Fig. 55: Mr TP Cook as Zenocles, Ali Pasha’s adversary in Ali Pacha; or the Signet Ring.
When Ali Pasha heard this, his executioner he called in.
And while the klepht bowed, off went his head.
‘Kolias’, Klephtic song
From contemporary accounts we learn that tales and songs about Ali Pasha were already common currency during his lifetime. Music and storytelling were among the entertainments witnessed at Ali’s court and a retinue of entertainers followed his family members as they moved from one residence to other. When Thomas Hughes was invited by Mukhtar to dine with him on the island of lake Ioannina, they were accompanied by a ‘household fiddler, like the ancient bard, that invariable concomitant of the feast, stretching his lungs to the tortured catgut and celebrating in wild Albanian music the deeds of Ali and his valiant sons’.
In order to show his favour to distinguished European guests, it was usual practice for Ali to send musicians to their homes during the evening. Pouqueville tells of the entertainers in the retinues of Mukhtar and Veli; drawn from a wide area and including Jewish and Gypsy musicians and dancers, some from Constantinople, a Morlaque comedian troupe (from the Dalmatian coast), dancing bear trainers, Buretinieri (dice-box players) and acrobats. Pouqueville brackets the acrobats with prostitutes and he often compares musicians and acrobats to the courtesans and prostitutes of ancient banquets. Exotic as these entertainments must have been, the greatest impression on visitors was that left by the songs about their host. When Leake heard the war songs about Ali and the Suliotes sung in the guests’ honour in the presence of the Albanian despot he could not help being moved and impressed. Ali liked to hear his deeds recounted, and the songs that told of his early exploits might be termed the ‘official’ record. As a counter there was the ‘unofficial’ version, also noted by visitors to Albania, that gave the alternative Ali story as witnessed by his subjects or his enemies. To have your praises sung was common practice and minstrels would compose eulogies in return for payment. Gavoyanios,1 a famed old minstrel of Auspelatria in Thessaly living at the end of the eighteenth century, became wealthy composing songs for soldiers in the Turkish military, not a particularly popular undertaking, but he was prepared to extol their prowess for a large fee, the greater the praise the greater the sum. In contrast to the eulogies, the ‘unofficial’ songs praised the exploits of Ali’s enemies and bewailed the excesses of his regime.
The most well known eulogy to Ali is the long epic song, the Alipashiad, which was composed for him in his lifetime. Written in Greek by the Muslim Albanian, Haxhi Shehreti, it gave a concertinaed and imaginative account of Ali’s life to date, skipping lightly over his youthful exploits but not shirking from the brutal way in which Ali went about asserting his authority.
He went in one end and out at the other,
He tramples on bodies and still is not sated.
Lord Ali had resolved not to leave a single soul,
And his troops fell on them like maddened lions…
All that were in the villages the snakes devoured;
He smashed their legs and smashed their backs
and smashed their buttocks.
Such details obviously were a matter of pride to Ali rather than shame. In song, Ali is often remembered for his cruelty to his opponents and to his subjects, but his opposition to the Sultan meant that he could be cast as both villain and hero. To the klephts, Ali was usually the villain.
In the song ‘Kolias’ (quoted at the beginning of the chapter) Ali is unequivocally seen as a double-crossing despot. In his study on klephtic song, Gabriel Rombotis saw the themes of capture and betrayal as a window into how Ali exploited the internal rivalries among the klepht captains. The captains were the dominant personalities after whom each band would be named. Rombotis lists the virtues and qualities for leadership a captain must have shown to gain his reputation:
Determination, definiteness of purpose, supreme ability in the indispensable requirements of the profession, generosity when needed, gallantry, tenacity and inflexibility of character in the face of any event even death, fairness to his fellow-Klephts, power of persuasion.
