Fig. 17: Lord Byron in Albanian dress (1813) from a painting by Robert Philips.
Ali was not in Ioannina but away on campaign in ‘Illyricum’, as Byron put it, besieging his brother-in-law, Ibrahim Pasha, in the well-fortified town of Berat. The rather put out Leake, whose plans had been inconvenienced by Byron’s arrival, had informed Ali of their visit, paving the way for an audience by telling him that his visitor was a man of great family. In response, Ali had left instructions for Byron to be treated as befitted an ‘Englishman of rank’; everything provided gratis. The guests were put up in the house of Nicolo Argyri Vrettos, a Greek merchant and patient put upon default host for Ali’s foreign guests. Cockerell and Hughes also stayed with Agryri three years later. Hughes found the ingratitude of Ali towards the Vrettos family, which he had reduced to such poverty that they could hardly cope with the upkeep of their house, worthy of comment whereas Byron was much less questioning in his observations.
Once installed in the house of Nicolo Argyri, Byron fell under the spell of the vizier’s generosity and luxury and he and Hobhouse were soon trying on Albanian costume. Byron’s may have been the one he was to wear in his famous portrait by Thomas Phillips, painted in 1813. They were treated royally, shown round Mukhtar’s palace by Hussein, his 10 years old, but very grave, son, who entered into a courteous conversation about the British parliament. He asked the two noblemen whether they were in the Lords or the Commons, thus impressing them with his knowledge of external affairs. Mahomet, Ali’s other grandson, also around 10 or 12 years old, showed them round Ali’s palace, which was said to have 300 chambers. The son of Ali’s second son, Veli, pasha of the Morea, was living in the palace and already had a pashalik of his own.
In contrast to Byron’s fulsome verse, the prose accounts of Hobhouse and Leake dwell on the often shabby appearance of Ali’s retinue and the quaint juxtapositions of Oriental opulence, silks and furnishings, harems and slaves, with haphazard and misjudged attempts at Western taste. All this existed, it was noted, within a region of backwardness and squalor, with the exception of those areas with proximity to Italy and a history of interaction with the outside world. Complaints of the poverty and dirt of the accommodation with its resident vermin are frequent; even if for the seasoned traveller through Italy, the fleas were not necessarily any worse. The population too was often unwashed and the fleas could even be spotted jumping in the divans of Ali’s palace, brought in by the visiting public. Ali, ‘so accustomed to the rudest Albanian life in his youth’, showed no disgust when receiving petitions from the lowest of his subjects, whose dirtiness Leake obviously found hard to bear. Ali treated them with familiarity and allowed them
to approach him, to kiss the hem of his garment, to touch his hand, and to stand near him while they converse with him, his dress is often covered with vermin, and there is no small danger of acquiring these companions by sitting on his sofa, where they are often seen crawling amidst embroidered velvet and cloth of gold.
At the same time, in 1804, Ali had just completed a magnificent audience chamber in the seraglio of the castle that was
not surpassed by those of the Sultan himself. It is covered with a Gobelin carpet, which has the cypher of the King of France on it, and was purchased by the pasha’s agent at Corfu.
Fifteen years later an anonymous American contributor to The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal (1820), described the palace as being in ‘the Chinese taste’, with small pillars and points on the roof, painted red and white and decorated with large pictures of battles, hunts and ‘wild beasts devouring each other, the work of poor Italian artists’. Indeed this ‘taste’ apparently stretched to opera. This was the young Edward Everett, the first American to visit Ioannina, who had received an introduction to Ali through Byron. On the same visit was a young Venetian opera dancer joining a troupe of Italians to entertain at the wedding of one of Ali’s grandchildren. Such culture clashes appear more frequently than would be imagined in such a remote area. Everett was greeted by a German band playing ‘God save the King’ in Ali’s court at Tyrnavos in Thessaly; Americans were usually taken to be English. Ali’s eclecticism is endorsed by Hughes, who records that the new seraglio at Preveza was adorned with Persian carpets and Venetian mirrors. This was not so uncommon in a changing world. The reforming Sultan Selim III, who was keen to absorb Western influences, decorated his palaces in the Italian style while European fashions were imitated in the capital. Of course the acquisitive owners of the finest European houses and palaces had long been stylistic plunderers. There was an irony in the snobbish criticism of the travellers to Ali’s court, coming as they did from lands with a penchant for chinoiserie and where the Prince Regent himself indulged his own fantasies for Chinese-Islamic pastiche in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Eager to counteract what he saw as the naive myopic classicism with which his contemporaries viewed modern Greece, often only to be disappointed with the present reality, Byron plays up the Ottoman in his verse and the acceptance of things as they are, emphasizing the Orientalist vision.
