James A. Notopoulos: looking for Homer in Greek folk song

Following in the footsteps of the Darwin of Homeric Studies, Milman Parry, who, in the 1930s, revolutionised Homeric studies by studying the oral poetry of Yugoslavia, renowned classicist James A. Notopoulos set out in the early 1950s to study the heroic folk music of Greece and Cyprus. 

Notopoulos collected hundreds of songs, which have been digitised by Panayiotis (Paddy) League and are available here. 

In the above video – taken from a symposium in Denmark on Patrick Leigh Fermor – League gives a fantastic talk about these songs, with an emphasis on the songs of the Cretan resistance and the Nazi occupation of the island, including a 90 minute epic song on the famous kidnapping of General Heinrich Kreipe. 

League follows the talk by giving a concert, dedicated to Leigh Fermor, in which a number of Cretan songs are recited. He provides useful context as to how these songs were originally composed and performed.

The song that League and his colleagues open the concert with is Χίτλερ, να μην το καυχηθείς πως πάτησες την Κρήτη, Hitler, don’t dare boast that you conquered Crete. 

The song reflects a widespread Cretan belief that if the Cretan Division had remained on Crete rather than been sent to Albania after the British had assured the Greek government that the Allied Expeditionary Force (composed of predominantly British, Australian and New Zealand units) would defend Crete from Axis attack or, if once the Cretan Division had, following the German invasion of Greece, left Albania and been given the opportunity to return to Crete – the Royal Navy refused to evacuate them to Crete from the Peloponnese – then the Battle of Crete would have been won and the island would not have fallen to the Germans.

Χίτλερ, να μην το καυχηθείς πως πάτησες την Κρήτη,
ξαρμάτωτη την ηύρηκες κ' έλειπαν τα παιδιά τησ,
στα ξένα πολεμούσανε, πάνω στην Αλβανία,
μα πάλι πολεμήσανε.

Hitler, don’t dare boast that you conquered Crete
you found her unarmed and its lads were away
fighting in foreign lands, high up in Albania
but they still fought.

Below is another version of the song.

Seferis, Leigh Fermor and the Cyprus crisis

The above programme is from Greek TV in 1972; it's an episode of This is Your Life involving the British writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, known as much for his books on the Mani and Roumeli as for his exploits in Nazi-occupied Crete, where as an SOE officer he executed with the Cretan resistance the kidnap  of the island’s senior German commander, General Heinrich Kreipe, an incident captured in the 1957 Powell & Pressburger film Ill Met By Moonlight, in which Leigh Fermor is portrayed by Dirk Bogarde.

In the moving and almost surreal TV show, Leigh Fermor is reunited not only with two of the Cretan fighters involved in the kidnap, Manolis Paterakis and Giorgos Tyrakis, but with the unfortunate Kreipe himself!

I've been thinking a bit about Leigh Fermor recently. I’ve never read any of his books on Greece, but he does crop up as part of the Katsimbalis circle, the group of Greek, British and American writers brought together by the literary critic and publisher, Giorgos Katsimbalis, the eponymous Colossus of Maroussi as depicted by Henry Miller.

Katsimbalis was responsible in the 1930s for launching the literary careers of, among others, Giorgos Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and Giorgos Theotokas, though his idol was the poet of the Megali Idea, an Idea Katsimbalis shared, Kostis Palamas. The American and British writers and intellectuals involved in the Katsimbalis circle included Steven Runciman, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, the translator Rex Warner, Osbert Lancaster, Leigh Fermor, Philip Sherrard – all of whom, through their intimacy with Katsimbalis and the Greek poets in his circle, developed a passion for and knowledge of Greece, which they converted into literature that inspired a generation of Britons and Americans sympathetic to Hellenism.

However, this Anglo-Greek circle was ruptured by the Cyprus crisis in the 1950s, which pitted Greek against British nationalism.

Seferis, in particular, was deeply involved in the struggle of Cypriot Hellenism. The poet and diplomat was an ardent admirer of Makarios and strong supporter of Grivas and the armed revolt he led – regarding it as pure and just as the Cretan resistance to Germany Leigh Fermor participated in – and as such Seferis cut off all contact with Britons he knew during this period.

I’ve not been able to find any explicit details regarding Leigh Fermor and Cyprus – whether he supported Greek demands or British imperialism – but he was one of the Britons Seferis broke with; although, unlike with Durrell – who not only moved to Cyprus during the EOKA revolt, but was also recruited into the colonial administration’s Information Office (Seferis refers to Durrell as assuming the role of a gauleiter) from where he argued for the virtues of continuing British rule in Cyprus and, indeed, that the Cypriots were not Greeks and their demands for Enosis illegitimate – relations with Leigh Fermor were later resumed.

Nevertheless, the bitterness of the rupture was sincere, particularly on the side of the Greeks, who felt their British friends, who they had embraced, trusted and guided, were little more than parasites and hypocrites.

On 18 April, 1955 – two weeks after EOKA began its armed struggle to unite Cyprus to Greece – Katismbalis, the Venizelist and veteran of the Macedonian campaign, the attempt to liberate Ionia and the Albanian epos, wrote to Seferis:

»Είμαι μπαρουτιασμένος με τους φίλους μας τους Άγγλους… Είναι όλοι τους πούστηδες και καθίκια (και δεν εξαιρώ κανέναν εκτός από το Ρεξ και τον Όσπμερτ – ίσως).»

Werner Herzog talks Kos, Crete, Homer, Thucydides, Linear B and Wrestlemania

Werner Herzog in conversation with Paul Holdengräber at the Onassis Cultural Center NY, 16 June 2015.

Britain and the expansion of the Greek state

Many thanks to the friend who sent me a copy of Robert Holland and Diana Markides’ The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960. The book is very good  and covers, albeit essentially from the British perspective, Anglo-Greek relations as they developed in the post-Napoleonic period through the Eastern Question, the two World Wars and post-colonialism, in which circumstances prevailed that meant Britain had a powerful say in the futures of the Ionian islands, Crete, Cyprus and the Dodecanese. 

Many things are revealed by the book: notably, how, apart from the Venizelos-Lloyd George entente, British and Greek interests – or the interests of a conservative superpower and an aspiring regional one – often collided and that the union of the Ionian islands, Crete and the Dodecanese with Greece was done in the teeth of British opposition and was not some ineluctable or organic process, but a combination of local Greek fortitude, a whole host of arbitrary factors and decisions and a passing alignment with the strategic imperatives of foreign powers.

The unwillingness of enough Greeks to submit or compromise their identity and national aspirations comes across strongly – and was something that exasperated the British; but, sadly, as in the Cyprus case, the fervour and willpower of the Greek periphery for enosis was often not enough to overcome a hesitant Greek state, Greece’s inferior strategic position and its reliance on the acquiescence of more powerful nations to achieve Greek goals. Modern Greece’s failures appear to be rooted in this inability to seize control, as much as is possible in these matters, of its own destiny.