These strengths will have been those Ali himself possessed during his time leading a bandit life and once he became a pasha he was canny enough to know how to use his experience to turn the tables and exploit them as weaknesses. The virtues led to rivalry between the captains making it possible for pashas like Ali to ‘attract them to their Palaces and treacherously to put them to death’; and Ali Pasha, quick to capitalize on any opportunity, would become a past master of the art. In the songs ‘Kolias’ and ‘Katsoudas’ (the same hero by another name) the protagonist is summarily beheaded with one clean blow by Ali’s executioner, while in another version Kolias is given over to the pasha of Tripolitsa’s men for a long process of torture and humiliation. ‘Tripolitsa’, Tripoli in the Peloponnese, where the song has moved the action, is where Veli held court. In the song the hero begs not to be taken through the mountain village of Vytina on the way to Tripoli so that his betrothed sweetheart does not see him in his perilous condition.
The French historian and philologist Claude Charles Fauriel collected these klephtic songs close to the latter years of Ali’s life from expatriate Greeks living in Venice and Trieste and his translations were published in 1825 shortly after Ali’s death. Fauriel was a radical and member of the le comité philhellène de Paris working for Greek independence. His pioneering work was taken up and expanded on by Arnold Passow who translated it into German in the 1850s. These two works brought the folk culture of Greece and Albania into the European mainstream for the first time and at an opportune moment. There was a growing interest within the Romantic and nationalist movements in folk song and culture. Using Furiel’s work, the great German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe made his own adaptations of folk songs from Epirus following the adventures of another klepht, Liakos, who takes on Ali’s principle deputy in charge of the passes and defeats him in single combat. From the German, the klephtic verses took on a new life in Bohemia. The Czechs, a subjugated people themselves under the Habsburg thumb since the seventeenth century, were creating their own national revival. Their Romantic nationalist poet Vaclav Bolemir Nebesky translated the klephtic verses, probably from Passow, into his native tongue and in so doing inspired Antonín Leopold Dvořák to set the results to music. ‘Kolias’, the story of Kolias, forms part of a suite of ‘Three Modern Greek Songs’ (1875). Two of the three poems relate to Ali Pasha, while the middle poem is of a pastoral nature akin to the mood of medieval romances. The Lament of Parga, the third in the trilogy, has been identified as a Suliote song in the heroic style concerning Ali’s taking of the town. Dvořák’s interest in this material chimes with his other work on nationalist themes, the Slavonic Dances (1878) and Moravian Duets settings of folk poetry (1875–81), that he composed during this period.
The mixture of resignation and national pride surrounding the events in Parga became a theme of numerous Greek folk songs. The moment when the Pargians dug up the graves of their ancestors rather than let their remains fall into the hands of the enemy (they had not submitted in life, so they should not submit in death), was felt to be memorably poignant. But the incident from Ali’s life which is perhaps most famously commemorated in folk song, and also in this case dance, was the mass suicide of the Suliote women who preferred death rather than submitting to Ali’s slavery, remembered as the ‘Dance of Zalongo’. The dance is accompanied in song and there are versions in both Greek (Horos tou Zalongou) and Albanian (Vallja e Zallongut). In the Greek version, the women sing as they throw themselves over the cliff edge to their deaths:
Farewell poor world,
Farewell sweet life,
and you, my wretched country,
Farewell forever
The Suliotes’ complex relationship with Ali is portrayed in The Song of Ali Pasha collected by Fauriel. It shows how soon after Ali’s death events were already being manipulated to create a situation in which he could extol the bravery of the Suliotes. The song takes the form of a dialogue between Ali and his sons Mukhtar and Veli in the Church of the Pantokrator in Ioannina. The sons remind Ali of their collective wealth in order to reassure him. In response Ali says that he can neither rely on wealth nor on his regular troops but that his only hope against the wrath of the Sultan is the ‘Greeks’ who always fought against him with great heroism. He says that the Greeks emulate the French in their love of freedom, going on to single out the Suliotes, mentioning that not only the men but also the women ‘preferred death to slavery’ despite his promises of material goods, such as weaponry and coin.
