Download PDF | (Byzantium_ A European Empire and Its Legacy) Chrysovalantis Kyriacou - The Byzantine Warrior Hero_ Cypriot Folk Songs As History and Myth, 965_1571-Lexington Books (2020).
243 Pages
Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy
Series Editor: Vlada Stankovié (University of Belgrade)
The series explores the rich and complex history, culture, and legacy of the longest lasting European state, its place in the Middle Ages, and in European civilization. Through positioning Byzantine history in a wider medieval context, the series will include new perspectives on the place of the eastern Mediterranean; Central, Eastern, and South Europe; and the Near East in the medieval period.
The intention is not simply to place the Byzantine Empire in the Western sphere, but rather to call for a reorientation away from the traditional East-West divide and to bring Byzantium out of its isolation from the rest of the medieval world. Byzantium: A European Empire and Its Legacy seeks both monographs and edited collections that bring Byzantine studies into conversation with scholarship on the Western medieval world, as well as other works on the place of the Byzantine Empire in the global Middle Ages.
Acknowledgments
The idea for a book on the Byzantine warrior hero in Cypriot folk songs came up in 2018, when I was teaching a course on late Byzantine history at the University of Cyprus. My first thoughts were put on paper later that year, and again on 2019, when the Cypriot newspaper [/odityc¢ published, as part of the broad-audience journal Xpovixo, two of my articles on the akritai and pre-Christian culture in medieval Cyprus. From Yiannis loannou—political scientist, journalist, and military history expert—I received constant encouragement to move on to the next step, turning these early thoughts into a monograph.
It is his fascination on folklore and the medieval heroic traditions, which revived my own excitement on the warrior culture of Byzantium. Revd. Professor Kyprianos Kountouris, rector of the Theological School of the Church of Cyprus, kindly invited me to present the preliminary findings of my research on the Charopalema, during the IV Annual Conference of the School in 2019. I also profited greatly from the lectures and seminars of fellow colleagues in the Hellenic Studies postgraduate program of the European University Cyprus.
Collaborating with such a brilliant team of historians, archaeologists, and cultural heritage experts has been a most fruitful experience that enabled me to frame my exploration in ways I could not even imagine in the past. I am particularly grateful to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the Holy Monastery of Kykkos Museum for granting their permission for the reproduction of images. Deep thanks go to Vlada Stankovic, Eric Kuntzman, Alexandra Rallo, and Kasey Beduhn for believing in this project, and for their expert assistance during its various stages. I also owe sincere thanks to the anonymous Lexington Books reviewer for offering valuable comments and suggestions, which helped me improve—substantially—the final manuscript.
This book could not have been written without my family’s love and support. Once again, I would like to thank my parents and sister for all their patience and willingness to help. Three-year-old Evridiki often invaded my office, sweetly demanding to be informed on “how’s Dad doing” (meaning that she wanted to know when Dad would have the time to play with her). Last words are for my wife, Maria: thank you for being there. This book is dedicated to you.
Author’s Note
The transliteration of ancient Greek and Byzantine names into English generally follows The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Cypriot folk songs quoted in this book are in the monotonic (“single accent’) system of accentuation, which has been employed in Modern Greek since 1982. This is in order to stress the continuation, through oral transmission, of Byzantine themes, motifs, ideas, and values from medieval times to the modern era, when these songs were recorded, usually in the polytonic system.
For the sake of convenience and simplification, I have chosen to avoid the complex issue of phonetically representing the Greek Cypriot dialect, for which there is no universally employed system. Byzantine texts preserve the breathing marks, accents, and iota subscripts of the polytonic system. The orthographic idiosyncrasies of Cypriot heroic folk songs follow their printed editions. All English translations of Cypriot folk songs and Byzantine sources are mine, unless stated otherwise.
The Greeks of medieval Cyprus generally described themselves as ‘Papatot (“Byzantine Romans”), which reveals their ethnic, cultural, and religious bonds with Byzantium. This book employs the modern term “Greek Cypriots” or simply “Greeks” to denote the Greeks of medieval Cyprus, while using “Byzantines” to refer to subjects of the Byzantine Empire. The term “Latins” refers to Latin-rite Christians in general; “Franks” and “Frankish” refer to the Latin-rite dynasty of the Lusignans (originating from Poitou, France) and the period of Lusignan rule in Cyprus (1192-1489). The capitalized term “Orthodox” (which, at the time, was not specific to any group) is used to describe Byzantine-rite Christians.
