ABSTRACT

As we have seen, one of the features of the laments of Mani is that the calm, hard surface of the narrative is inevitably broken at one or two places by a cry. The emotional outburst sometimes takes the form of a direct address to the dead; at other times it may be an address to oneself or to a third person supposed responsible for the death. The agent of death may not be obvious, but there still seems to be a need to assign blame to someone specific. Koundounara, in her lament for her son, blamed the king who had conscripted him into the army. In the lament for Yiorgos Kossonakos, a permanent officer in the Greek army who was drowned when the Turks sank the Greek vessel Arkady carrying Cretan refugees to the mainland in 1867, the widow curses the state, the sub-prefect of the district and representative for Mani in the parliament, for sending Maniot troops to support the Cretan cause.1 When the cause of death is a natural one, God himself may be named as the enemy. In a lament for a twelve-year-old boy, the only son of a widowed mother, who died of a fever between the two world wars, his mother says that God is wicked for killing an orphan. She is warned by her relatives and the other villagers not to curse God because it is sinful and evil, but she answers them back in her lament, saying:

—This thing God did on the Saviour’s holy day when he killed the orphanisn’t it sinful and evil?2