With such songs disseminating across Greece and eventually abroad, and travellers’ tales being rushed into print, Ali’s notoriety was such that news of his death was rumoured prematurely on numerous occasions, with the result that foreign obituaries were penned before the event. But it was on his death that Ali achieved another level of fame, if not infamy. His life became not only the stuff of legend, but entertainment. Hardly had his head made its way to the Sultan before his own favourite puppeteer, Iakov, whose traditional bawdy Turkish Karagöz show Pouqueville had seen at Ali’s court in 1799 and Hobhouse had witnessed in Ioannina, was quickly adapting his performance to one based on a life of Ali, which he then took round the countryside. A more sympathetic portrayal of Ali soon followed in an anonymous Greek poem, the Lament of Ali Pasha. The author appears deeply moved by the tyrant’s death and attempts a closer characterization in fictional scenes between Ali, his son and the son of the Sultan. Ali is portrayed as majestic, caring and intimate in the days before his downfall. Three authentic persons, Manthos Oikonomou, Bairamis and Tzamis, known from the sources, are inaccurately put at Ali’s side in his dying moments.
The first incident from Ali’s life to have impact abroad was the fate of the ‘beautiful Ephrosyne’ recorded by Byron and the others. Already doing the rounds while Ali was alive, it became a fully developed tale within Greece and Albania and ready for adaptation into works by Western authors ensuring it an audience long after Ali’s death. That the story was popular throughout Greece is recounted in Finlay’s History. He includes a quotation from one of the many songs that mention the storyline of the ring, which he translates:
I told you, Ephrosyne, dear,
The ring, oh! do not take,
Ali the news will quickly hear –
He’ll drown you in the lake.
The colourful detail that Mukhtar’s wife had seen an emerald ring on the finger of Euphrosyne at the hamam (bathhouse), which was one and the same as the one that Mukhtar had earlier refused her, was found to be particularly emotive. Ali, who takes action after she goes to him to plead for vengeance, justifies his retribution as being necessary to uphold public morals. Although Euphrosyne in this version brings her fate on herself, and as the niece of an archbishop, was no obstacle to her becoming a martyr to the Orthodox Christians; the other sixteen or so victims (depending on the account) of Ali’s rough justice, though perhaps less culpable, were not equally pitied. The real-life ambiguity of Euphrosyne, or Kyra Frosini amongst the Greeks, played into the hands of the storytellers who could embroider her tale for their own differing purposes, making her at one moment innocent victim, at another abused lover.
Euphrosyne became a popular folk hero to the Albanians too and was known as the maid Eufrozina. By the time her story was woven into a national epic poem about the Albanian struggle against the Turks, The Highland Lute (Lahuta e Malcís) written by Gjergj Fishta in the early years of the twentieth century, it was her virginal qualities that were underlined.
There are very many maidens
But like that maid from Janina,
Nowhere will you find her equal
Ali Pasha glimpses her as she ‘dove-like stepped upon the terrace’ and he immediately wants her for himself. Ali sends a Moor to fetch her but she refuses to ‘renounce faith and honour’ despite being warned that Ali will chop off her head. Ali sends the Moor again, warning him that he will end up in the lake if he does not bring Eufrozina. That night the Moor seizes her and embarks over the lake in a wooden raft with his cargo. Despite the Moor’s threats she answers him:
Yes, I’ll go now to the pasha,
But I need my bridal garments
For I’ve made no preparations,
And so saying she,
plunged into the water,
Sank and vanished to the bottom.
Word then spread across the country
That Albania has such maidens
Who, defending faith and honour,
Sacrifice their young existence.
Despite the fact it is Ali, an Albanian, who wants Eufrozina, she is portrayed as being abused by a ‘foreign’ agent and so is transformed into a symbol of national struggle against the Turkish oppressor.
As was shown in the opening chapter, Ali’s fame was closely linked to Byron’s. Henry Gally Knight, who was a contemporary of Byron at Trinity College, Cambridge, also wrote verse in a similar vein, but in the shadow of his more illustrious competitor. Knight became an MP and a member of the London Greek Committee formed to support the Greek cause against the Turks. He travelled widely in the Middle East and to Epirus, and he and Byron were both publishing Orientalist verses at the same time, and with the same publisher, Murray. On learning that Byron’s forthcoming poem, The Giaour, included an incident of a girl being drowned in a sack, Knight wrote to him in 1813 to make sure the way was clear for the publication of his poem, Phrosine: A Grecian Tale (1817), which he claimed he began around 1811. Knight was afraid they were using the same material and in his letter he explains that he heard the tale in Ioannina: ‘the adventures of a certain Miss Phrosyne, whom Ali Pasha wish’d to get into his Harem, but her relations put her to death, to save her from infamy’. In this instance there is a similarity with the Albanian poem, where Eufrozina sacrifices herself, but in this instance she is willingly smothered by her female kin. It has been suggested by Michael Franklin that Knight was familiar with one of the Euphrosyne ballads through his allusion to the ballad’s imagery in the letter. Knight follows the version of the tale that puts the maid at the hands of the rapacious Ali; the version that most chimed with philhellenic sentiment. In his poem, as Phrosyne dances with her fellow maidens she laments in song ‘The lost delights of freedom’s day’ and the poem is unequivocal in its propagandist sentiments. It was in such symbolic identifications with Greece that Euphrosyne became the inspiration for the Greeks and their allies against Turkish domination.