Introduction
Songs Have Stories
There was a time when giant Saracens guarded the Euphrates and the far side of the world was inhabited by monstrous crabs. In this mythic universe, valiant heroes rose to bring order to chaos. Sometimes they had to combat injustice and insolence, killing monsters, defending their women against their own relatives, or coming to rescue an incarcerated brother from the hands of a jealous ruler.
Virtuous sisters would sleep with the image of their brother decorating their sheets; young warriors would wreak havoc on Saracen armies in order to liberate their captive relatives; Amazonian wives would take their husbands’ arms to slay a demanding mistress; enormous swineherds would clash with lords and their armies. Warrior heroes could also embody the forces of chaos, injustice, and brutality; darkness and light were two sides of the same coin.
Every time I look outside the windows of my home, I see the gray peak of Pentadaktylos, the “Five-Finger Mountain” standing at the north of Nicosia. Overlooking the coastal city of Kerynia, the long limestone range of Pentadaktylos took its name from Digenes, the Byzantine warrior hero who (so the legend says) gripped its rocky peak before leaping over to southern Asia Minor, in pursuit of a Saracen raider. As a child, I grew up with stories of Digenes wrestling with Charos, the personified death.' At school, I was taught that Modern Greek literature begins with the Byzantine heroic traditions, surviving in the form of folk songs on the akritai, Byzantine warlords of the eastern frontier.
During the long winter nights of my two-year service in the Republic of Cyprus National Guard, my imagination grasped something of the life of these Byzantine frontiersmen, shivering on watch and waiting for an invisible enemy to come out of the darkness. One of my favorite readings as an undergraduate history student was Constantinos N. Sathas’s (1842-1914) Greek Warriors in the West and the Renaissance of Greek Tactic—a tour de force (despite its many inherent weaknesses) exploring the mentalities and practices of Greek frontier warriors from Byzantium to the early modern period.” And I later remember completing the bibliography of my doctoral thesis, while listening to Michalis Christodoulides’s legendary 1988-recording of Cypriot folk songs on the warrior heroes of the Byzantine frontier.
In many ways, writing a book on the Byzantine warrior hero pays a personal debt to these memories; it is also a tribute to the past and present of Cypriot heroic folk songs, which managed to preserve (despite the heavy blows of modernity and the political peripeties of the twentieth century)? the richness of the island’s Byzantine culture.* From a scholarly perspective, this book underlines the value of Cypriot heroic folk songs in recovering medieval popular perceptions of Byzantium’s warrior heroes, which helps us “complete and correct our view of Byzantium, dominated by the culture of the elites, considered as representative of the Byzantine world in general.’””°
Songs tell stories and have their own stories. Although folk songs are born in particular historical contexts, they are constantly transformed and adapted, reflecting new ideas, responding to the needs of younger generations, obscuring or reinterpreting the past; ultimately, folk songs become artifacts, clothed—like marble Caryatids—in layers of cultural vestments. Heroic folk songs praise the deeds of mighty heroes, lost in the mist of their own mythology, and the symbolism of their triumphs and tragedies.
° Scholars approach heroic folk songs in different ways: they focus on the diachronicity and comparative development of heroic folklore; study the folk ballads’ cultural context, language, literary form, transmission and performance; pick up historical details to understand politics, religion, society and economy; and defend or criticize their historicity.’
Building on the scholarly approaches mentioned earlier, this book wishes to examine the diachronic symbolism of heroic folk songs in relation to particular historical developments.’ The originality of the book’s approach is that it concentrates on a microcontext with its endemic historical, cultural, social, and ideological mechanisms, while also exploring the relationship between microlevel and the much broader historical picture, thus understanding in a completely novel way complex historical phenomena related to the role of Cyprus as part of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world.’ In addition, this study is a first step toward a more comprehensive analysis of folk materials (usually outside the canon of sources studied by historians) in the field of Byzantine history.
“AKRITIC” SONGS AND THEIR HISTORICAL STROMATOGRAPHY
Serving the medieval Greco-Roman or Byzantine Empire’? as a stronghold during the Islamic expansion and the Crusades (649-1191), Cyprus, an island mostly populated by Greeks, became the last Crusader kingdom in the Eastern Mediterranean under the Frankish family of the Lusignans (1191), and was only conquered by the Ottomans after a bloody war with Venice in 1570—71.'! The island’s proximity to the Near East and its role as a border between Christianity and Islam transformed Cyprus into a key center in the production or revision of Byzantine heroic songs, labeled by scholars “akritic” or the akritika (after the akritai).