The harem; something of undying fascination to Western writers, and Everett gives it due attention. Nothing, except religion, defined the Oriental more than the harem and the hamam (bath). Ali was said to have anything from 200 to 400 women in his harem (and perhaps 300 boys, called Ganymedes, in the seraglio), depending on whom to believe. Some were slaves from Constantinople, others native Greeks or Albanians, generally volunteers (or had been volunteered) that could be married off at the right moment to the officers of the court, some had been taken by force. According to Everett, Ali at this time had one wife, 25 years old; he was around 70 by this time. Nubian eunuch guards would stand at the door and attend the women on visits to the bath or out in a covered wagon. In the Ottoman court it was common for black eunuchs to guard the harem, as they had been rendered completely sexless as opposed to their white counterparts who served in the administration. As well as his palace in Ioannina, Ali had two summer residences, one at the north of the lake and one in the town. Here he could retire with the ‘most favoured ladies of his harem’. The town retreat, a marble-floored pavilion surrounded by a wild garden, citrus groves, figs and pomegranate, with roaming deer and antelope, contained a central octagonal ‘saloon’ with a marble fountain and an Italian ‘organ’ playing Italian tunes. Hobhouse’s diary adds that the gardens were in disarray and the organ was a water-organ. Typical of the strange amalgam of East and West, the pavilion was said to be the handiwork of a Frenchman, perhaps a onetime prisoner. Hughes comments on the use of foreign designers, obtained by whatever means. The extensive gardens of the Tepelene seraglio were the creation of two Italian gardeners, ‘somewhat in the style of their own country’. Deserters from the French Army in Corfu whom Ali had taken in, he provided them with houses, a good salary, and wives from his own harem. The exotic picture at Ioannina was completed by the scenes, which Hobhouse did not witness but eagerly imagined, of Ali cavorting with members of his harem, some of whom would dance to an Albanian lute as he reclined on a sofa, to indulge in ‘the enjoyment of whatever accomplishments these fair-ones can display for his gratification’.
Fig. 18: Ali’s grandsons, Ismail and Mehmet (1825) by Louis Dupré.
Ali’s exploits were not only being told in song but stories about him were widely circulated. Hobhouse records that hardly had his party stepped ashore before they learnt from a Greek teacher in Arta that Ali, ‘having made the most of his youth’ suffered from an incurable disorder with the symptoms of secondary syphilis. Rumours of his lurid exploits were common currency: the debaucheries of his court, the oriental splendour, the gold, silks, jewels, the activities of the concubines and scores of pages, the young orphaned sons of parents he had murdered and attached to him like puppies; Ali, bored with his courtiers, roaming the streets of Ioannina in the night disguised as a merchant, in search of adventure. One of the most notorious stories doing the rounds concerned the drowning of twelve young maidens in the Lake at Ioannin
a on the orders of Ali. This incident took on a life of its own, reaching a large international audience by its mention in The Gaiour (infidel), published in 1813, in which a Venetian Christian extracts revenge for the drowning of his lover Leila, a slave and member of the harem, by the Emir Hassan. Byron set the narrative in the recent past, the abortive Russian-backed rising of the Greeks in the Morea of 1770 which was put down by Hasan Pasha. A note at the end however acknowledges the inspiration of the Ioannina lake drowning. Byron claims factual credence by recounting Ali’s use of drowning as a punishment, the details of which he heard in part from Vassily, his guide supplied by Ali, who claimed to have been an eyewitness to events. In essence the wife of Mukhtar Pasha complained to Ali that her husband had been unfaithful. She supplied a list of his supposed twelve beautiful lovers, who were then seized, tied in a sack and drowned in the lake the same night without a cry. Phrosyne, in Byron’s account, the fairest of the twelve, then became the subject of many a local ballad and coffeehouse story that had spread throughout the region.