On the news of his death accounts of Ali’s life proliferated in the West, and something akin to Ali-mania broke out. Once again it was the story of Euphrosyne that captured the imagination first. Within seven months it had been transformed for the stage featuring the theme of the ring as the plot device as Ali Pacha; or the Signet Ring by the American John Howard Payne, who is mostly remembered as the writer of the song, ‘Home Sweet Home’.2 Premiered at the Covent Garden theatre in 1822 to ‘enthusiastic expressions of delight’ Payne was onto a winner, for as George Daniel wrote in the preface, ‘the dramatist acts wisely who avails himself of extraordinary characters and events’ and ‘to have conceived a monster of greater ferocity than Ali Pasha, would have been to have to paint a devil’. Offering a spine-chilling evocation of oriental tyranny and grand spectacle the play became a tourist attraction. Britain was not yet officially involved in the Greek War of Independence and the portrayal of Ali, contrary to the facts, as the obstacle to freedom was a vehicle for arousing philhellenic sentiment. Ali Pacha; or the Signet Ring became one of a flurry of dramas and other works that appeared at the time supporting the cause, with Ali frequently cast as the villain. The Maid of Athens by John Baldwin Buckstone, which followed in 1829, was staged after the Battle of Navarino (1827) and Britain’s official entry into the Greek War of Independence. It therefore gives a more nuanced characterization of Ali, who does not appear on stage, presenting him as a misunderstood tactician who could have saved Greece. The Maid of Athens is a reference to Byron, whose poem to Theresa Macri begins:
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh! give me back my heart.
In the play, which also features Byron as a character, the maid is Madeleine, an English girl and daughter of a diplomat. Like the Ali Pasha, the play employs full dramatic licence. By the logic of melodrama the romance plot is concluded with Madeleine marrying Demetrius ‘King of Greece’, the previously unknown son of a Greek slave and Ali Pasha.
The reassuring portrayal of the death of Ali, the embodiment of the threat of tyranny and oriental despotism, gave the audience hope for the cause of Greek liberty. As the formation of a modern Greek State was becoming a reality, there was a vicarious thrill of danger for theatregoers who could fantasize about the prospect of travel to a land where the mystery of the Orient was still to be found. In music, Orientalist themes were already an established tradition. For the Austrians any such thrill was too real, for the Ottomans were their close neighbours, if diminishing as a threat. Mozart had been happy to absorb Eastern influences and storylines and for Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782) he used fictional caricatures that include janissaries, Albanians, a despotic pasha, and the ever-intoxicating perceived licentiousness of the harem. But one year after Ali’s death, Albert Lortzing from Berlin, turned to real life for inspiration with his first opera, the one-act Ali Pasha von Janina, first staged in 1828. Even though he was depicting almost contemporary events Lortzing remained wedded to Orientalist fantasy rather than any historical perspective, and using a plot resembling Mozart’s, his opera tells of a Frenchman saving the girl he loves from the tyrant Ali’s harem.
