Linda Suny Myrsiades*

NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS

HISTORY PERFORMANCE

K araghiozis—Greek shadow puppet theatre—is a performance which

developed in Greece over a period of a hundredfiftyyears, using local
character types, costumes, and dialects, folk anecdotes, contemporary
events, topical humor, themes and motifs of classical, hellenistic, and
Byzantine origin, Greek legends, songs, and dances. It is modelled on a
fourteenth-century Turkish prototype, Karagoz, which itself finds its
roots in fool lore and the classical mime (the dominant form of entertain-
ment in the eastern empire from the fourth century B.C. to 1400 A.D.). The
Turkish performance was introduced into occupied Greece possibly
as early as the seventeenth century (the time of the consolidation of the
Turkish hold over Greece). It had certainly appeared by 1809, at which
time the traveller John Hobhouse records the earliest known date of
the Turkish performance in Greece.1
Christianized, sentimentalized, and Europeanized in the last half of
the nineteenth century, Karaghiozis is a product of the oral tradition
and is structured by stock scenes and a programmed introduction of a
series of stock characters. By adding suspensefully arranged historical
materials to the traditionally comic Turkish plays, performers of
Karaghiozis made it a vehicle of national expression and a medium for
the Greek people to explore their own identity. The history plays
represented more, in the long run, to the Karaghiozis player than merely
an opportunity to impose Greek innovations on the conventional

•Linda Suny Myrsiades is a coadjutant instructor at Widener College in Chester, Pa.

49
50 THEATRE SURVEY

Turkish core of his tradition. It represented a means of prevailing over

oppressive influences after the revolution of 1821 (which freed Greece
from Turkish rule only to submit it to interference by its western allies).
A folk form rooted in the life of the people, it provided a means of
defending national sovereignty against external influences and of
fighting class oppression by affirming popular rights and customs over
those of the upper classes of Greek society.
Deeply scarred by the outbreak of the revolution of 1821, Greece of
the post-war period was afflicted with widespread starvation, death, and
the general ruin of its countryside. Its borders were unstable, the country
torn by internal strife, and the common man merely a slave who had
changed masters from the rich Turkish to the rich Greek landlord. In
such a fluid political state, the entertainments of the people were at
first limited. The more oriental common folk participated in the com-
munal diversions of fairs and festivals and were entertained by the
performances of itinerants, mountebanks, and talented amateurs who
passed among the lower classes. The people at large had at their disposal
more than sufficient opportunities for entertainment, if one considers
both the number of festivals on the Greek religious calendar and the hard
life and lack of leisure time in the lower classes. Within the upper ranks,
an inclination for European fashions and diversions appeared, en-
couraged by the royal court, itself infused with Bavarians, Englishmen,
and Frenchmen. Elevated Greeks pandered to the needs of the foreign
circle around the king, who was himself a Bavarian and a Catholic.
That small group—and through it the king—dictated the shape of the
social life of a nation which, at base, had little, if nothing, in common
with European tastes.2
Dependent upon the influence of foreign powers and their own
Bavarian king for the continued existence of the state and compromised
by the lack of social structure in the country, the Greek people failed to
assert themselves. A split thus existed between upper and lower class
entertainments which was to persist until the latter part of the nineteenth
century. By then, one finds a recognition of the legitimacy of folk
culture, a revival of interest in performances of the people, and a sub-
sequent acceptance of popular taste in the professional theatre. By
then Greek theatre had begun to stabilize itself, and national feeling
began to take precedence over class interests. Later entertainments were
to reflect a unified culture less influenced by festive vestiges of the
Turkish occupation or foreign tastes and more a part of a truly national
cultural life. The development of that cultural life, tainted by bitter
feuding between nationalists and Europeanizers, between the lower and
NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS HISTORY PERFORMANCE 51

