DECONSTRUCTING ZALONGO

“You’re from Epirus,” an enthusiastic mother exclaimed at the recent 25 March celebrations. “I love that Zalongo song. The one which goes«στη στεριά δε ζει το ψάρι/ούτε ανθός στην αμμουδιά» (on land, fish cannot survive/ nor a flower on the sand). It really gets me going. You have to hand it to these amazing women. Preferring to die free, rather than live as slaves and writing amazing songs in the process. This is what the Greek Revolution is all about.” 

“It is a lovely song, but unfortunately it was not composed by the Souliotisses at Zalongo, nor was it sung during the Greek Revolution” I replied hesitantly. “Oh you are just one of those pinko NeoKosmolefties who don’t respect our traditions and want to destroy everything,” she snapped. “Why don’t you do us all a favour and go and find another ethnicity if you hate being Greek so much.” 

The legend holds that sixty women of Souli, trapped at Zalongo after fleeing the destruction of their homes by the Albanians of Ali Pasha, threw their children and themselves off the cliff to their deaths, in order to avoid enslavement and rape, all the while dancing and apparently spontaneously singing the song which has dominated Greek school theatricals ever since: «Έχεγεια καημένε κόσμε» (“Farewell poor world, Farewell sweet life, and you, my wretched country, Farewell for ever).  It is this song that I was at pains to explain to the enraged mother, which although enmeshed within our popular consciousness and considered emblematic of the Greek Struggle of Independence, actually has nothing to do with it. Firstly, the incident at Zalongo took place in 1803, some eighteen years prior to the Greek Revolution. The music itself, bears absolutely no resemblance to the musical tradition of the region, and as for the lyrics, we know that the song was first performed one hundred years after the event it is supposedly contemporaneous with, forming part of a popular drama, written by Spyros Peresiades, in 1903. 

What we know of Zalongo mainly comes from Western travellers who were eager to incorporate the austere, mountain dwelling war-like tribespeople of Souli into a romanticised myth that presented them as modern incarnations of republican Rome or Sparta. Sacrificing oneself for one’s country was weaponised as a prime example of these forms of civic virtue. By grafting the Souliotes onto values already accessible and understood in the West, Western philhellenes sought to elicit sympathy for the Greek cause and fashion renascent Greece in their image. 

Prussian traveller Bartholdy, who was present in Ioannina at the time of the Zalongo massacre is the first to report on it in 1804. He writes that one hundred refugees from Souli had sought refuge at Zalongo: “They [the Albanians] attacked them because the location, being quite defensible, could easily be fortified and so, the massacre was terrible. Thirty nine women threw themselves off the cliff with their children, some of which were still at the breast.” 

A year later, in 1805, English traveller William Martin Leake recorded that the number of women involved was twenty two. Henry Holland, who travelled through the region a decade later and published his account in 1815 wrote that the Souliotisses “threw their babies over the cliff so they would not be captured by the enemy.” In both accounts, there is no mention either of dance, nor of song and it appears that they were forced off the cliff rather than choosing to throw themselves. 

The earliest account we have of dancing in connection with Zalongo, is that by Christophoros Perrhaivos, also in 1815. He notes that the band of Souliotes that had reached Zalongo were those who had capitulated to Ali Pasha and that among them were men, notably tribal leader Kitsios Botsaris. They were suddenly attacked and only after two days of fighting did “around sixty” women decide to throw themselves off the cliff. Perrhaivos describes them dancing, but also does not mention singing. Instead, he provides a gruesome detail: “Some of them did not perish because they had fallen upon the bodies of their offspring or comrades, impaled upon the sharp rocks below.” Mysteriously, in the second edition of Perrhaivos’ account, he completely omits mention of the Souliots’ capitulation to Ali Pasha and the women’s fatal dance. 

French philologist and historian Claude Charles Fauriel, who published the first collection of Souliote songs in his 1824 “Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne” while dramatizing the massacre by focusing on how the women kissed their children prior to throwing them to their deaths, records the dance but not the singing. He mentions the survival of one woman, as compared to Perrhaivos’ several, but this could be a literary trope to explain how the tale of their sacrifice could have been told without the survival of eyewitnesses. 