Yet, as Guy (Michel) Saunier points out, historical details associated with the akritai in these songs are superficial; “akritic’” songs should be better viewed as part of a much broader category of heroic narrative folk songs.'* For this reason, this book chooses to concentrate on Byzantine heroic themes, rather than digging Cypriot folk songs to trace the “akritic’” element. Concerning the complex question of the relationship between the Digenes Akrites epic (probably composed under the Komnenian emperors in the twelfth century, with later revisions)'? and the orally performed heroic folk songs," I am in line with Saunier’s arguments on the priority of heroic folk themes, later reworked in the form of a literary epic on Digenes;'°
this is another reason why this book puts “Modern Greek” folk songs under the historian’s microscope, rather than placing emphasis on the Digenes epic (which, anyway, appears to have only loose connection with the folk songs of Cyprus).'°
My quest for the Byzantine folk hero in the geographical area of medieval Cyprus (965-1571) is driven by two interconnected questions. First, to what extent did historical developments leave their imprint on the cultural ideas and values expressed in the island’s heroic folk songs? Secondly, how did Cyprus—a provincial microlevel at the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, which became politically disconnected from Byzantium after 1191—operate within the broader macrolevel of Byzantine culture? The chronological period covered in this book stretches from the island’s full reincorporation into Byzantium in 965 until the Ottoman conquest of 1571, which ended a long period of Christian rule on the island (Byzantine and Latin).
Exploring the aforementioned questions requires a reconstruction of the social, cultural, and religious framework functioning as a matrix for the emergence of Byzantine heroic themes in Cyprus. For this reason, a synthetic approach is necessary, taking into consideration both primary sources from Cyprus and the broader Byzantine world (e.g., works of historiography, patristic homilies, epic and didactic poetry, etc.) and archaeological evidence (e.g., depictions of warriors and warrior saints from frescoes, icons, and ceramics).
Since no folk songs from medieval Cyprus survive (at least in their original Byzantine Greek form), one has to search for Byzantine heroic themes, motifs, and symbols’’ in folk ballads recorded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have decided to examine materials from ten main collections of Cypriot “akritic” folk songs, collected and published between the 1860s and 1980s by Athanasios Sakellarios,'* Nikolaos G. Politis,'°Georgios Loukas,” Stilpon P. Kyriakides,”! Christos G. Pantelides,”” Hedwig Liideke,* Georgios K. Spyridakis,“* Magda Kitromelidou,* Alexandros Eleutheriades,” and Menelaos N. Christodoulou.’
The songs recorded in these collections are in Cypriot Greek, a dialect consisting (as Brian Newton noted in 1972) of no less than eighteen regional varieties.”* In Byzantine times (ca. 300-1191), Cypriot Greek largely maintained the phonetic, morphological, and syntactic characteristics of the Byzantine koine while also preserving ancient local idiosyncrasies. Frankish (1191-1489), Venetian (1489-1571), Ottoman (1571-1878), and British (1878-1960) rule (together with the presence of Armenian, Syriac, and Maronite groups in Cyprus) enriched Cypriot Greek with various linguistic elements.” In recent years, “social and historical changes that have taken place since [the 1970s], such as on going urbanization, the Turkish invasion of 1974, and the occupation of the northern part of the island, have had an impact on the dialectical continuum,” enhancing the process of koineization at the expense of regional varieties.*°
The folk songs examined in this book bear witness to the historical development of Cypriot Greek in the medieval and modern period, which inevitably creates a linguistic and cultural gap between Byzantine folk songs and the songs recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: our Cypriot material is “post-Byzantine,” in the sense that it has been shaped by later historical contexts, though maintaining its Byzantine core.*' In the medieval love song known as the Hundred Words of Love, for example, we find mixed historical references to the island’s Crusader and British rule.
Aoyes extiotny TOBwtdcs tliat TCrvovpKEnKvV KOOLOG tai ytioTHV TO TETPATOOV, AOD Paoth TOV TOTOV, extiotny TC n ALLOYMoTO, tTHS TCOmpov TO pryatov, extiotny TC n Ayia Logid tCiai to K votavtivatov.