Lurid biography and storytelling came fast on the heels of the swathe of travel memoirs and attempts at serious history published just prior to or after Ali’s death. In E Mackenzie’s Choice Biography: Comprising an Entertaining and Instructive Account of Persons of Both Sexes and All Nations Eminent for Genius Learning Public Spirit Courage and Virtue, published in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1829, Ali’s dubious life sits alongside a hotchpotch of celebrities from Canova and Rossini, to Marie Antoinette and Napoleon, and to virtuous nineteenth century British heroes such as Grace Darling. Ten years later Alexander Dumas (père) took on a similar exercise before embarking on his famous novels, but this time concentrating on the notorious. Dumas published his eight-volume collection of villains, Celebrated Crimes (1839–1840), based on historical records. Sitting alongside such notables as the Borgias, Mary Queen of Scots and the Man in the Iron Mask is ‘Ali Pacha’. As was his usual practice Dumas used a number of collaborators and the lurid relating of the cruelties of Ali’s court owes much to Félicien Malleville. Dumas was interested enough in the story of Ali to use the circumstances of his demise in his later novel, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), where the death of Ali is used as a plot device and to introduce Orientalist colour into the narrative. Dumas’ father had served in Italy and Egypt under Napoleon and stories of his escapades were another source of useful inspiration. Taking liberties with fact, Dumas has Ali betrayed by Fernand Mondego, a French officer who he had entrusted to plead for mercy from the Turks. Ali’s young daughter, Haydée, witnesses her father’s death and then she and her mother, the ‘beautiful Vasiliki’, are sold by Mondego to slave traders bound for Constantinople. On seeing Ali’s head displayed in front of the imperial gates Vassiliki falls down dead. Haydée is sold on to Sultan Mahmud from whom she is purchased by Edmond Dantès, and then freed. Dantès, alias the Count of Monte Cristo, uses Haydée in an elaborate plot to revenge himself on Fernand, who was responsible for framing him as a Bonapartist traitor, his imprisonment in the Château d’If and stealing his intended bride.
Fig. 56: Haidée, a Greek Girl (1827) by Sir Charles Eastlake (from Byron, Don Juan).
The name Haydée is self-consciously borrowed from Byron’s heroine, Haidée in Don Juan, the daughter of a Greek pirate chief.3 Dumas’ heroine mixes a number of Orientalist fantasies. She is referred to as a princess, she is a Christian like her mother but the daughter of the nominally Muslim Ali, a cruel despot (whom she loves), and a product of the harem. A ‘white slave’ she has already experienced a number of masters, and, although they become lovers, placidly accedes to the count’s demands. Educated in at least four languages, including Ancient Greek, her manners are oriental. She flounces amidst cushions on a divan, dressed in the Turkic Greek style, drinking Turkish coffee and eating oriental sweetmeats, and smoking a chibouk, the long-stemmed Turkish tobacco pipe sometimes used for smoking hashish. The mixture of the harem and slavery had an added frisson; Greek slaves had become a cause célèbre when reprisals by the Turks after the Greek uprising of 1822 led to an increased number of Christian slave-girls in the markets of Constantinople and Smyrna. In England, the Quakers used their commercial connections in the Levant to systematically buy them and then set them free. Depictions of the (often beautiful and scantily clad) Greek slave became a dramatic propaganda tool used by artists to promote the cause of Greek liberty.
Kyra Vassiliki did not die at the sight of Ali’s head in Constantinople, but one memory of her may live on in present-day Istanbul. It is said that a large diamond once worn by her resides in the Topkapi Palace. The Spoonmaker’s Diamond is the largest pear-shaped example at 86 carats (17.2g), but how it came to be in its present resting place is unclear. Although possibly commissioned by either Ali or Mahmud II, some of the tales relating to its appearance rely on fables worthy of the Arabian Nights, including one to do with a fisherman. If it was in Ali’s possession first, it may have passed to Mahmud either as part of Ali’s complicated dealings with the Porte or after his execution, when his possessions and treasure were confiscated. In another version of events it was the ransom paid for Captain Camus de Richemont after Ali’s victory over the French at Preveza. Camus had been sent to Istanbul for questioning but was released through the auspices of Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Romolino, in 1801; they were rumoured to have been lovers. Letizia sent a diamond reputed to have belonged to Marie Antoinette to Preveza as a present for Sultan Selim III. From there it went to Ali in Ioannina. As Camus was freed Ali must have felt bound to honour such an illustrious undertaking by sending it on to the Topkapi Palace. The mysterious allure of Vassiliki lived on as an adornment to a number of depictions of Ali by Western Orientalist artists.
