ASIA MINOR, GREECE 3*3

eastern Mediterranean. Relying on the promised aid of Catherine
II, a certain Daskaloiannes (Master John) raised a revolt in Crete
in 1770; but he was deceived in his hopes, taken and put to death.
In the ballad the Turks taunt him with his Greek patriotism. The
operations on both sides became more elaborate as the turn of the
century approached. Ali Pasha of lannina, himself of klephtic
descent, undertook punitive expeditions at the head of Turkish
regulars and Albanian spahis, and the resulting conflict could be
deemed a war (the Souliot War). He was surprised and defeated
by Botzaris in the defiles near Souli on 20 July 1792, and the Greek
ballad is a shout of triumph:

Then Botzaris upraised his voice, Ms right hand shook his falchion:
'Stay, Pasha, stay; why sneak away? why flee among the fleetest?
Come, turn again into our town, turn back to empty Kiapha,
and set you up your royal throne, and make yourself a sultan!'

(Politis 5.)

There is a longer ballad on the defence of Missolonghi and others
follow down to the arrival of King Otho and the Treaty of Berlin.
New ballads have arisen at even later dates in the islands, especially
in Crete. The Cretan Alidakis relates his feud with the local
Turkish ruler in some thousand lines of vigorous narrative, but
pedestrian verse.

The klephtic cycles were once quoted for the light they might
throw on the composition of the Iliad, based on hypothetical
ballads of Troy. Their irrelevance in this respect is now generally
recognized, and they have lost caste in the eyes of scholars because
of their patent modernity. Yet they have their niche in ballad
history. They fanned the flicker of national spirit in the most
desperate age. They link up with the haiduk ballads of Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Rumania, both in themes and in sites. Those of
Rumania derive from Serbo-Bulgar models, and the best of these
belong to the western mountains which extend southward into
Epirus, the favourite haunt of the Greek klephts. On the Albanian
frontier, Greeks, Slavs, and Albanians mingled in feud or amity.
Metsoisos, Ali Pasha's great-grandfather, revolted in 1690 with
three thousand klephts and Albanians; his ballad is Greek, but it
is popular in Albania. A Greek ballad commemorates the prowess
of the Albanian Liazes, who led a mixed company of Bulgarians,
Albanians, and Vlachs into Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus, On
the other side, the Turks relied on Albanian renegades to crush the

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