middle classes and the upper ranks, would include a war of the theatres
(Italian versus native Greek) and significant social and political changes,
culminating finally in a civil uprising and the removal of King Otto in
1862. By the 1880s, the nation was in a state of cultural renaissance, a
true beginning to culture of the modern period.
A beneficiary of this situation, the Karaghiozis history performance
was to hold a special place in the Greek cultural scene. Taking advantage
of the nature of the Turkish form as a presentation of the manners,
customs, folklore, and costumes of various national types, Karaghiozis
exploited the regional characteristics of its own dialect groups through
patriotic plays about local heroes whose deeds had already been widely
circulated in folk songs and tales. Capitalizing on recent heroism of
almost mythic proportions, the Karaghiozis history performance was to
achieve over the next century an unmatched acceptance among native
Greeks. It became the first widely-accepted post-revolutionary form of
entertainment to embody that cultural unity which nineteenth-century
entertainments were seeking. Because of the illiteracy and wide dis-
persion of the population, as well as the association of literary drama
with foreign influences and King Otto's royal court faction, live theatre
did not develop into a significant entertainment until late in the history
of the growing nation. Unlike the irregular live theatre, Karaghiozis
functioned as a centripetal force, drawing to itself varied streams of
national life and uniting those streams in an itinerant performance easily
accessible to all parts of the country.
Having received the impetus for its hellenization from the revolution
of 1821, the Karaghiozis performance was to return to subjects and
themes of that period for its justification. With the death of the Albanian
tyrant AH Pasha in Epirus in 1822 and the subsequent texts that develop-
ed around that figure, the Greek performance began its utilization of
historical materials. The popular Alexander the Great and Adiochos,
both Macedonian heroes, were among the first to find a home in the
shadow puppet theatre. Together with Greek heroes associated with Ali
Pasha (Katsandonis, Diakos, Botsares, and Androutsos) these con-
stituted the contribution of northern Greece to the performance. As the
performance began to filter south and west across Greece (from 1830 to
1860) new heroes were added, particularly those who participated in
the revolution in western Greece and the Peloponnesos (the Souliotes,
Kolokotrones, Karaiskakes).
At least by 1837, as indicated in the Athenian Theatis, 20 July 1837,
the Turkish performance was being generally referred to in Greek as
"Karaghiozis;" it was not here, however, considered any more than an
52 THEATRE SURVEY

Asiatic form of entertainment—marketplace humor "dipped in its base in

Arabic-Persian-Turkish feeling and life."3 Looked upon as typical of
the vulgar comedy of contemporary times, Karaghiozis is compared un-
favorably to the more substantial comedy of Aristophanes. Aristophanes
is not touted here, as he was in later periods, as the comic source of
the as-yet contemptible Karaghiozis performance.
The Athenian newspaper Tachypteros Pheme provides notices of a
performance in Naphlion in 1841 and one in Athens in 1852, testifying
that at least by those dates the still oriental Karaghiozis had reached
both the Peloponnesos and Attica, having thus passed through the
country from the northwest to the southeast.4 A note in an anonymous
work entitled E Stratiotike Zoe en Elladi (1870) confirms that in 1856
Karaghiozis performances were being presented almost every evening
in Kalamata, southwest Peloponnesos.5
The oriental aspect of the performance was still being debated in
cosmopolitan Athens in 1854 where moral elements objected to the
presence of schoolboys at the performance:
We are sorry to see the governance of the police department tolerating and pardoning the
Karaghiozis performance in this cafe, when at other times it was strictly prohibited. The
director seems ignorant of how many shameful and indecent acts were presented by the
puppet theatre in the lewd Asian theatres, and that this corruption spreads from them to
our whole community since it touches numerous different children, and many of our high
and grade school students keep frequenting these theatres every evening, without let-up.6

This newspaper's reference (Athena, 4 January 1854) to performances

in the plural indicates that, here, as in Kalamata, Karaghiozis was
becoming established on a daily basis, either through one player putting
on a number of performances or through developing competition
between performances of two or more players. Such competition,
suggesting the possibility of pandering to vulgar tastes to draw larger
audiences, could account for the now-apparent concern over young
boys in the audience.
Over the period of the development of the Karaghiozis performance,
one finds in such movements to de-vulgarize the form an element of
hysterical and uncritical moralizing. Hellenization is viewed as a means
of making a clean sweep of vestiges of the Turkish occupation, including
uncomfortable facts about the demoralization and debasement of the
Greek people itself during that period. All that fails to conform to this
artificially elevated new norm is attributed to low Turkish influence,
even when, as in the case of the phallophoric Karaghiozis,7 its roots can
be traced to a golden age in classical Greece. The process was thus not
so much hellenization as it was neo-hellenization, based in a bowdlerizing
NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS HISTORY PERFORMANCE 53

