...the Annunciation of Freedom

(Elizabeth Murray: Woman and Child in Greek Dress)

Victor Hugo: The Greek Boy
("Les Turcs ont passe la.")
All is a ruin where rage knew no bounds:
Chio is levelled, and loathed by the hounds,
For shivered yest'reen was her lance;
Sulphurous vapors envenom the place
Where her true beauties of Beauty's true race
Were lately linked close in the dance.
Dark is the desert, with one single soul;
Cerulean eyes! whence the burning tears roll
In anguish of uttermost shame,
Under the shadow of one shrub of May,
Splashed still with ruddy drops, bent in decay
Where fiercely the hand of Lust came.
"Soft and sweet urchin, still red with the lash
Of rein and of scabbard of wild Kuzzilbash,
What lack you for changing your sob--
If not unto laughter beseeming a child--
To utterance milder, though they have defiled
The graves which they shrank not to rob?
"Would'st thou a trinket, a flower, or scarf,
Would'st thou have silver? I'm ready with half
These sequins a-shine in the sun!
Still more have I money--if you'll but speak!"
He spoke: and furious the cry of the Greek,
"Oh, give me your dagger and gun!"

Today we celebrate the beginning of the revolution of 1821 against the Turks, that led to the liberation of a small part of what was Greece, and that is now the modern Greek state. It all began in my native Peloponesus, where the flag of the revolution was blessed by the Bishop Germanos of Patras, meaningfully, on the day of the Annunciation.


(Oil painting by Theodore Vryzakis (1865)

Freedom or Death!