Fig. 19: Ioannina with Ali’s citadel by Finden.
The numbers of the victims vary. Cockerell heard the tale from Psalidas, the schoolteacher of Ioannina, who also told him of Ali’s massacre of the villagers of Gardiki in 1799. By then it had more details and a new twist. Phrosyne, now Euphrosyne, was a celebrity who attracted a host of admirers due to her wit and beauty. The dissolute Mukhtar became her lover, but his wife was the daughter of the pasha of Berat whose friendship Ali was at that time especially anxious to cultivate. Ali burst in on Euphrosyne with his guard at midnight and after calling her the seducer of his son and other names, he forced her to give up whatever presents he had made her, and had her led off to prison with her maid. Next day, in order to make a terrifying example to check the immorality of the town in general and his son in particular, he had nine other women of known bad character arrested, and they and Euphrosyne were led to the brink of the precipice over the lake on which the fortress stands. Her faithful maid refused to desert her, and with echoes of the Suliote women, she and Euphrosyne, linked in each other’s arms, leapt together down the fatal rock followed by the others. Another version had it that Mukhtar had refused to give his wife an emerald ring, but had given it to Euphrosyne, whose husband was away in Venice. It was rumoured she had also turned down the advances of Ali. Ali arranged a dinner inviting Euphrosyne, and a selection of the most charming and elegant ladies and some prostitutes. His policemen then burst in, tied them up and shut them in a church all day by the lakeshore, telling them they were condemned to death. The women supposed that Ali was expecting them to be ransomed. That night Euphrosyne and sixteen other girls were drowned in the lake.
George Finlay, who fought with Byron during the Greek War of Independence, told the tale in his History of the Greek Revolution (1861) some years later by which time it had become even more colourful. Euphrosyne was the beautiful 28 years old niece of Gabriel, the archbishop of Ioannina, who spent too much time reading ‘naughty’ episodes in classical literature rather than studying the saints, which led her to revive the customs of the hetairai, the educated courtesans of ancient Greece. While her husband was away in Venice, hoping to keep away from Ali’s designs on his wealth, Euphrosyne was entertaining the wealthy young men of the city and enticing the attention of Mukhtar who showered her with gifts. Her behaviour caused scandal and encouraged imitators, to the outrage of the pious, both Christian and Muslim. After the complaints of Mukhtar’s wife and under a veil of public duty, or even out of rejected jealousy, Ali decided that such activities had to be stopped and punished. Following their arrest, Euphrosyne and her accomplices were held in the Church of Saint Nicholas, until the next night when they were rowed across the stormy lake in small boats and summarily thrown overboard, without being tied up in sacks as was the custom, to drown with solemn dignity. Again Finlay attests to the eyewitness account of one of the guards. The Christian population was indignant and the funerals of the women drew large crowds, but Ali, apologizing for the severity of his justice, justified his actions by saying he would have pardoned them but no one had stood up to intercede for them.
Such incidents and the notoriety of Ali’s propensity for acts of cruelty as reported in the West only seemed to add to his mystery and romance. In fact many of his punishments were part of the Ottoman culture. The drowning of women in sacks was the result of a Turkish taboo against the shedding of female blood; a common punishment for the prostitutes of Constantinople was to end up in the Bosphorus. The extreme case was when the Sultan Ibrahim I (1640–1648) was rumoured, in a fit of madness, to have ordered his complete harem of 280 to be drowned. Suffering was used particularly to deter brigandry, rebellion or political offences. Thus impalement, sometimes using the stake as a spit so that the victim could also be roasted alive, was not uncommon. Hughes reported that despite initially disbelieving the stories he was told on good authority that criminals were roasted alive over a slow fire, impaled, and skinned alive. Sometimes they had their extremities chopped off or the skin of their face stripped over their necks. While still alive the victims were able to plead for water to no avail, as the populace was too afraid to help. Leake saw a Greek priest, the leader of a gang of robbers, nailed alive to the outer wall of the palace at Ioannina in sight of the whole city. On his own death Ali’s head was sent to the Sultan in Constantinople. This was a recognized end for offenders where heads were displayed outside the palace.