When the Ark was built and the world became new, and the four pillars of the earth were made, Famagusta was built, the Kingdom of Cyprus,
and Saint Sophia and the City of Constantine.”
This is, clearly, a medieval layer. What follows is a different historical layer, closer to the moment of the song’s incorporation into Kitromelidou’s collection (1937); here we can find references to England, the British high commissioner, as well as descriptions of the luxurious female dress of the medieval period:
TCat pav ayiav Kupiaxiy, deonotitCijv npépav, nOédnosv n Avept va 1a” otnv EyKAitépav.
Evietny tC exoAAdotnkEv TCL EOAOEV TA LOAALE TNS, EUMENV EOOW TCL GAAaEEV povbya TNS POPEOIhs TNS. ‘TlanméEm Popnosv ypvod, TanTéEcM YPVOTOAAEVA
tliat KaCaKOV OADYPVOOV TCL EDOLEMAOEV TO TEAELO. BaAAét Tov KaTEAAOV OLLTPOG, VA UNV THY TLVVEL NALOG, Tas TCL tav KOpH tT Appootn, mac TClat Paota PaoctrEto.
And on a holy Sunday, on the Lord’s day, the Maiden decided to go to England. She washed her face, painted her eyes, and combed her hair, went in her house and put on her formal dress. On the outside she was dressed in gold, on the inside she was dressed in shiny crystal, and with a golden coat she covered everything. She put on her hat, not to be touched by the sun; she looked like the commissioner’s daughter, as if she was holding a kingdom.
The Hundred Words of Love is representative of the creative blending of various linguistic elements, themes, and historical details in Cypriot folk songs. Scholars have argued that the authenticity of folk songs containing medieval themes and elements depends on various factors. “The oldest local collections probably preserve texts with a greater degree of authenticity,” writes Linos Politis (1906-82). “General collections sometimes modify the text on the basis of criteria that are totally subjective, aesthetic, and arbitrary . .. . Isolated verses from different versions could be authentic; yet, the editor’s collation of these verses does not create a whole but an externally-devised summation.”* Saunier associates editorial “corrections” with the political agenda of collectors willing to “improve” their texts, through the expression of a more explicit national identity.**
The very classification of a large group of folk songs as “akritic” reflects this process.*° In addition, printing (with its tendency for standardization) might have intervened in the process of oral performance and the recording of folk songs, affecting their degree of authenticity.*” Discussing the role of Cypriot folk singers, Roderick Beaton argues that “the epic length of traditional songs in Cyprus is due not to the preservation of a medieval epic tradition lost in the rest of the Greek-speaking world,” but to the influence of the singers themselves who achieved greater length in their songs “by a variety of devices such as excessive repetition, prevarication, and the inexpert tacking together of self-contained episodes.”**
Thus, apart from the wide chronological gap between the moment of creation/circulation of medieval heroic folk songs and their modern recordings, both singers and folklorists collecting these songs may have (intentionally or not) introduced modifications, which seems to challenge their value as historical sources.*”
QUESTIONS OF “HISTORICAL AUTHENTICITY”
The historian of Byzantium should not be discouraged by such limitations. A starting point in our attempt to approach the historical significance of heroic folk songs must be a precise definition of “authenticity.” Saunier points out that the debated authenticity of Greek folk songs is related to the scholars’ ability to decipher the myths encrypted therein. According to Saunier, many themes in Greek folk songs reflect earlier, pre-Christian myths, and have nothing to do with the “akritic” world.“ “Such historical elements,” writes Saunier, “as they may be said to possess are no more than an added gloss, which has nothing to do with the meaning of the myths and no real significance for an interpretation of the songs.”