tradition of European neo-classical thought. Like the move to accept

kathareuousa (elevated Greek) over the popular demotic language, the
devulgarization campaign preferred an artificial instructional form to
one which was responsive to and uncritically reflective of natural
impulses in the population.
Hobhouse's notice in 1809 (a starting point in Greece for anti-Turkish
sentiments attributing the performance's sexuality to the indecency of
the Turkish nation itself) is co-extensive with later Greek responses. He
clearly takes the point of view of a European gentleman of class offended
by the phallic "equipage of the God of the Gardens," "the very dirty
coffee-house," the boy-audience's "loud and frequent bursts of laughter,"
and the "too horribly gross actions" of a performance whose language
he could not understand. Hobhouse juxtaposes the upper-class westerner
and the lower-class easterner and finds the latter wanting in exquisite
sensibility. Whether the performance presented its viewers with clever
language play, earthy wisdom, or folk-rooted humor we are not told, for
its virtues were locked behind a language barrier which our condescend-
ing visitor made no effort to penetrate.
During a period when popular culture was not well-received, the
rising Greek civil class fed on French and Italian culture. Newspaper
notices in 1879 in Chalkida (capital of Euvoia, an island off the east
cast of Attica) indicate, however, a surprising popular acceptance of
the Karaghiozis performance. In Euvoia, 24 October 1879, the journalist
Giorgios Philaretos spoke of the multitude of working class people who
crowded together each evening in a cafe in the Jewish quarter of the city.
Theatre, apparently, suffered in competition with the Karaghiozis
performance which by this time is being described as appropriately
"disarmed of its devilish thesis"8 (presumably a reference to the phallic
comedy and vulgarity of the Turkish performance). Christians, Jews,
and Ottomans are seen mixed together in an audience including children.
The language of the performance is presented as a barbaric mixture of
Turkish, Italian, and Greek. Incomplete and rough, the performance
itself was divided into prologue, "chamani" (meaning "Turkish bath")
or main body, and epilogue and is described as pursuing one main idea.
The author of the article emphasizes that the performance centered on
Karaghiozis, the one-hundred-handed one who is all things, and his
confederate, the opportunist Xatziavatis. Everyday customs and
Anatolian details distinguished the performance from the European
theatre which played in the city. Typically, for example, Turkish der-
vishes and hodjas (holy men) appeared, while two new Greek folk types,
Skordos (garlic) and Kremidos (onion), had been added.9
54 THEATRE SURVEY

The hellenized form was crystallized in the hands of Demetres

Sardounes, or Mimaros, of Patras who by 1894 had achieved a reputa-
tion which spread from one end of the Peloponnesos to the other.
Visiting Kalamata, he was blamed for the wild enthusiasm of the people
for the new form. While Karaghiozis had been playing in Kalamata since
at least 1856, its impact was not seriously felt until Mimaros' appearance
there in 1894. Indeed, one newspaper (Pharai, 14 July 1896)10 dated the
history of Karaghiozis in that city as merely three years in duration. Such
dating indicates that the hellenized form Mimaros brought there was
significantly different from any performance previously held. It is
described here as now featuring—in addition to Karaghiozis—Dionysios,
the Italianate Greek from the island of Zante, and Barba George, the
rustic shepherd of Roumeli, with his following of heroes.
The audiences Mimaros drew were also somewhat different from
those of earlier performances. Teachers and students, men and women,
the upper and the working classes all became frequent visitors, as the
account reports: "An entire Democracy you see! There, near the cloth
and oil Karaghiozis scene, social barriers retreat, social fences collapse,
different social strata, mixed-up texts, constituting a mass; a new
populism would envy it, a new socialism.""
Such audiences, attracted to this "Turkish screen,"12 were responsible,
according to contemporary accounts, for destroying a nascent theatre
movement in Kalamata; in this instance the Louloudaki troupe was
affected, while in 1900 it was the Petala Lorandos troupe which was
ruined.13 While theatre tickets were agreeably priced for even the poorest
pocket-book, one author complained: "Our public of the city, sardine-
like, crowd together with a view to hearing the loathsome Karaghiozis
and the nonsense of this dramatic pulchinello."14 Such was the taste
for Karaghiozis by 1896 that morning, afternoon, and evening popular
lines from the dialogues of Barba George and Karaghiozis were repeated
throughout the city, and the songs of Dionysios and Barba George were
on everyone's lips. The disease, as the newspaper Pharai described it,
was endemic. Neighborhood performances sprang up and children made
plans to become Karaghiozis players. Mimaros was called a king of
buffoonery and marketplace punning, whose infectious mimicry posed
a moral danger equal to the physical threat of encephalitis or meningitis.
Karaghiozis had merely to grab Dionysios' coattails or Barba George's
foustanella (the skirt of the Greek warrior) for the crowd to dissolve in
frantic laughter. The public of Kalamata, the newspaper lamented, had
lost its sense of great struggle.
NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS HISTORY PERFORMANCE 55