The continuing Orientalist appeal of Ali Pasha was summed up by R Nisbet Bain towards the end of the century in his introduction to the novel, The Last Days of the Janissaries: The Lion of Janina, a Turkish Novel (1854) by the Hungarian writer Morus Jokai. Bain, Jokai’s English translator, commented on the success of the writer in portraying Ali’s dual nature:
Fig. 58: The Greek Slave on display in New York. It caused a sensation in London where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was so moved by the work she penned an impassioned sonnet desiring Art to break up ‘the serfdom of this world’ and show that the East was not grieving alone and the ‘strong’ would be overthrown.
The hero of the strange and terrible drama, or, rather, series of dramas, unfolded with such spirit, skill, and vividness … is Ali Pasha of Janina, certainly one of the most brilliant, picturesque, and, it must be added, capable ruffians that even Turkish history can produce. Manifold and monstrous as were Ali’s crimes, his astonishing ability and splendid courage lend a sort of savage sublimity even to his blood-stained career, and, indeed, the dogged valor with which the octogenarian warrior defended himself at the last in his stronghold against the whole might of the Ottoman Empire is almost without a parallel in history.
The life of Ali Pasha may have provided numerous colourful episodes to delight European audiences and readers and a comforting feeling of superiority in comparison to oriental barbarism but his real-life exploits were tied into unfolding events in Eastern Europe and Greece in particular, providing useful propaganda material for philhellenes and other European nationalists. His reign and collapse was part of a drama in which European nations, for so long at war, might be forced to act together for an ideal. The confusion as to whom was the enemy for the Greek and Albanian freedom fighters, Ali or the Porte, was overlooked as the effects of his tyranny provided ample examples of brutal injustice to be exploited. The taking of Parga by Ali was an incident that struck a chord with the Romantic idealist and the suppressed political activist alike. When Missolonghi fell to the Turks in April 1826, the plight of the fleeing inhabitants including women and children recalled the fate of Parga in 1819. The story was widely known in France by the 1820s through accounts in the press, Pouqueville’s writings and Madame Dufrénoy’s history of Greece.4 In a land where the cry for freedom still rang out, numerous poems were inspired by the event.5 The radical poet Viennet prefaced his poem on Parga published in 1820 with a defence of liberty:
But it is in the name of liberty that we support [the Pargians’] cause, because liberty has been profaned under our eyes, the governments must disapprove whatever is solicited in its name, as if liberty meant permissiveness everywhere, as if monarchy was synonymous with despotism… And the degradation of our principles is such that it is impossible to indict the despotism of the Grand Turk and his pashas without being accused of jacobinism.
Baron d’Ordre’s poem of the same year stressed the exiles’ devotion to freedom:
Ce people préféra la mort à l’esclavage
Détruit, mais non vaincu, trahi du tout côté,
Il s’écriait encore: liberté, liberté!
This people have chosen death over slavery
Destroyed yet not defeated, betrayed from everywhere,
They still cried out: liberty, liberty!
The Greek war had not broken out yet but by 1827 when the play, Parga: ou, Le brulot, mélodrame en trois actes, a spectacle, by Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche and Adolphe Poujol was performed the resonance of events at Missolonghi with those of Parga were raw. Pouqueville had described the Pargians praying for help from the Virgin, their protector. In the play they were shown as victims of their faith and their love of liberty.
Outrage and politics were not confined to the page. The moment of embarkation of the Pargians for Corfu was a striking mental image ideal to be put on canvas. The Romantic artist Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault left pencil sketches of the Pargians streaming down from the town on its rocky promontory toward the shore as preparation for a monumental project, the Reddition de Parga, which he never completed. Some are depicted already aboard the boats, others are being carried on shoulders and some bend to kiss their sacred land farewell as a man points to the sky. The conflation of the events at Missolonghi with Parga is evident in a similar unfinished painting attributed to Géricault. Wrongly titled, Scene from the Exodus of Missolonghi, the same scene is repeated in more detail with disregard to Missolonghi being situated on flat land. The townspeople form the same procession to the sea with a youth being carried by an old bishop and their holy images mistakenly represented by the Catholic statue of the Virgin. As the people make for the waiting boats a group of British officers look on. In an allusion to the Pargians’ refusal to leave any of their possessions to the Turks, a man shoots his horse. These same elements appear in a highly finished version by Alphonse-Apollidore Callet from 1827. In L’Embarquement des Parganiotes the procession has reached the harbour, but it is the priest who is carried by two men who points to the sky.
