Ali Pasha, Lion of Ioannina

by Eugenia Russell

  Ioannina too was a pitiful sight:

  this city, once, if not the largest, one of the most prosperous and brilliant in the Turkish dominions, still looked imposing; but when we entered, I soon found that all preceding desolation had only been preparative to the vast scene of destruction now before me. We proceeded through a street, winding in its course, but of very great length, to our quarters. Ruined houses, mosques with their tower only standing, streets utterly razed – these are nothing. We met great patches of ruin a mile square, as if a swarm of locusts had had the power of desolating the works of man as well as those of God. The great heart of the city was a sea of ruin. Arches and pillars, isolated and shattered, still here and there jutting forth, breaking the uniformity of the desolation, and turning the horrible into the picturesque. The great bazaar, itself a little town, was burnt down only a few months since when an infuriate band of Albanian soldiers heard of the destruction of their chiefs by the grand vizier.

  But something of the splendour of Ali’s palace still remained, commandeered for use by the vizir.

  we repaired to the celebrated fortress-palace of Ali, which, though greatly battered in successive sieges, is still inhabitable, and yet affords a very fair idea of its old magnificence. Having passed the gates of the fortress, we found ourselves in a number of small streets, like those in the liberties of the Tower, or any other old castle, all full of life, stirring and excited; then we came to a grand place, in which on an ascent stands the Palace. We hurried through courts and corridors, all full of guards, and pages, and attendant chiefs, and in fact every species of Turkish population… At length we came to a vast, irregular apartment, serving as the immediate antechamber to the Hall of Audience. This was the finest thing I have ever yet seen… The Hall was vast, built by Ali Pacha purposely to receive the largest Gobelins carpet that was ever made, which belonged to the chief chamber in Versailles, and was sold to him in the Revolution. It is entirely covered with gilding and arabesques.

  Despite the scenes of destruction witnessed by Disraeli, the complete erasure of Ali’s memory was yet to come. Richard Burgess described passing the defences that Ali had put up around Ioannina as he entered the city in 1834 as still being extant and he observed ‘the approach and suburbs of the meanest town in Italy may put to shame those of the capital of Epirus’. The fortress ‘battered on all sides’ had fallen into ruin and the canal that connected it into disuse. The population had been reduced by a third from that of twenty years previous. The town’s sixteen mosques and eight churches had been burnt by Ali. At Tepelene too, when Lear visited in 1848 its former grandeur was a memory. The high fortress walls still stood then as they do today, but little else remained but ‘a short street of miserable bazaars’ outside. Lear had a Murray’s Guide of 1840, so he knew what to expect: a ghost town, its population reduced to 150 Albanian and 8 Greek families, a heap of ruins with its fortifications ‘level with the ground’. The same fate had befallen Tepelene as his seraglio at Preveza. Ali’s palace, eulogized by Byron, almost equal in size to that at Ioannina, its many rooms large in scale and magnificently adorned, and the harem on its north side, was no more.

  1 Other estimates put the population in excess of 400,000.

  2 See Chapter 5.

  3 See Chapter 1.

  4 See Chapter 3.

  5. Two of the columns were donated by his family to the British Museum in 1904; the missing parts are located in the National Museum of Athens and in several museums in Germany.

  Chapter 7

  Cultural Impact

  When Ali Pasha heard this, his executioner he called in.

  And while the klepht bowed, off went his head.

  ‘Kolias’, Klephtic song

  From contemporary accounts we learn that tales and songs about Ali Pasha were already common currency during his lifetime. Music and storytelling were among the entertainments witnessed at Ali’s court and a retinue of entertainers followed his family members as they moved from one residence to other. When Thomas Hughes was invited by Mukhtar to dine with him on the island of lake Ioannina, they were accompanied by a ‘household fiddler, like the ancient bard, that invariable concomitant of the feast, stretching his lungs to the tortured catgut and celebrating in wild Albanian music the deeds of Ali and his valiant sons’.

  In order to show his favour to distinguished European guests, it was usual practice for Ali to send musicians to their homes during the evening. Pouqueville tells of the entertainers in the retinues of Mukhtar and Veli; drawn from a wide area and including Jewish and Gypsy musicians and dancers, some from Constantinople, a Morlaque comedian troupe (from the Dalmatian coast), dancing bear trainers, Buretinieri (dice-box players) and acrobats. Pouqueville brackets the acrobats with prostitutes and he often compares musicians and acrobats to the courtesans and prostitutes of ancient banquets. Exotic as these entertainments must have been, the greatest impression on visitors was that left by the songs about their host. When Leake heard the war songs about Ali and the Suliotes sung in the guests’ honour in the presence of the Albanian despot he could not help being moved and impressed. Ali liked to hear his deeds recounted, and the songs that told of his early exploits might be termed the ‘official’ record. As a counter there was the ‘unofficial’ version, also noted by visitors to Albania, that gave the alternative Ali story as witnessed by his subjects or his enemies. To have your praises sung was common practice and minstrels would compose eulogies in return for payment. Gavoyanios,1 a famed old minstrel of Auspelatria in Thessaly living at the end of the eighteenth century, became wealthy composing songs for soldiers in the Turkish military, not a particularly popular undertaking, but he was prepared to extol their prowess for a large fee, the greater the praise the greater the sum. In contrast to the eulogies, the ‘unofficial’ songs praised the exploits of Ali’s enemies and bewailed the excesses of his regime.

  The most well known eulogy to Ali is the long epic song, the Alipashiad, which was composed for him in his lifetime. Written in Greek by the Muslim Albanian, Haxhi Shehreti, it gave a concertinaed and imaginative account of Ali’s life to date, skipping lightly over his youthful exploits but not shirking from the brutal way in which Ali went about asserting his authority.

  He went in one end and out at the other,

  He tramples on bodies and still is not sated.

  Lord Ali had resolved not to leave a single soul,

  And his troops fell on them like maddened lions…

  All that were in the villages the snakes devoured;

  He smashed their legs and smashed their backs

  and smashed their buttocks.

  Such details obviously were a matter of pride to Ali rather than shame. In song, Ali is often remembered for his cruelty to his opponents and to his subjects, but his opposition to the Sultan meant that he could be cast as both villain and hero. To the klephts, Ali was usually the villain.

  In the song ‘Kolias’ (quoted at the beginning of the chapter) Ali is unequivocally seen as a double-crossing despot. In his study on klephtic song, Gabriel Rombotis saw the themes of capture and betrayal as a window into how Ali exploited the internal rivalries among the klepht captains. The captains were the dominant personalities after whom each band would be named. Rombotis lists the virtues and qualities for leadership a captain must have shown to gain his reputation:

  Determination, definiteness of purpose, supreme ability in the indispensable requirements of the profession, generosity when needed, gallantry, tenacity and inflexibility of character in the face of any event even death, fairness to his fellow-Klephts, power of persuasion.

  These strengths will have been those Ali himself possessed during his time leading a bandit life and once he became a pasha he was canny enough to know how to use his experience to turn the tables and exploit them as weaknesses. The virtues led to rivalry between the captains making it possible for pashas like Ali to ‘attract them to their Palaces and treacherously to put them to death’; and Ali Pasha, quick to capita
lize on any opportunity, would become a past master of the art. In the songs ‘Kolias’ and ‘Katsoudas’ (the same hero by another name) the protagonist is summarily beheaded with one clean blow by Ali’s executioner, while in another version Kolias is given over to the pasha of Tripolitsa’s men for a long process of torture and humiliation. ‘Tripolitsa’, Tripoli in the Peloponnese, where the song has moved the action, is where Veli held court. In the song the hero begs not to be taken through the mountain village of Vytina on the way to Tripoli so that his betrothed sweetheart does not see him in his perilous condition.

  The French historian and philologist Claude Charles Fauriel collected these klephtic songs close to the latter years of Ali’s life from expatriate Greeks living in Venice and Trieste and his translations were published in 1825 shortly after Ali’s death. Fauriel was a radical and member of the le comité philhellène de Paris working for Greek independence. His pioneering work was taken up and expanded on by Arnold Passow who translated it into German in the 1850s. These two works brought the folk culture of Greece and Albania into the European mainstream for the first time and at an opportune moment. There was a growing interest within the Romantic and nationalist movements in folk song and culture. Using Furiel’s work, the great German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe made his own adaptations of folk songs from Epirus following the adventures of another klepht, Liakos, who takes on Ali’s principle deputy in charge of the passes and defeats him in single combat. From the German, the klephtic verses took on a new life in Bohemia. The Czechs, a subjugated people themselves under the Habsburg thumb since the seventeenth century, were creating their own national revival. Their Romantic nationalist poet Vaclav Bolemir Nebesky translated the klephtic verses, probably from Passow, into his native tongue and in so doing inspired Antonín Leopold Dvořák to set the results to music. ‘Kolias’, the story of Kolias, forms part of a suite of ‘Three Modern Greek Songs’ (1875). Two of the three poems relate to Ali Pasha, while the middle poem is of a pastoral nature akin to the mood of medieval romances. The Lament of Parga, the third in the trilogy, has been identified as a Suliote song in the heroic style concerning Ali’s taking of the town. Dvořák’s interest in this material chimes with his other work on nationalist themes, the Slavonic Dances (1878) and Moravian Duets settings of folk poetry (1875–81), that he composed during this period.

  The mixture of resignation and national pride surrounding the events in Parga became a theme of numerous Greek folk songs. The moment when the Pargians dug up the graves of their ancestors rather than let their remains fall into the hands of the enemy (they had not submitted in life, so they should not submit in death), was felt to be memorably poignant. But the incident from Ali’s life which is perhaps most famously commemorated in folk song, and also in this case dance, was the mass suicide of the Suliote women who preferred death rather than submitting to Ali’s slavery, remembered as the ‘Dance of Zalongo’. The dance is accompanied in song and there are versions in both Greek (Horos tou Zalongou) and Albanian (Vallja e Zallongut). In the Greek version, the women sing as they throw themselves over the cliff edge to their deaths:

  Farewell poor world,

  Farewell sweet life,

  and you, my wretched country,

  Farewell forever

  The Suliotes’ complex relationship with Ali is portrayed in The Song of Ali Pasha collected by Fauriel. It shows how soon after Ali’s death events were already being manipulated to create a situation in which he could extol the bravery of the Suliotes. The song takes the form of a dialogue between Ali and his sons Mukhtar and Veli in the Church of the Pantokrator in Ioannina. The sons remind Ali of their collective wealth in order to reassure him. In response Ali says that he can neither rely on wealth nor on his regular troops but that his only hope against the wrath of the Sultan is the ‘Greeks’ who always fought against him with great heroism. He says that the Greeks emulate the French in their love of freedom, going on to single out the Suliotes, mentioning that not only the men but also the women ‘preferred death to slavery’ despite his promises of material goods, such as weaponry and coin.

  With such songs disseminating across Greece and eventually abroad, and travellers’ tales being rushed into print, Ali’s notoriety was such that news of his death was rumoured prematurely on numerous occasions, with the result that foreign obituaries were penned before the event. But it was on his death that Ali achieved another level of fame, if not infamy. His life became not only the stuff of legend, but entertainment. Hardly had his head made its way to the Sultan before his own favourite puppeteer, Iakov, whose traditional bawdy Turkish Karagöz show Pouqueville had seen at Ali’s court in 1799 and Hobhouse had witnessed in Ioannina, was quickly adapting his performance to one based on a life of Ali, which he then took round the countryside. A more sympathetic portrayal of Ali soon followed in an anonymous Greek poem, the Lament of Ali Pasha. The author appears deeply moved by the tyrant’s death and attempts a closer characterization in fictional scenes between Ali, his son and the son of the Sultan. Ali is portrayed as majestic, caring and intimate in the days before his downfall. Three authentic persons, Manthos Oikonomou, Bairamis and Tzamis, known from the sources, are inaccurately put at Ali’s side in his dying moments.

  The first incident from Ali’s life to have impact abroad was the fate of the ‘beautiful Ephrosyne’ recorded by Byron and the others. Already doing the rounds while Ali was alive, it became a fully developed tale within Greece and Albania and ready for adaptation into works by Western authors ensuring it an audience long after Ali’s death. That the story was popular throughout Greece is recounted in Finlay’s History. He includes a quotation from one of the many songs that mention the storyline of the ring, which he translates:

  I told you, Ephrosyne, dear,

  The ring, oh! do not take,

  Ali the news will quickly hear –

  He’ll drown you in the lake.

  The colourful detail that Mukhtar’s wife had seen an emerald ring on the finger of Euphrosyne at the hamam (bathhouse), which was one and the same as the one that Mukhtar had earlier refused her, was found to be particularly emotive. Ali, who takes action after she goes to him to plead for vengeance, justifies his retribution as being necessary to uphold public morals. Although Euphrosyne in this version brings her fate on herself, and as the niece of an archbishop, was no obstacle to her becoming a martyr to the Orthodox Christians; the other sixteen or so victims (depending on the account) of Ali’s rough justice, though perhaps less culpable, were not equally pitied. The real-life ambiguity of Euphrosyne, or Kyra Frosini amongst the Greeks, played into the hands of the storytellers who could embroider her tale for their own differing purposes, making her at one moment innocent victim, at another abused lover.

  Euphrosyne became a popular folk hero to the Albanians too and was known as the maid Eufrozina. By the time her story was woven into a national epic poem about the Albanian struggle against the Turks, The Highland Lute (Lahuta e Malcís) written by Gjergj Fishta in the early years of the twentieth century, it was her virginal qualities that were underlined.

  There are very many maidens

  But like that maid from Janina,

  Nowhere will you find her equal

  Ali Pasha glimpses her as she ‘dove-like stepped upon the terrace’ and he immediately wants her for himself. Ali sends a Moor to fetch her but she refuses to ‘renounce faith and honour’ despite being warned that Ali will chop off her head. Ali sends the Moor again, warning him that he will end up in the lake if he does not bring Eufrozina. That night the Moor seizes her and embarks over the lake in a wooden raft with his cargo. Despite the Moor’s threats she answers him:

  Yes, I’ll go now to the pasha,

  But I need my bridal garments

  For I’ve made no preparations,

  And so saying she,

  plunged into the water,

  Sank and vanished to the bottom.

  Word then spread across the country

&n
bsp; That Albania has such maidens

  Who, defending faith and honour,

  Sacrifice their young existence.

  Despite the fact it is Ali, an Albanian, who wants Eufrozina, she is portrayed as being abused by a ‘foreign’ agent and so is transformed into a symbol of national struggle against the Turkish oppressor.

  As was shown in the opening chapter, Ali’s fame was closely linked to Byron’s. Henry Gally Knight, who was a contemporary of Byron at Trinity College, Cambridge, also wrote verse in a similar vein, but in the shadow of his more illustrious competitor. Knight became an MP and a member of the London Greek Committee formed to support the Greek cause against the Turks. He travelled widely in the Middle East and to Epirus, and he and Byron were both publishing Orientalist verses at the same time, and with the same publisher, Murray. On learning that Byron’s forthcoming poem, The Giaour, included an incident of a girl being drowned in a sack, Knight wrote to him in 1813 to make sure the way was clear for the publication of his poem, Phrosine: A Grecian Tale (1817), which he claimed he began around 1811. Knight was afraid they were using the same material and in his letter he explains that he heard the tale in Ioannina: ‘the adventures of a certain Miss Phrosyne, whom Ali Pasha wish’d to get into his Harem, but her relations put her to death, to save her from infamy’. In this instance there is a similarity with the Albanian poem, where Eufrozina sacrifices herself, but in this instance she is willingly smothered by her female kin. It has been suggested by Michael Franklin that Knight was familiar with one of the Euphrosyne ballads through his allusion to the ballad’s imagery in the letter. Knight follows the version of the tale that puts the maid at the hands of the rapacious Ali; the version that most chimed with philhellenic sentiment. In his poem, as Phrosyne dances with her fellow maidens she laments in song ‘The lost delights of freedom’s day’ and the poem is unequivocal in its propagandist sentiments. It was in such symbolic identifications with Greece that Euphrosyne became the inspiration for the Greeks and their allies against Turkish domination.