On setting out for Ali’s palace at Tepelene, Byron, who seemed determined to see everything in terms of a great new adventure, proudly asserted that he was the first Englishman, with the exception of Leake, to venture ‘beyond the capital into the interior’. The Frenchman, Pouqueville, of course had also travelled extensively throughout Albania and Leake admonished Hobhouse for relying with too much credence for background information from Pouqueville, ‘who is always out’. In reality, neither Hobhouse nor Byron, nor any of the other English writers had much to say in his favour, often criticizing him for his inaccuracies and anti-British bias, but happy to plunder his writings when it suited them. When they arrived at Tepelene on a baking late afternoon, Byron was typically reminded of Scott’s description of Branksome Castle in his Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and, allowing for the difference in dress, its feudal customs. The pomp, ceremony and colour of the court made a deep impression. Byron was more taken by the show of military activity than the reality that Ali, inconveniently, was actually at war. Ali had around 5,000 men actively besieging Berat, so the palace was obviously on a war footing, with messengers coming and going from the front line. While Byron shows little interest in the wider military picture, the warlike nature of the Albanians, whom he believed all to be brave, rigidly honest and faithful, capture his imagination. He wrote to his mother describing the pomp of the court:
The Albanians in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold worked cloak, crimson velvet gold laced jacket and waistcoat, silver mounted pistols & daggers), the Tartars with their high caps, the Turks in their vast pelisses11 & turbans, the soldiers & black slaves with the horses… in an immense open gallery in front of the palace, the latter placed in a kind of cloister below it, two hundred steeds ready caparisoned to move in a moment, couriers entering or passing out with the despatches, the kettle drums beating, boys calling the hour from the minaret of the mosque.
Again Hobhouse is less awestruck than Byron. As the visitors followed ‘an officer of the palace, with a white wand’, they approached their audience with Ali by proceeding ‘along the gallery, now crowded with soldiers, to the other wing of the building, and… over some rubbish where a room had fallen in, and through some shabby apartments… into the chamber in which was Ali himself… a large room, very handsomely furnished, and having a marble cistern and fountain in the middle, ornamented with painted tiles, of the kind which we call Dutch tile’.
When finally ushered into the presence of the vizier, visitors w
ere confronted with a decidedly portly man of medium height, around 60 years old, with a long white beard and deceptively benign aura, and sharp light blue eyes. Ali received Byron with respect and hospitality, standing up to greet him and flattering him by saying he could see he was a ‘man of birth’ because he had ‘small ears, curling hair and little white hands’. He was not magnificently dressed, but wore a high turban of fine gold muslin and his waist was adorned with a yataghan, or short sabre, studded with diamonds. Though he knew Ali cruel, Byron was impressed by his courtesy and military reputation:
his manner is very kind & at the same time possess that dignity I find universal amongst the Turks. - -
He has the appearance of anything but his real character, for he is a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties, very brave & so good a general, they call him the Mahometan Buonaparte. Napoleon has twice offered to make him King of Epirus, but he prefers the English interest & abhors the French as he told me. He is of so much consequence he is courted by both, the Albanians being the most warlike subjects of the Sultan, though Ali is only nominally dependent on the Porte.12 He has been a mighty warrior, but is as barbarous as he is successful, roasting rebels etc., etc.
Rather than being confronted with a lion in his prime Byron had met more of a wily old fox, to whom age had bestowed the air of an almost otherworldly fatherly humility and wisdom. On his way to Tepelene, Byron had experienced first-hand the brutal acts of repression and petty disregard for the ordinary people, turfed out of their homes to give Byron’s party lodgings, but this experience of the arbitrary and avaricious nature of Ali’s government contrasted with the courtly display only seemed to give an added frisson to their audience. The comparison of Ali with Napoleon was enough of an accepted fact by this time to go unquestioned, though after his death, in the Introduction to ‘Les Orientales’ (Oeuvres Complètes de Victor Hugo, 1829), Victor Hugo made the comparison with reservations. Ali was ‘the only colossus of this century who can be compared to Bonaparte… and is to Napoleon as the tiger to the lion, or the vulture to the eagle’.
Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina Page 7
