OWING to certain circumstances, I was not living with my immediate family, but was under the care of my father’s uncle. He and I lived on one of those islands that rise high above the Sea of Marmora; and our near horizon was the Asiatic coast of Turkey, which stretched itself in the blue waters like a beautiful odalisk. We lived in an old huge house, which belonged to him, and was far away from any other habitation. The sea was in front, the mountains behind, and thick woodland on the other two sides.
From the time I could remember my uncle conversed with me as if I were grown-up, yet I felt that he held me in contempt because I was a girl and could not carry arms. Life contained nothing for him beyond the hope of waging warfare against the Turks.
He had been only a lad in 1821 when the Greeks had risen in desperation to throw off the Mussulman yoke. Enlisting among the first, he had fought during the entire nine years. Subsequently he fought in every one of the uprisingsof Crete. When not fighting, he was back in Turkey, in his home, where he thought, studied, and sometimes wrote inflammatory articles for the Greek reviews.
At times he had tremendous physical suffering, mementoes of his many battles. On those days I did not see him. He possessed that noble and rare quality of being ashamed of his bodily ailments. But after my fifth birthday I was present on many days when mental anguish possessed him. On such days he would stride up and down his vast gloomy rooms, talking of the Greek race and of the yoke under which so large a part of it was living.
He would stand by the window and tell me about Crete, pointing, as if the island were visible from where he stood—and I believe that in spite of the distance, he actually saw it, for it was ever present in his mind, and he knew every corner of it.
“There it lies,” he would say, “lapped by the waves of the Mediterranean; but were the mighty sea to pass over it, it could not wash away the noble Cretan blood which drenches it. It is soaked with it, and it will be blood-soaked until the Mussulman yoke has been wrenched from it—or till there is no more Cretan blood to shed.”
Or he would cry out: “Don’t you hear the shrieks of the Cretan women as they leap into the foaming sea, holding fast to their hearts theirlittle ones? Yes! they would rather meet their death in the merciless but clean sea, than fall, living, into the hands of the vileTurkishsoldiery. Oh! my God—my Christian God—how can you permit it?”
He would bow his head on his arms and remain motionless, until the feeling which was choking him had passed. Then, in a subdued tone, he would resume:
“Crete! Crete! brave, indomitable Crete—always victorious, yet always handed back to the Turks by Christian Europe. My beautiful Crete, when shalt thou be free?”
It was on such days that he exhorted me to remember the little Greek flag he had given me, and all that it stood for. On other days, when he was calmer, he took me systematically with him through the entire nine years of the Greek revolution, and by him I was carried through all its glorious battles.
He had fought first under the leadership of Marco Bozaris, and he entertained for this heroic chief an admiration amounting to worship.
“We were only a handful, mostly lads, at first,” he would say, with a happy smile on his saddened face. “Yes, we were mostly lads, and Marco himself a little over thirty. But how we did obey him, and how we did fight!”
Here he would lose himself in memory for a while.
“I can see Marco now, seated cross-legged on the ground, a crude map of his own make before him, we bending over him. ‘Here, boys,’ he would say, pointing to the map, ‘here is where we fight the Turks to-morrow, and by night time we shall carry our holy flag farther along. We do—or we die!’ Then the handful of us would kneel and kiss the flag, and swear by to-morrow to carry it farther along—or to die. And we always carried it farther along.”
He described Marco Bozaris so vividly to me, that when one day he showed me a picture which he had smuggled into Turkey for my benefit, I instantly cried: “Why that is the great Bozaris—your Marco!”
I believe that I never pleased him more in my life than by this. He actually kissed me.
Next to Bozaris, the man he admired and talked of most was the intrepid mariner, Constantin Kanaris.
“The Turkish fleet was blazing with lights,” he told me, “for the Kabitan Pasha was celebrating. One of the warships was filled with Greek maidens, ranging from twelve to eighteen years. They had been carried off that day without distinction of class or name. The daughters of the great Greek chieftains and of the commonest sailors had been herded together, and brought on this battleship to be made the victims of the night.
“Word of this had come to us. We sat gloomily around a rude wooden table, saying not a word. Then Constantin Kanaris spoke, his voice hoarse, his face terrible to look at:
“‘Take them away we cannot—unless God sends us ships from heaven at this minute. But if we cannot take them away, we can at least send them to God, pure as he has given them to us.’
“We listened breathless, while he unfolded to us his daring plan. He would go out in a small row-boat to the battle-ship alone. ‘Never fear! I may not come back—but the battle-ship will be blown up.’
“He left us—so dumb with despair that for a long, long time none of us spoke. Hours passed since he had gone; then a far distant boom made the still air to tremble, and we, rushing to the shore, saw the sky bathed in burning colours.
“We lads were for shouting for joy, but at the sight of the older men, whose heads hung low on their breasts, we remembered that none yet knew whose were the daughters just sent to God. Each father there, maybe, had a child to mourn.”
My uncle’s friendship lasted as long as Kanaris lived, and at times he went to see him in Greece. Once he reproached me bitterly for having been born a few years too late to be taken to the home of Kanaris, to behold the great chieftain and to be blessed by him.
After the untimely death of Marco Bozaris at Karpenissi, my grand-uncle fought under other great leaders, until in turn, in the last three years of the revolution, he himself became a leader.
Of his own exploits he never spoke. He entrusted this task to posterity. It was of this and that other leader he loved to speak, and as his narrative progressed all the names which have immortalized the modern history of Greece passed before me—passed before me not as names from a book, but as men of flesh and blood, in their everyday aspects as well as in their heroic moments.
And I, seated on my little stool, with the big book I had brought him to read me still unopened on my lap, would listen enthralled, wishing that I might have lived when my uncle had, and might with him have kneeled in front of Marco Bozaris, to kiss the Greek flag, and to swear that I would do or die.
One day when he was more violent than usual against the Turks—when he almost wept at the thought of living under the Turkish yoke—an inspiration came to me.
“Uncle!” I cried, “why do we live here? Why don’t we go to live where the Greek flag flies?”
Abruptly he stopped in his walk before me, his tall, thin figure erect, his eyes aflame.
“Go away from here?” he cried. “Go awayfrom here, and be a traitor? Yes, that is what so many thousands did in 1453. They abandoned their hearths and the graves of their ancestors. They abandoned their lands and their schools, and above all they abandoned St Sophia. To go away from here is to forsake our country—for ever to relinquish it to the conqueror. We must stayhere!” he thundered, “and bear with ourpatridathe yoke of slavery, till the day shall come, when again strong, we shall rise to break that yoke, and hear again a Christian priest in St Sophia!”
I was seven years old when he died; yet I felt almost as old as he. Having never seen other children, and therefore having never shared in childish frolics, my world consisted of the woes of Greece.
His death was a terrible shock to me, and yet I cannot say that I quite understood what death meant. For days and days I pondered as to where he was, and whether he were comfortable or not. I saw his body, wrapped in a huge Greek flag, the icon of his patron saint clasped in his cold hands, lowered to rest beside the men of his family, who, like him, had lived and died under the Turkish yoke.