Eût de ses chevaliers guidé l’arrière-ban.”
…
“Ah! si l’Europe en deuil, qu’un sang si pur menace,
Ne suit jusqu’au sérail le chemin qu’il lui trace,
Le Seigneur la réserve à d’amers repentirs.” (V: 49–52; VI: 13–15)
Happier days for Christendom are heralded in La bataille perdue, where Mehmed
Reşid Paşa, one of the commanders of the forces that sacked Missolonghi,
bemoans the turning of his fortunes:
Hier j’avais des châteaux, j’avais de belles villes,
Des grecques par milliers à vendre aux juifs serviles;
J’avais de grands harems et de grands arsenaux.
Aujourd’hui; dépouillé, vaincu, proscrit, funeste,
Je fuis… De mon empire, hélas! rien ne me reste. (67–71)
Of course Byron and Hugo represent the pinnacle of philhellenism; the same
themes were taken up, however, in the hundreds if not thousands of popular
publications that aimed at rallying support for the Greek cause. A good example is
the anonymous American pamphlet Turkish Barbarity: An Affecting Narrative of
the Unparalleled Sufferings of Mrs. Sophia Mazro, a Greek Lady of Missolonghi,
Who with Her Two Daughters (at the Capture of that Fortress by the Turks) were
Made Prisoners by the Barbarians, by Whom their Once Peacable Dwelling was
Reduced to Ashes, and Their Unfortunate Husband and Parent, in His Attempt to
Protect His Family, Inhumanly Put to Death in Their Presence [1828]. Written
as a first-person narrative, accompanied by a second narrative by “the exile of
Scio [Chios],” and sanctioned by the authority of various American men, this
pamphlet was evidently a fund-raising tool for American philhellenes. It begins
by pointing out that while the persecution of Greeks by “the merciless Turk—the
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avowed enemies of the Cross” is well known to all, news thus far had been limited
to the print media; now, however, “there has at length arrived among us, one of
the unfortunate subjects, who comes to make a public declaration of them.”22
Following this introduction, Sophia Mazro begins her account of the uprising in
Missolonghi and the Ottoman reaction. After her husband is killed, she comes to
the sexually charged topic of slavery:
[S]oon we found, contrary to our expectations, that our lives were to be spared,
but only to endure, if possible, still greater myseries!—my daughters were
given to understand that their fate was determined upon—that they were to be
sent with many of their christian female companions to some distant part of
the Grand Signor’s dominions, there to be disposed of as slaves, to the highest
bidders! (11)
Inevitably the girls are given the option of purchasing their freedom by converting
to Islam; they refuse, of course, and Mazro watches them “board the vessel which
was destined to convey them to a distant land, where they were to be consigned
to slavery.” (11) The irony in the fact that Mazro had subsequently sailed to
another distant land where slavery was also practiced, namely the United States
of America, never seems to have occurred to the author of the pamphlet.
Since it was intended for respectable Christian Americans, this is as far as the
narrative went; the readers’ imagination would do the rest. As was often the case
with such accounts, however, nudity was relentlessly deployed to conjure sexual
impropriety, as in the following testimony offered from the island of Poros by a
Mr. J.P. Miller, one of the Americans charged with distributing relief supplies to
the afflicted:
The children were entirely naked, and the women but a little better off, one of
them had three wounds in the arm, which she had received from an Arab, her
brutal ravisher. I immediately clothed them from the charitable donations of
the ladies from New-Haven… I have distributed all the ready made clothes
from the boxes, sent from Orange, New-Jersey, to beings all but naked. Many
a time, when a daughter of the mountain has presented herself for charity,
modesty has prevented me from looking at her, while she, trembling like a
forest leaf, gathered her rags around her in order to hide her nakedness. (22)
Between literary giants like Lord Byron and popular pamphlets like the
Sophia Mazro narrative were countless poems, stories, and novels, not to
mention accounts by journalists, politicians, and propagandists. One such novel
is Romance of the Harem (1839) by Julia Pardoe, a poet and the author of many
books including Beauties of the Bosphorus (1839) and The City of the Sultan and
the Domestic Manners of the Turks (1838). An eminently forgettable work chock-
full of incorrect ethnographic details intended to provide couleur locale, Pardoe’s
Romance of the Harem includes “Song of the Greek Slave,” “Song of the Greek
Lover,” and an untitled poem that was subsequently set to music by John William
Hobbs as “The Song of the Captive Greek Girl.” It goes as follows:
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285
Oh! the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,
A wave of the ocean! a bird on the wing!