It is myth, so Saunier argues, that is important, not the historical elements per se: any historical details or references (as in “historical” folk songs, that is, folk songs relating historical events) seem to be largely dating from the 1200s, namely the period of political fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire (as a result of the Fourth Crusade of 1204), under the pressure of Latin and Turkish expansion.” It is only after the thirteenth century that history begins to have a greater influence on myth, for example, in the representation of death, as well as in the perception of divine responsibility in relation to adikia (“injustice/wrong-doing”’), the very essence of evil.*? A last point made by Saunier (together with his former student, Emmanuelle Moser) is that folk myths function as (to use a term employed by Mircea Eliade) “initiatory scenarios,’ in which new layers of interpretation (shaped by changing contexts) replace older interpretations.*
At the same time, the older, pre-Christian layers of interpretation coexist with the newer, Christian cultural elements, attesting the fascinating survival of pagan “initiatory patterns’“° in the Christianized popular culture of medieval Byzantium.”” To put it simply, folk myths prepared premodern people for their transition from one social (and existential, we may add) phase/status to the other (e.g., life and death, separation from one’s family and community, and the creation of a new family through marriage).*
Although Saunier’s approach to heroic folk songs has not been accepted by everyone,” it provides a valuable tool for the analysis of different cultural layers in the heroic folk tradition, and, ultimately, the histoire de mentalités in a medieval Cypriot context..° Based on Saunier’s interpretation of the heroic folk myth in general and the characteristics of Cypriot folk songs in particular, this book will explore the different cultural layers of heroic ballads in relation to continuities and discontinuities during the Byzantine, Frankish, and Venetian rule in Cyprus. Already in 1873, Sathas attempted to draw connections between Byzantine frontiersmen and Cyprus at the time of the Byzantine-Arab wars (seventh-tenth centuries).°' Sathas’s argument concerning Byzantine military (“akritic’”) presence in Cyprus before 965, sometimes QUESTIONS OF “HISTORICAL AUTHENTICITY”
The historian of Byzantium should not be discouraged by such limitations. A starting point in our attempt to approach the historical significance of heroic folk songs must be a precise definition of “authenticity.” Saunier points out that the debated authenticity of Greek folk songs is related to the scholars’ ability to decipher the myths encrypted therein. According to Saunier, many themes in Greek folk songs reflect earlier, pre-Christian myths, and have nothing to do with the “akritic” world.“ “Such historical elements,” writes Saunier, “as they may be said to possess are no more than an added gloss, which has nothing to do with the meaning of the myths and no real significance for an interpretation of the songs.”
It is myth, so Saunier argues, that is important, not the historical elements per se: any historical details or references (as in “historical” folk songs, that is, folk songs relating historical events) seem to be largely dating from the 1200s, namely the period of political fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire (as a result of the Fourth Crusade of 1204), under the pressure of Latin and Turkish expansion.” It is only after the thirteenth century that history begins to have a greater influence on myth, for example, in the representation of death, as well as in the perception of divine responsibility in relation to adikia (“injustice/wrong-doing”’), the very essence of evil.*? A last point made by Saunier (together with his former student, Emmanuelle Moser) is that folk myths function as (to use a term employed by Mircea Eliade) “initiatory scenarios,’ in which new layers of interpretation (shaped by changing contexts) replace older interpretations.*
At the same time, the older, pre-Christian layers of interpretation coexist with the newer, Christian cultural elements, attesting the fascinating survival of pagan “initiatory patterns’“° in the Christianized popular culture of medieval Byzantium.”” To put it simply, folk myths prepared premodern people for their transition from one social (and existential, we may add) phase/status to the other (e.g., life and death, separation from one’s family and community, and the creation of a new family through marriage).*
Although Saunier’s approach to heroic folk songs has not been accepted by everyone,” it provides a valuable tool for the analysis of different cultural layers in the heroic folk tradition, and, ultimately, the histoire de mentalités in a medieval Cypriot context..° Based on Saunier’s interpretation of the heroic folk myth in general and the characteristics of Cypriot folk songs in particular, this book will explore the different cultural layers of heroic ballads in relation to continuities and discontinuities during the Byzantine, Frankish, and Venetian rule in Cyprus. Already in 1873, Sathas attempted to draw connections between Byzantine frontiersmen and Cyprus at the time of the Byzantine-Arab wars (seventh-tenth centuries).°' Sathas’s argument concerning Byzantine military (“akritic’”) presence in Cyprus before 965, sometimes repeated today,” has been proved to be unsubstantiated: during that period, there were no akritai established in Cyprus.**
But Sathas was correct in tracing the historical echo of “akritic” culture on the island.** Henri Grégoire (1881-1964)—whose work*® on the historicity of the “akritic” traditions is of the outmost importance (even if many of his points are now considered outdated)—has shown that the memory of Lusignan Crusader expeditions in Asia Minor is echoed in the Cypriot Song of Armouris (collected by Hedwig Liideke).*° In the same vein, Gilles Grivaud has more recently pointed out several elements of historicity in the Cypriot “akritic” songs.*’ Nikolaos Konomis has noted that Leontios Makhairas’s fifteenth-century Exegesis of the Sweet Land of Cyprus contains a linguistic formula that could be found in Cypriot “akritic” folk songs,** thus helping us date such folk materials around the late medieval period; future intertextual research may offer more linguistic examples in this direction.*?