By the end of the century, the balance of popular opinion had shifted
decidedly in Karaghiozis' favor. Still associated with Turkish tastes as
late as 1896, it was by 1900 no longer seen as the enemy, and comparisons
with theatre troupes often ended with expressions of nostalgia for Kara-
ghiozis. Laic performances were received as respectable entertainments.
Bekos in Kalamata is referred to in Phouros, 7 November 19OO,15 as that
"wonderful Karaghiozis player." Davo's performances, having in-
troduced bicycles on the screen and accompanied by a musical band that
included a violin and a lute, are referred to as "a little in the European
style" and are favorably reviewed in Kalamata (Phos, 24 June 1901):
"Without exaggeration it is inimitable. And the audience is packed."16
The same newspaper admits that Karaghiozis, once thought worthless, is
now, with its sparkling and biting wit, much preferred.17
Having originated in a Turkish art, Karaghiozis was, during the
century after the revolution, to take advantage of the broad instincts of
the masses in which the effect of the prototypical Karagoz was located.
The Karaghiozis performance stood in strong contrast to western
entertainments (balls, tableaux, pageants, literary theatre, band concerts,
amateur musicales) carried into Greece by the influx of foreigners and
Greeks of the diaspora. It did not reflect the tastes of a foreign power or
the upper classes, but was a popular and familiar means of expressing
the newly liberated demotic spirit of the common people.18 The numerous
saints' holidays in Greece provided constant excuses for performances
throughout the land, and folk performances associated with such fes-
tivals influenced Greek Karaghiozis in its adoption of klephtic ballads,
demotic songs, folk tales, and Christian themes, as well as in the infusion
of the spirit of Greek laic cleverness into the Turkish presentation.19
Breaking down class distinctions in a performance in which "social
barriers retreat" and a new populism is proclaimed, Karaghiozis
provided an alternative to the vintage performances of local festivals,
on the one hand, and to western-oriented literary theatre, on the other.
Indeed, in the developed history performance (the most significant
addition the Greek performance made to the materials it inherited from
its Turkish progenitor), it represented more than either alternative; it
was a national dramatic folk art, a mirror of Greek attitudes and aspira-
tions, a reservoir of a past rooted in the Greek soil. Karaghiozis was the
poor man's response to social and psychological tyranny, its underlying
rationale appearing in the basic impulse of the history play: the political
conflict of Christian against Moslem, European against oriental, poor
against rich, enslaved against oppressor. True, the have-not comic
characters—out-ranked in every regard by their rich, privileged, Moslem,
56 THEATRE SURVEY