A riderless steed o’er the desert-plain bounding,
A peal of the storm o’er the valley resounding:
It spurns at all bonds, and it mocks the decree
Of the world and its proud ones, and dares to be free!
Oh! the heart may be tamed by a smile or a tone
From the lip and the eye of a beautiful one;
But the frown and the force with its impulse contending,
Ever find it as adamant, cold and unbending;
It may break, it may burst, but its tyrants will see
That even in ruin it dares to be free!23
A fitting allegory for Greece yearning to be free, to be sure, even if the deed was
long done in 1839 when the novel was published, and still longer in 1850 or so
when the song first made its appearance in London. If anything, the success of this
song—its first two lines made it into John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—attests
to the continuing appeal of the theme of philhellenism years after Greece had
achieved independence.
The phenomenal popularity of Hiram Powers’ sculpture Greek Slave, first
completed in 1844 and visited by some one hundred thousand viewers across
the United States during its tour of 1847–48, is likewise testimony to how
compelling the idea remained, even in slave-owning America.24 As the engraving
in Figure 10.2 clearly indicates, visitors included ladies from polite society and
even children; despite the moralistic climate of the day, the subject’s nudity was
evidently offset by the moral power she exuded as a Christian woman enslaved
by unbelievers in body but not in spirit—“Naked, yet clothed with chastity” in
the words of one anonymous poet.25 Newspapers heaped effusive praise on the
work and on the artist, who, for his part, did his best to steer public opinion
through pamphlets available wherever the statue was exhibited. In an interview
given about the time he completed the first of several copies of Greek Slave, for
example, Powers said:
The Slave has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by th
e Turks, in
the time of the Greek Revolution; the history of which is familiar to all.
Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by
her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown
away. She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full
recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present
state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and
awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her
reliance upon the goodness of God.26
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Perhaps the best known public tribute to Powers’ Greek Slave was the 1850
poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her,
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)
To so confront man’s crimes in different lands
With man’s ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art’s fiery finger, and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God’s pure heights of beauty against man’s wrong!
Catch up in the divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.27
The last line—which, incidentally, was also found worthy of inclusion among
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—emphasizes what distinguished Powers’ work
from the everyday reality of American cities and plantations: the slave’s dazzling
whiteness. “Man’s crimes in different lands” was not enslavement per se, but the
enslavement of white Christian women by Turks. Given the poet’s wealthy slave-
owning family, this must have been a crucial distinction, and the source of some
relief.
Philhellenism also found many adherents in painting. One of the most famous
works in this vein, Eugène Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios (1824, Figure 10.4) is,
if truth be told, a remarkably weak painting that pales among such masterpieces of
the artist’s as Liberty Guiding the People (1830) and The Death of Sardanapalus
(1827). It is difficult to imagine that Massacre at Chios would have enjoyed the
fame it has, were it not for the dramatic subject matter. Other Philhellenic works
by Delacroix included a number of paintings inspired by various Byron poems,
as well as Greek on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), the proceeds from whose
exhibition were pledged to the effort to rescue Greek women abducted after the
re-conquest and destruction of Missolonghi by the Ottomans that same year. The
Greek figure standing over the ruins of Missolonghi is, appropriately enough
a woman, as are some of the figures crowding the foreground of Massacre at
Chios. Indeed, the writhing nude figure tied to the Turk’s horse at the far right of
the canvas precariously straddles the line between pathos and prurience—a line
that was apparently not infrequently crossed in Delacroix’s own mind. Her youth
contrasts sharply with the old and sickly figures in the center, and her nakedness
unmistakably calls attention to the rape she has just suffered, or is about to. As
Joan DelPlato notes, “The figure offers a fascinating case study in the way the fear
of abduction into the harem was used to provoke philhellenic sentiment.”28
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287
Figure 10.4. Eugène Delacroix, Le massacre de Scio [The massacre of Chios] (1824).
Photoengraving after the original at the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The Macedonian Insurrection
A much less known instance of the sexualization of national conflict in the late
Ottoman Balkans concerns the Macedonian insurrection of 1902–3. Though
there was nothing comparable to the philhellenic movement to support the efforts
of the Macedonian revolutionaries, these events did come on the heels of the
public opinion storm surrounding the “Bulgarian Horrors” of 1876,29 which had
whipped up much anti-Turkish fervor in Britain and elsewhere. The ongoing
bloodshed in Macedonia, as well as the vision of yet another Christian nation
rising against Ottoman rule and pushing the Turks further out of Europe, captured
the imagination of more than a few western writers and artists. Thus, one such
westerner wrote that
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Figure 10.5: Jaroslav Čermák’s Razzia de bachi-bouzoucks dans un village chrétien
de l’Herzégovine (Turquie) [Raid of başıbozuks in a Christian Village of
Herzegovina (Turkey)] (1861). Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, 2000.19.
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289
the struggle of the Macedonian Bulgars, for liberty, was interesting, I think,
because of its quaint setting, and its mingling of the barbaric colour of the
East with the more sober tones of the West. Macedonia is the shadow of the
Orient. The passions, hatreds, loves, and shoutings of the East, and of the
old-time West, can still be found within its borders.30
Building upon long-standing cultural stereotypes concerning the Ottoman
Balkans—epitomized by the wonderfully over-the-top painting by the Czech
artist Jaroslav Čermák in Figure 10.5—they created a significant body of works
of which I wish to discuss just a few particularly striking examples.
The London-born Charles Carrington (pseud. of Paul Ferdinando, 1868–1921)
was one of the most active publishers of erotica on the Continent around the
end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In a popular series entitled
La flagellation à travers le monde, he brought out an imposing volume by the
prolific pseudonymous author(s) Jean de Villiot entitled Œil pour œil: Épisode de
l’insurrection macédonienne (1905). This book apparently only went through a
single printing, limited to a paltry 300 copies; nevertheless, it is a good example
of the conflation of war and sexuality in the context of the Balkans, and as such
certainly deserves our attention. Before the novel is a lengthy Preface whose main
message is that the author was in no way guilty of exaggeration in his descriptions
of war atrocities; and that point is made by summarizing at length an article
entitled “Une page rouge” by a Jacques Dhur in Le journal of 13 October 1903.31
This summary describes in painstaking detail many horrors that reportedly took
place in the province of Edirne (Adrianople), including many incidents of rape:
In Koulata—a locality of 80 houses—[and] at Tchéglaïk—a small town of
100 houses—it was regular Turkish soldiers—the asker—who operated
last August 28th. In Koulata they killed several peasants… and raped a
certain number of women among whom were Tzona Ivanova, Thodora
Stoyanova, and the latter’s little daughter… The population of Tchéglaïk
was treated in the same fashion. Among the victims of the Turks in that
village were four women and eight young girls, whom the soldiers raped,
then slaughtered and cut in
to small pieces… On the 29th, the asker and the
başıbozuk [irregulars] invaded Ericlaire, 69 Bulgarian houses were burned
down, 40 others were looted and demolished, 45 men were killed before the
eyes of their wives and children… A raid on women was undertaken for the
repopulation of harems… The başıbozuk and regulars set fire to Almadjik
and massacred about 20 families. Many women and young girls were taken
to Turkish houses in the aforementioned village… An old woman, Thodora,
was killed, as well as 35 women and young girls whom the Turks first
stripped naked, forced to dance, and then raped… Many women and young
girls were raped, notably Zlasta Ioneff, Doukinia Stamatova, and the little
Daphinea Stoycova. Others were directed onto the harems…
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The account continues along these lines for pages on end, after which the Preface
concludes triumphally with the rhetorical question: “Having read this account,
how could one accuse the author of the present book of having gratified himself
by indulging in a narrative of imaginary cruelties?”32
These pieties notwithstanding, the novel tells a singularly implausible story:
Thodra Ivanowna, daughter of a rural notable in Tchéglaïk, loses both her
father and her new husband on her wedding day to a başıbozuk raid led by an
Albanian warlord named Ali Pesheven, “the disemboweler of virgins”. She
swears vengeance and joins the Bulgarian rebels, only to be abducted by brigands
who sell her to a Frenchwoman who operates a brothel in Istanbul—where, of
all things, she becomes a highly successful dominatrix! As fate would have it,
Pesheven eventually comes to the brothel. Thodra, who had amazingly managed
to preserve her virginity up to that point, willingly yields it to him; but at the very
moment of defloration, she castrates him and avenges the deaths of her loved
ones, as well as the violence visited upon her homeland and compatriots.
There is much in this novel that is factual, and even more that is fictional.
For example, when Thodra is abducted by the brigands, she comes upon three
Americans—a young clergyman, his mother, and a Chicago socialite named Maggy
Marble trying to forget her heartache by doing God’s work among Macedonian
rebels. This is no doubt based on the true story of Ellen Maria Stone, an American
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