Stylianos Alexiou (1921-2013) argued for the dispersion of Byzantine heroic themes from the Digenes epic into Greek folk songs, drawing thematic connections between Andronikos and his Black Steed, a folk song from Karpathos, and the Cypriot Death of Digenes.
Revised mythic themes and added historical details: these are the keys for examining the reception and adaptation of Byzantine heroic traditions through folk songs. Historical context, even if it plays a secondary role in the creation and revision of folk myths, is “no mere ornament” to our investigation; sometimes myths reflect the process of “internal change within a tradition,” inevitably linked to the process of “‘external change in the social context.’ Saunier’s emphasis on the independence of myth in Greek folk songs should not exclude a historicist reading of heroic ballads “in such a way,” to quote Harold Aram Veeser, “as to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the behavioural codes, logics, and motive forces controlling a whole society.” I should clarify beforehand that my aim is not to reconcile conflicting methodological approaches, but to historically understand in a deeper and meaningful way heroic myths and perceptions in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean, using medieval Cyprus as a case study.
But how exactly can we define the historicity of heroic folk songs? “Some scholars persist in understanding historicity only as the representation of historical events and persons, that is, the very things that are absent from epic poetry,” writes Vladimir Propp (1895-1970). “If in epic poetry events are thought of as having occurred in the remote past, in the ballad they are attributed to a potential reality, although perhaps not the reality that surrounds the performer.”® For the historian, this potential reality (imaginative and inherited as it may be) mirrors the ideas, views, aspirations, and anxieties—that is, the mentalities—of past people and societies in changing contexts.
In addition, Propp advises us that “in many works, historicity is deduced not from the entire plot and its historical significance but from individual details,” including proper and place names, the legal and social position of the protagonists, economic details (e.g., trade and monetary system), as well as the description of tools (e.g., a plow), dress, and so forth.”
The historian can also profit from the remarks of Eratosthenis G. Kapsomenos, who applies the Marxist approach of literary criticism and semiotics on the “akritic” songs. For Kapsomenos, these ballads could be read as signs or symbols of Byzantine ideological developments, power relations, and class struggle in the middle Byzantine period.® Kapsomenos’s interpretation is enriched by the brief observations, made in 1978, by Nikolaos G. Svoronos (1911-89) on the influence exercised by Byzantine society on Greek folk songs.
According to Svoronos, the Byzantine Empire was characterized by social mobility and political, military, fiscal, and ecclesiastical unity, bridging the cultural gap between cities and their countryside; this became the unifying matrix in which Greek folk songs were born, developing specific characteristics related to the particular historical and socioeconomic circumstances of their geographic dispersion.
METHODOLOGY AND STRUCTURE
Let me summarize by defining this book’s methodology. My examination of the image of the Byzantine warrior hero builds on Saunier’s “mythic approach,” in order to identify different cultural layers, and to focus on the specific features of songs originating from Cyprus. At the same time, I am following Propp’s guidelines in how to assess the historicity of folk ballads, in agreement with Veeser that “tiny particulars” could reveal a substratum of cultural codes, logics, and motive forces in a historical context. Lastly, Svoronos’s and Kapsomenos’s conclusions are valuable in reconstructing the broader historical, cultural, and social framework in which mythic themes were revised and historical details were added to heroic folk songs. More specifically, Svoronos’s arguments help us acknowledge the existence of peripheral microlevels and microcultures within a broader and more unified Byzantine culture, while Kapsomenos brings forth political ideology and social struggle as significant shaping forces of Byzantine heroic themes.
Before proceeding to the book’s structure, it is necessary to offer some additional theoretical clarifications and definitions.