oriental oppressors—maintain among themselves, nevertheless, their

own set of social distinctions. But the arbitrary assertion of one regional
type or attribute, one characteristic dialect or personality trait over
another, is a matter of no real significance in the face of the larger
enslavement of the Greek people as a whole. Such distinctions, while
senseless in the world of real values, at the same time preserve sanity in a
realm which can only appear, to the underdog, an inverted order. There
thus exists a meaningful psychological and social base to the politics of
the Karaghiozis performance and the distinctions it maintains, whether
vertical (in terms of the status hierarchy of conqueror and conquered) or
horizontal (in terms of differences maintained within the oppressed
class itself).
It is in the history plays that the most extreme political contrasts are
exposed. The nineteenth-century revolutionary hero Katsandonis, for
example, is treated as a Christian warrior whose mission it is to rebuke
and unseat the godless pagan foreigner who has sullied the virgin soil
of Greece. He is likened to the martyred Christ in an apotheosis in which
he ascends to heaven accompanied by a chorus of angelic voices. A
similar polarization attends the Alexander the Great play, which serves
as an index of the alienation of Turkish culture in its revitalization of the
Greek's sense of his own national identity. Only the Christian hero
Alexander can successfully undertake the destruction of the monster
which ravages the land; this is a beast which no Turk has been able to
slay, for it is an aspect of the oppressor himself. Resurrecting the spirit of
classical heroism which in the past made Greece a great power, Alexander,
like Katsandonis, demonstrates the superiority of the Greek over his
enemy. Oriental duplicity and cunning are pitted in both instances
against the purity of European chivalry, and the desperation of the
oppressor against the certainty of he who revolts against enslavement.
The Turkish enslaver, having long since departed Greece, becomes a
surrogate for new enemies—allied influence over foreign and internal
affairs of the country since the revolution, German and Italian occupiers
during World War II, present American influence, and modern native
military dictatorships. The displacement is in itself highly ironic, for
European is thus pitted against European. With the conflict internalized,
friends become enemies, one's own chivalry, called into question, is set
against one's own barbarism.
The Karaghiozis performance is based, as we have seen, on the univer-
sal, if primitive, premise that the sustained national identity of a people
requires a recognition of its heroes and its enemies to define its national
character and life. The history hero's urge is to shed disorder throughout
NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS HISTORY PERFORMANCE 57

the old kingdom as a means of unsettling established power and re-

ordering society through the creation of a new kingdom, however
spurious. The level of political awareness is not very sophisticated; it
reflects folk thought and experience limited largely to the villages,
mountains, and islands of Greece and is less indicative of attitudes in the
heavily populated areas. It does, however, guide its unlettered audience
to the development of national attitudes; it functions as a catalyst to
more clearly defined values in its depiction of the oppression and conflict,
both external and internal, which Greeks have endured throughout their
modern history. An index to the thought of a people, the Karaghiozis
history performance documents the trials of the modern Greek, provides
relief from the social abuses to which he must submit, and supplies
meaning to a world of struggle and pain which of itself often has no
meaning at all.
With all that it accomplished in a positive sense, the history perform-
ance, it must be recognized, had a conditional effect on Greek culture, an
effect bounded on one side by its usefulness during periods of political
instability and on the other by its basically conservative impact. During
the difficult times of the German occupation of World War II and the
subsequent civil war in Greece, for example, the history performance was
to function both as a means of shoring up the sagging spirit of resistance
in a distraught people and as an expression of popular attitudes which
pandered to the basest judgements of its audience.
During this period Greek players performed wherever and whenever
possible the histories of the Greek revolution of 1821. Favorites of
audiences of the war years, the history plays proved cause for rejoicing
among spectators who identified with themes of liberty and resistance
and associated the enemy of the performance with contemporary
occupying forces. Audiences broke into the performance shouting
slogans and cheering the player. Performances such as Avraam's In the
Claws of the Gestapo, Georgos Charidemos' Marriage of Hitler and
Mussolini, Dino Theodoropoulos' Karaghiozis at Hitler's Place and
Karaghiozis at the Ovens of the Spirits supplemented those treating the
revolution and were themselves greeted with wild enthusiasm and
pronouncements of support.
While the history plays were well-received, the comic performances
were sometimes attacked as frivolous and inappropriate in the face of
tragedy. Giannes Moustaka's Karaghiozis Hostage in Chaidari and in
Germany,20 a play bridging the gap that separates comedy from tragedy,
typifies the play of this period. Capitalizing on the topicality of the
Karaghiozis performance, on its ability to make people recognize their
58 THEATRE SURVEY