Fauriel’s account seems to have influenced Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos’ portrayal of the massacre in his 1824 poem “The Death of Lord Byron.” In that poem, notable for its erotic imagery and its implication that unborn children were leaping in the womb along with their mothers, Solomos references the fatal dance at Zalongo, declaring that it was their love of freedom that pushed them to trace the steps of such an extreme dance: «τεςεμάζωξε εις το μέρος/του Τσαλόγγου το ακρινό/ της ελευθερίας ο έρως/ και τες έμπνευσε χορό».  

It is only when we come to the anonymous “Memorandum relating to Greece and Albania,” by the so called Ibrahim Manzur Effendi, that we learn that there were one hundred women at Zalongo, who apparently sung, danced and threw themselves off the cliff all the same time, a detail provided by one Suleiman Aga, an Albanian soldier, who apparently witnessed the sacrifice and related it with tears in his eyes. 

At the conclusion of the Greek Revolution and the establishment of the Greek State, Greece ceased being a romantic neo-classical paradise and instead became a burden and a source of aggravation to the West. There was no need to idealise the Souliotisses any longer and it is during this period that Greek historians begin to examine the event and to attempt to romanticise it. In 1860, Souliote doctor Panagiotis Salapantas describes the «σπαραξικάρδιον» moment where, kissing their children, the Souliotisses danced and threw themselves to their deaths. He adds the detail that the soldiers present, witnessing their bravery and daring, exclaimed: “Allah, Allah, yazık,” meaning “God, what a shame!” The fact that the soldiers were Albanian in origin and probably did not speak Turkish must have escaped him. 

George Finlay’s 1861 History of the Greek Revolution, based on Leake’s account omits the dancing component altogether and it is only when we get to Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’ five volume History of the Greek Ethnos that the authoritative account as we now know it, becomes close to being crystalised, he mentioning that the Souliotisses joined hands and threw themselves off the cliff while singing and dancing, though the nature of the song is not mentioned. 

In 1886, an account was published from the testimony of Lambro of Kamarina, one of the five children that survived the massacre. She stated that during the ambush, both men and women rallied to defend themselves. In the panic, some threw their children over the cliff, others tried to hide behind bushes and most were slaughtered. Poignantly, many children were killed when their mothers who were hiding ebhind rocks, smothered them inadvertently after covering their mouths so that they would not cry out. 

Another survivor’s account in 1890, Ekaterina Karras’ who was five at the time, mentions that there were fifty six women and thirteen men at Zalongo. She states that the women threw their children off the cliff before they followed, singing and dancing to their death. Again, just how the five year old Ekaterina was able to witness the women’s activities after having been thrown off the cliff, is a matter for speculation. 

It appears then that while there can be no doubt that an incident did occur at Zalongo, and that it is plausible that women jumped or were forced to jump to their deaths, the exact manner of their deaths, including whether they danced or sung, and what form this took is impossible to ascertain. What we are able to appreciate instead, is the formation of a myth for national purposes, one that meets the philhellenic ideals and expectations formulated in the West, whereby the Souliotes and by extension, all Greeks are as committed to the defence of their nation and willing to sacrifice themselves for it as the ancient Spartans, while being also as honourable and democratic as the Athenians, in contrast to the capricious and despotic Ali Pasha. It is an exercise in the building of Hellenes, in which the threat of rape converns not only the Souliotisses specifically but endangers the entire Greek ethnos. 

As such, the song and its accompanying myth are highly problematic. As Alfredo Banti has argued, female suicide is an act for submission to men, not relevant to personal emanciapation. While it may be presented as the woman’s choice, it is implied that it is a woman’s responsibility towards men, with the threat of secualised violence being presented in order to create a collective European identity against the sexually violent Other. Thus, the women of Zalongo who love their country more than their children or their lives, subordinate their interests to those of the public good, which is determined by their menfolk. Since women are usually held to represent the private sphere, this means they adopt the male perspective whenever they enter into the public sphere and are sacrificed first. 

The myth of Zalongo, thus, instead of acting as an archetype of defiance and subversion of the patriarchy, both local and externally imposed, or being an element in the process of negotiating the Greek identity in opposition to the colonising vision of classical antiquity propagated by the West and an attempt to overcome the sentimental, orientalist identity imposed upon Greeks by western intellectuals merely reinforces their narrative. Until such time as Greek women feel comfortable enough to articulate their own discourse without resorting to tropes, such myths will continue to deprive them of their voice, fuelling the internal contradictions of our ontopathological identity. 

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU 

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 April 2023