First, the need to focus on the “microlevel.”” As John-Paul A. Ghobrial observes, “even though global history has helped us understand circulation and connectedness in important ways, it has been less effective at explaining how change over time happens differently in specific contexts and, more importantly, why this change happens differently in sites that are connected to one another.’’®’ One way to concentrate on the microscale is to read primary sources “as if through a microscope . . . prioritizing small details, or clues, which [are] used to unravel the teleology and triumphalism of grand narratives.” Such examination can also involve broader chronological periods, “imagined to resemble the very microcosms that had been given life in. . . local studies.’’°’
The importance of this approach is that specific geographical areas are seen as “‘fragments’ through which ‘universal’ processes can be observed, similarly to the way social sciences approach case studies as mere exemplifications of predefined theories.” In this book, heroic themes, motifs, and symbols from Cypriot folk songs are scrutinized as the small details and clues through which we can understand the broader picture of historical processes in Cyprus, the Eastern Mediterranean, Byzantium, and the medieval European world. A useful way to transcend the micro/macro dichotomy is to adopt Jacques Revel’s methodology of jeux d’échelles (“scale games’’), based on the magnification (“zoom out’) and minimization (“zoom in’) of the historical focus in relation to a local context, in order to capture the different dimensions of the subject under investigation.’”? A similar approach is employed throughout this book.
Heroic traditions could be viewed as the carriers of memory. Cypriot heroic folk songs were composed, revised, preserved, and transmitted by anonymous cultural agents: they are the product of a group of people, bearing witness to their memories. To quote Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), “collective frameworks of memory do not amount to so many names, dates, and formulas, but truly represent currents of thought and experience within which we recover our past only because we have lived it.””! There is a sense of collective identity in the process of remembering, achieved through intergenerational communication:” “
the life of the child is immersed in social milieus through which he comes in touch with a past stretching back some distance. The latter acts like a framework into which are woven his most personal remembrances.”’? For Marianne Hirsch, traumatic events can be remembered by the next generation of people (“postmemory”’), not actually experiencing them, because “these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.””*
Halbwachs rightly distinguishes collective memory from history in its official versions,’ noting that “the memory of involvement in the events or of enduring their consequences, of participating in them or receiving firsthand account from participants and witnesses, may become scattered among various individuals, lost amid new groups for whom these facts no longer have interest because the events are definitely external to them.” Social memory is, essentially, the memory of groups keeping particular remembrances,” which are bound to the self-understanding of these collective entities, so as to “perpetuate the feelings and images forming the substance of [their] thought.”’*
Individual remembering often occurs “under the pressure of society,”” implying a certain “technique” or “technical activity,” which “specifies what has to be done, the lack of which will leave the function unaccomplished.’’®° Therefore, collective memory can become a transcript of the needs, customs, traditions, and value judgments of a society,®' which “obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality does not possess.” Although the Byzantines did not share Halbwachs’s clear distinction between memory and history,®
the intergenerational transmission and revision of folk songs provides an opportunity to historically examine the function of collective memory as identity formation mechanism, namely the way that the representation of the Byzantine warrior hero and his world corresponded “to the self-image and interests of the group [and was] oriented towards the needs and interests of the group in the present.’
Another key term requiring clarification is “myth.” Under the influence of Christianity, the word is often employed to denote “the domain of the unfamiliar, of the pagan, who, living in another time or under different skies, does not have the benefit of the lights of Truth. In his ignorance of the revealed biblical narratives, he can construct only irrational fictions.”’*° For the ancient Greeks, myth was a discourse, not a lie;®° it was a narrative inseparable from history.*’ On the contrary, Byzantine historians writing under the hegemony of Christianity generally drew a line between mythology and history; for the Byzantines, the dominant tendency was to interpret myths allegorically, so as to convey higher philosophical, and, more importantly, theological truths.**
Traces of this allegorical interpretation could be found in Cypriot heroic folk songs, especially those stressing the polar opposition between the hero, fighting under divine protection, and the monsters, perceived as incarnated forces of evil. It would be wrong, however, to take for granted the Christian allegorical interpretation of mythic discourses in the songs. As we shall see in chapters 3 and 4, one can also trace themes, motifs, and symbols that convey ideas incompatible with, and sometimes in direct opposition to, Christianity.
This book employs “myth” to define a pre-Christian narrative structure that survived the official establishment of Christianity. For most Orthodox /iterati and church pastors, pagan mythology was recycled only after its allegorical “filtering”; yet, the existence of elements in the songs that seem to have remained untouched by such a process implies that myth could also function independently, partly due to its interpretive plasticity, and partly due to the inability, or unwillingness, of the cultural agents responsible for its transmission and preservation to see the mythopoeic process as deception and false truth. In other words, although official authorities tolerated and manipulated myth through allegory, this strategy seems not to have been shared by the folk community, for whom the boundaries between fiction and reality appear to have been less clear.