own sad state and laugh at it, it skirts the edge of the comic divide.
Unrelievedly, almost immutably serious, it takes on a threatening tone
as politics steal the limelight from comedy, and the Karaghiozis audience
is forced to face the underlying despair of its own enslavement, an
enslavement which is lighted in this world of shadow and light only
fitfully by its comic aspects. Moustaka's play is a grim reminder of the
fundamental seriousness of the struggle between the enslaved and the
oppressor, the Greek and his foreign conquerors. The round-up of
entire neighborhoods, the terror of knocks on the door at night, the
internment of hostages in camps, and the hunger, fear, betrayal, and
injustice of the occupation are depicted with little of the farcical humor
associated with the Karaghiozis performance.
Initially the Karaghiozis player of the period, performing at great
personal risk, carried the message of resistance throughout the war-
ravaged countryside. The players suffered privation along with their
audience. Demetres Mimaros suspended comic performances which
exploited food themes (such plays as Karaghiozis Cook, Karaghiozis
Baker, and Karaghiozis Yogurt-Maker) because of the wide-spread
starvation in Greece. Having at one point no equipment at all with which
to perform, he simply sat on a rock and mimicked voices to entertain
the Greek troops.21 Kostas Manos, forbidden by the Italians to use
performance lights (a danger to public safety and a violation of the
black-out laws), eliminated the front screen and played his puppets on
wires like marionettes. Other typical experiences are reported by Petros
Dorizas22 who, caught in round-ups by the Germans and burned-out by
the Italians, was even suspected by the andartes (resistance fighters) in
his attempts to perform under the occupation. Cleared at a resistance
trial, Dorizas, hungry and dispossessed himself, gave benefits for
orphans, unfortunate families, and the andartes hospital.
Players who risked history performances were harassed, jailed, exiled
to camps, or sometimes executed. Kostas Manos speaks of being betray-
ed performing Katsandonis. Italian officers in the audience remained
oblivious to the play's propaganda value until informed by a quisling in
the audience. At a later performance of The Black Infidel, he was forced
at gunpoint to change plays or have his theatre burnt down around him.
Panagiotes Michopoulos was arrested three times for performances of
the forbidden history plays and was incarcerated by the Germans at the
detention camp in Chaidari.23 Soteres Spathares was taken in as well,
accused of depicting the national police force in his Photes Giankoulas
as the enemy. Spathares extricated himself by demonstrating to collab-
orationist Greek authorities that the fezes worn by his constables made
NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS HISTORY PERFORMANCE 59

them Turks and not Greeks at all.24 In such times, native Greeks had
themselves become aliens, as Dino Theodoropoulos confirms, having
been reviled and threatened near Patras by villagers frightened of
strangers and wary of possible sabotage.25
It becomes clear that, however risky they were, Karaghiozis history
performances during the occupation served a distinct popular need. They
demonstrated the refusal of the laic spirit to accede to tyranny; they
permitted the common Greek to relive the careless days of childhood
entertainment and to distract himself from his troubles; more impor-
tantly, they reaffirmed primal values which the Karaghiozian mirror
reflected. In an era which had no place for amusement, plays turned
bitter and activist for the moment. Rarely ahead of the spirit of the
times, rarely acting as a prod or initiator of an attitude, they formalized
vague feelings in the culture and brought them to a simple and pointed
focus. The performance was a picture of Karaghiozis fighting for his
country like the rest of Greece—all Greece, upper and lower class, right
and left on the political spectrum. Karaghiozis acted as a unifying force
in defense of freedom.
During the civil war that followed the occupation, when unity was no
longer taken for granted among Greeks, the players carried with them
the stigma of an activism less their own than that of a period. As a result,
they were not always well-received outside of leftist and populist strong-
holds. Some players, like Demetres Mollas, spent time in rightest
prison camps like Makroniso where performances were held for the
inmates. Mollas' The Engagement of Barba George (reviewed in the
prison newspapers Makronesiotike Phone, 7 January 1949, and Phone
tes Patridos, 16 January 1949) was not, however, accepted uncritically:
Let him charge after his figures, of Karaghiozis, to true Greeks, who are not subjugated to
just any kind of life and who are not just poor pseudo-heroes like the Karaghiozis we have
known up to now. Let soldier Mollas, Dem. raise the heroic Greek voice with the art which
he holds in his hands to give us a contemporary hero Karaghiozis who has an adversion to
slavery, who is not afraid of privations, and who, too, fights as all of Greece, with dignity.
In this way he will contribute more as he takes hold of the work of the batallion."
Recognizing in Mollas' work a basically conservative attitude char-
acteristic of his profession, the anonymous reviewer pressed for a use of
the form as a political weapon in the leftist struggle. But although
Karaghiozis players were themselves despised members of the working
class and many were sympathetic to the communist cause, they were
incapable, as a whole, of embracing a point of view that was more than a
cultural convention or of expanding their role beyond a focused com-
plaint to involved protest. Theirs was a tenuous position, as the death of
60 THEATRE SURVEY

at least one player, Manthos Psileas, at the hands of the resistance

evidences.27
In a period when the common man was a spectator to economic and
political crisis, when he had little influence or organization, he still
had his folk culture through which to experience his era and to express
his problems. Karaghiozis served this function—that of generalized
complaint rather than substantive protest—a function understood and
accepted by the common class. Karaghiozis had become a conservative
force which was far from inspiring the masses to outright rejection of an
unjust or even corrupt social situation (either Greek or foreign-imposed).
The kind of experience imposed by the Karaghiozis performance on its
audience ultimately leads, through its characteristic blurring of limits,
its disjointedness, and its inversions to an acceptance and identification
with the status quo as a refuge from chaos and disorder.28
The Karaghiozis performance by the 1940s was, in sum, very much a
people's art, an art which grew out of and identified with the masses,
even in the worst sense as a reflector of the anti-semitism, the oriental
backwardness, the anti-intellectualism, and the anti-Europeanism
typical of the lower classes. In Moustaka's Karaghiozis Hostage, for
example, the Cretan Manolis warns his friends to beware being eaten by
the cannibalistic Germans. He goes on to insist that the tribes of Israel2'
trapped Greece in this holocaust. An apocalyptic and a pacifist,
Manolis expresses his belief that the German presence in Greece is
the work of an angry God and that the Greeks must repent or be crushed.
The typical history play also reveals an ethos which, far from being
progressive, expresses a fascistic attitude toward the power of a national
state. Inaros' performance of Markos Botsares30 provides a represent-
ative example in which warriors are warned by their leader that their
lives belong to the aborning Greek state which alone can decide if they
live or die. Tied to an either/or patriotism of "freedom or death" (the
watchword of the revolution of 1821 as well as that of the World War
II resistance), the Karaghiozis performance merely captured the collec-
tive voice of the people's resistance. It could act neither as a conscience
nor as a servant of an advanced political ideology. Feeding on the
basically conservative feelings of the common class from which it
emerged, and without exerting any real pressure for change, Karaghiozis
reflected without provoking. It followed the people's revolt of the
resistance period when it finally came, but could not be considered an
"advance guard."
The Karaghiozis history performance, in conclusion, increasingly
came to express the national sentiments of a growing state. Greek
NATION AND CLASS IN THE KARAGHIOZIS HISTORY PERFORMANCE 61

elements began to have greater influence on the Turkish performance,

an influence coinciding in the early nineteenth century with stirrings
of freedom in northern Greece, the site of the first known Turkish
Karagoz performance in the country (1809). As southern and western
Greece were emancipated and performances began to appear there
(between 1809 and 1841), players took advantage of this essentially
Turkish art to raise the consciousness of the peasant population of the
country to its new political role. Post-war integration into the perform-
ance of historical subjects from the revolution revitalized the hellenism of the
newly liberated state. Subsequent additions of texts and Greek regional
types at the end of the nineteenth century (inspired by the emancipation
of southern Epirus and most of Thessaly in 1881) dissolved regional
differences which had previously divided the Greeks, creating by 1910
a new unified national sense in the performance. Karaghiozis became a
tool for cultural expression of a type previously unmatched in Greek
popular dramatic art, recalling in its political thin-ice skating the same
ancient source, Aristophanic comedy, to which, earlier in its history, it
had been unfavorably, if unfairly compared. During the German
occupation of the 1940s and the civil war that followed, its role was
again that of focusing the general malaise, of drawing lines between
friend and enemy. But it was a performance without a program, a
performance which prodded but never proposed. That broad instinct
out of which its Turkish prototype was formed, that new populism
which the newly hellenized form of the 1890s had become, was indeed
based in the masses. It was based in its class feeling, its national and
religious attitudes, but it was also based in its prejudices, its superstitions,
and its limited political understanding.