In Italy the cause of freedom had a different appeal. After the defeat of Napoleon the old order had been restored and Italy was divided under the rule of Austria and the House of Savoy. The plight of Parga and its close proximity provided a popular analogy for poets and artists yearning for their own freedom from foreign domination. Ugo Foscolo, born in Zante, was living in exile in London when he wrote his description of the fall of Parga, Narrazione della fortune e della cessione di Parga, published in 1821 during nationalist uprisings in Naples and Piedmont. It was immediately suppressed for being subversive. The preface for the 1850 edition outlined its militant revolutionary character. Foscolo’s purpose was to expose the new doctrine of the Right of Nations for what it was; a false claim of legitimacy that allowed modern diplomats to carry out deadly acts of tyranny. Sharing the mixed Italian heritage of the Ionian Islands, Foscolo knew Dionysios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos, the Ionian poets of Greek nationhood. Solomos’ verses became the words to the Greek national anthem. The poet Giovanni Berchet also turned to the theme of Parga. I Profughi di Parga (1821) appeared in Il Conciliatore, a periodical with contributions from members of the Federati, revolutionaries dedicated to ridding Italy of the Austrians. Berchet had to flee from the Austrian authorities in 1823 and join the Italian exiles in London. Translated into French by Fauriel, the poem appeared in London the following year. In the final part of the poem Berchet made an impassioned attack on British foreign policy. He saw Parga’s fate as a symbol of the small nation at the mercy of a larger and more powerful one and yet again Britain’s actions had unjustly snuffed out another Liberal cause. The last words of the Pargians became a rallying call to all of Europe: ‘Time will bring our revenge, and God will endorse it, He who strengthens the spirit of Europe’. These verses became the battle cry of the Italian revolution and were sung across Italy.
The artist Francisco Hayez lived in Austrian-held Milan. He was an associate of fellow Italian patriots and radical intellectuals including Rossini and Verdi and the poets Leopardi and Manzoni. Working under Austrian censorship, Hayez made oblique reference to current affairs in a number of his paintings and he knew that Parga would be analogous to a situation every Italian would immediately recognize. He made three versions of the Parga incident. The earliest from 1831, The Refugees of Parga, focuses on the usual scene of the Pargians preparing to leave but with the added detail of the Turks making their way into the town perched on its rock. His 1832 version has echoes of Géricault and Callet but with emphasis on the Pargians pleading to God, an anonymous people of martyrs and heroes caught between the shore and the stretching sea with the infidels approaching in the distance. In Boat with Greek Fugitives the Pargians have set out into the unknown. Here the fragile storm-tossed boat is the universal symbol of Romantic iconography used to symbolize the fate of the entire Greek nation caught in the storm of revolution and fighting against overwhelming odds. Hayez’s contemporaries saw his work as important in the forging of national identity and promoting the patriotic ideal. Giuseppe Mazzini, a leader of the Risorgimento movement for Italian unification, singled out The Refugees of Parga, praising its theme as an analogy to the state of Italy.
Parga was matched in the European consciousness by the drama and idealization of Suli and the Suliotes. Ali’s massacre of the Suliotes in 1804 was immortalized in verse, drama and various paintings. Worthy of a mere footnote in Canto II of Byron’s Childe Harold, by 1825 it had become a five-act tragedy, The Martyrs of Souli or the modern Epirus, written by Louis Jean Népomucène Lemercier. In 1828, Victor Hugo was content with an account in verse, The Pasha and the Dervish (Un jour Ali passait), in which as Ali is out riding he is harangued for his deeds by a dervish who foretells that his fate is catching up with him, he is a ‘dog accurst’:
Fig. 60: The Refugees of Parga (I profughi di Parga) by Francesco Hayez (1831).
for Janina makes
A grave for thee where every turret quakes,
And thou shalt drop below
To where the spirits, to a tree enchained,
Will clutch thee, there to be ’mid them retained
For all to-come in woe!