Myths can be read as “invented traditions.” According to Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), the term embraces “both ‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period.”*° Hobsbawm divides invented traditions into three categories: (a) those expressing the social unity of communities; (b) those sanctioning institutions and power relations; (c) and those inculcating “beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour.”®!
This book understands the mythic traditions of medieval Cyprus as being “reinvented,” through the addition of historical details, which left their mythic core largely intact.” By placing the mythic core of Cypriot heroic folk songs under the historian’s microscope, we are able to identify and analyze the “symptoms and therefore indicators of problems” behind these invented traditions.”? A mythic narrative propagating the need to respect and preserve the established order tells us something of the domination of the Byzantine emperor and his collaborators in a particular geographical context: this is an invented tradition sanctioning the Byzantine imperial institution and the power relations stemming from it. An alternative mythic narrative, deconstructing Byzantine imperial authority and advocating resistance to power, implies a very different ideological attitude, shaped by specific sociopolitical circumstances. In the long term, and regardless of their ideological matrix,” heroic folk songs and their myths became part of the folk society’s identity and sense of belonging, expressing the social unity of the Cypriot peasant community. Some songs might have also sanctioned moral codes and ways of proper behavior. These issues will be discussed throughout the book.
The observation on power antagonisms brings forth the concepts of “subalternity” and “history from below” in uncovering the cultural agents, both composers/performers and audience, of the heroic themes in Cypriot folk songs. “One significant aspect of grassroots history,” writes Hobsbawm, “‘is what ordinary people remember of big events as distinct from what their betters think they should remember, or what historians can establish as having happened; and insofar as they turn memory into myth, how such myths are formed.’’*° Cypriot heroic folk songs are the songs of a folk society.
It is reasonable to suggest that at least fragments of the mentalities, fears, and aspirations of the socially marginalized are expressed through their culture. If this is indeed the case, then historians of Byzantium and the medieval world should see subaltern people not merely as the object of exploitation by the powerful (whose version of history offers, quite often, the only way to approach certain periods and events) but also as the active agents of historical developments and the hidden protagonists of history, a history that was no privilege of any specific social group or class.*° The historical examination of Cypriot heroic folk songs has exactly this dimension, inviting us to search for the people behind the songs, to recover their stories and mentalities.
Patrick H. Hutton defines the “history of mentalities” (histoire des mentalités) as the history of “the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life . .. the culture of the common man.”*” Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014) notes that the aim of this particular historical approach is not to study “objective” phenomena, but to concentrate on their representation, and to examine the relationship between mentalities and social structures (e.g., palaces, monasteries, castles, schools, mills, forges, taverns, sermons, painted or sculptured images, and the printing press).°° Since the 1960s, there has been an increasing tendency to bring under the historian’s microscope “insignificant” (from the viewpoint of earlier historiographical examinations) individuals, acknowledging that “history had not been made by kings, and grandiose politics was only a superficial flicker, which really changed nothing in the basic state of things.”’? Given the nature of the folk materials under examination (being products of an anonymous collective entity), this book focuses on the mentalities of elite and non-elite groups, rather than individuals, placing particular emphasis on folk perceptions of the powerful, imperial and royal authority, the ethnoreligious Other, and God.
Chapter 1 sets the scene by presenting the development of heroic warrior cultures in Byzantine and Latin-ruled Cyprus. Chapter 2, inspired by John G. Peristiany’s edited volume on honor and shame in the Mediterranean (1965),'° seeks to historically contextualize perceptions of honor and shame in Cypriot heroic folk songs. In chapter 3, the examination turns to the image of ethnic groups and social outsiders in the multiethnic society of medieval Cyprus. Following a “zoom in-zoom out” presentation of the relationship between pre-Christian and Christian culture in Byzantium and Cyprus, chapter 4 discusses expressions of “folk spirituality”’”’ in Cypriot heroic folk songs, paying particular attention to perceptions of theodicy and divine injustice.
The Byzantine Warrior Hero is a book about heroic deeds and tragedies; it is also a study on the dialogue between history and tradition, navigating the sea of pre-Christian heroic themes, motifs, and symbols in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, and revisiting the survival of Byzantine culture in the Latinruled Byzantine world. This is the story of the collective consciousness of an insular society on the southeastern margin of Europe, and of the elements determining their identity: war and peace, initiation and transformation, justice and injustice, shame and honor, life and death.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق