan literature, their linguistic similarity makes
it likely that one man wrote both.) Erotokritos, more than ten thousand
lines long, is the heroic romance of modern Greece. The epic Digenes
Akritas and the Erotokritos have to be for modern Greece what the Iliad
and the Odyssey were for ancient Greece. Parva componere magnis: nevertheless
the Erotokritos is beautiful and important, not only because it
ties in with Greek nationalism.
It is an astonishing poem. The model is the extremely popular
French romance ‘Paris et Vienne’; Kornaros knew an Italian version
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