Ali, perhaps true to his real character, remains unmoved:
Ali deemed anchorite or saint a pawn -
The crater of his blunderbuss did yawn,
Sword, dagger hung at ease:
But he had let the holy man revile,
Though clouds o’erswept his brow; then, with a smile,
He tossed him his pelisse.
Unlike Hugo, David Morier had first-hand experience of Ali and as one-time British emissary to his court he was in a better position to write about the Suliotes. Morier supplemented his personal recollections with tales supplied by a Greek physician with whom he was compelled to spend a period of quarantine at Corfu, to create Photo, the Suliote, a Tale of Modern Greece (1857). Modestly described as an ‘imperfect sketch’ or ‘fragment’ he attempted to give a picture of contemporary Greek and Albanian life in the manner of his more literary brother James, the author of the popular Adventures of Hajji Baba based on his experiences in Persia.
As with the Pargians, the Suliotes provided dramatic inspiration for painters. The momentum for Greek liberty triumphantly fused the themes of romanticism and liberalism at the Paris Salon exhibition of 1827–8, with twenty-one works on modern Greek subjects being exhibited. Ary Scheffer showed two paintings on the theme of Greek women taking refuge from the Turks, once more linking events from Ali’s past with the current Greek war; Jeune filles greques implorant la protection de la Vierge pendent un combat based on incidents from Missolonghi and Les Femmes Souliotes. In both paintings the women plead to heaven. The latter recalls the incident at Zalongo where the Suliot women and children are huddled on the edge of the precipice prior to throwing themselves over.
The narrative of the Suliot women’s sacrifice was equally well known in France and elevated to an evocation of the Romantic ideal of patriotic heroism and resilience. Again Pouqueville’s accounts provided inspiration. He had described the women singing and dancing as one after the other took the fatal step in his Histoire de la régénération de la Grèce (1824) an image taken up by the Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny in ‘Helena’ (1826) where the women go to their deaths singing in voices ‘steady and devoid of sobs’. The politician and writer Abel-François Villemain, whose portrait Scheffer painted, referred to them in his historical novel Lascaris (1825) as ‘these heroic and fierce mothers who, in order to escape from the barbarians, formed a funerary dance on the crest of a rock and leapt, one after another, over the precipice, holding their children in their arms.’ His fellow politician, writer and Orientalist, Alphonse de Lamartin, drew on Fauriel’s folk song collection adding with indignation, ‘Here is one of the prodigies of heroism and misfortune of which our age is a daily observer… And Europe just looks on!’ Pouqueville’s steadfast courage is replaced by fear and panic in Scheffer’s version where the women evoke pity by being depicted at the extreme of despair, broken and without pride or dignity. This deviation from the story was noted by the critics. In his review carried by the Revue encyclopédique, PA Coupin expressed confusion as to the picture’s purpose and Charles Farcy, in a statement echoed by many modern gallery-goers, said in the Journal des artistes, ‘really, one needs the catalogue in order to find out exactly what is [the subject] of the picture’. If the critics missed the point, it was a shame as Schaffer, a radical and philhellene, had intentionally modified the theme in an effort to fit better the mood and imagery of Liberal philhellenism, appealing to the public’s sympathies by showing pleading victims instead of heroic defenders, as the Greek cause hung in the balance before the intervention by the European powers. Ali’s life may have offered a spectrum of themes to be manipulated, Orientalist despot of legend to cartoon villain and lesson from history to entertainment, but it was as a vehicle for the cause of Greek liberty and the oppressed of Europe that it had its most profound impact.
1 Gavoyanios means Blind John; many folk musicians were blind.
2 According to a review in the American newspaper Minerva for 1822 (Vol. I No. 37) this was an adaptation of the play Xenocles by the French writer Mr Planchet. The protagonist in Ali Pasha is called Zenocles.
3 Byron took the name from a Greek folk song, a translation of which he appended to the first edition of Childe Harold.
4 Adélaïde-Gillette Dufrénoy, Beautés de l’histoire de la Grèce moderne (1826).
5 JPG Viennet, Parga, Poème au bénéfice du Parganiotes (Paris, 1820); TJ du Wicquet, Baron d’Ordre, Les Exilés de Parga. Poème (Paris, 1820); J Berchet, Les Fugitifs de Parga. Poème traduit librement de l’italien (Paris, 1823).