NOTES

'John C. Hobhouse, A Journey Through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in

Europe and Asia, to Constantinople During the Years 1809 and 1810 (Philadelphia, 1817),
I, 159-60.
2
William Mure, Journal of a Tour in Greece and the Ionian Islands, With Remarks on the
Recent History-Present State-and Classical Antiquities of Those Countries (London, 1842),
II, 216.
'See for full quote, N. I. Laskares, Istoria tou Neoellenikou Theatrou (Athens, 1938-1939),
I, 138-39.
4
See Linda Suny Myrsiades, "The Karaghiozis Performance in Nineteenth Century
Greece," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2 (1976), 83-97.
'Anonymous, E Stratiotike Zoe en Elladi (1870; rpt. Athens, 1970), p. 107.
62 THEATRE SURVEY

6
Kostas Bires, "O Karankiozes: Elleniko Laiko Theatro," Nea Estia, 5 (1952), 1069.
'The hunch-backed, bald-headed fool hero was a phallophoric figure in Turkish
Karagoz until the nineteenth century. The phallus was replaced in Greek Karaghiozis
sometime in the early part of the nineteenth century with a long arm articulated in several
places.
"Giorgios Philaretos, Euvoia, No. 198, 1 Nov. 1879, p. 4, as quoted in Spyros Kokkines,
Antikarankiozes (Athens, 1975), p. 7.
''Ibid., in Kokkines, pp. 6-8.
'"Geor-Gos, "Kalamatianes Eikones: Karankiozitis," Pharai, No. 56, 14 July 1896, in
Kokkines, p. 10.
"Ibid., in Kokkines, p. 12.
12
Ibid.
"Ibid., p. 13.
"Pharai, No. 53, 23 June 1896, p. 3, in Kokkines, p. 16, note 11; see also Pharai, No. 51,
9 June 1896, p. 2, in Kokkines, pp. 15-16, note 11.
"Phouros. No. 264, 7 Nov. 1900, p. 2, in Kokkines, p. 13.
"•Phos. No. 9, 24 June 1901, p. 1, in Kokkines, p. 14.
l7
See Phos. No. 85, 20 May 1901, p. 2; and Phos, No. 94, 17 June 1901, p. 2, in Kokkines,
p. 14.
18
Kostas Bires, "Ellenikos o Karankiozes," Theatro, No. 10 (July-Aug. 1963), 13-14;
Vasiles Rota, "O Karankiozes Berdes," Theatro, No. 10 (July-Aug. 1963), 31.
"Photos Polites, "O Karankiozes," in Ekloge apo to Ergo tou (Athens, 1938). II, pp. 147,
209; Rota, 31.
20
Giannes Moustaka, O Karankiozes Omeros sto Chaidari kai ste Germania (Athens,
[1945]). Moustaka's play is the only surviving printed text of an occupation performance.
One tape survives; Avraam, Sta Nichia tou Gestampo (In the Claws of the Gestapo),
recorded by Mario Rinovolucri in 1969, for the Parry Collection, Center for the Study of
Oral Literature, Widener Library, Harvard University.
21
"O Karankiozes ston Polemo kai sten Antistase," Epitheorese Technes, 22 (1965),
270-72.
n
Ibid.
"See Kostas Manos, autobiographical tape, Parry Collection, 1969; Veatrike Speliades,
"O Michopoulos Mila gia ton Techne tou," Epitheorese Technes, 22 (1965), 96.
24
Soteres Spathares, Apomnemoneumata (Athens, 1960), pp. 146-47.
25
Dino Theodoropoulos, autobiographical tape, Parry Collection, 1969.
26
Phone tes Patridos, 16 January 1949, as quoted by Thanases Photiades, "O Karankiozes
Makronesiotes," Ami, 10 January 1976, p. 29.
"Spathares, p. 117.
"For one view of this question see Loring M. Danforth, "Humour and Status Reversal
in Greek Shadow Theatre," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2 (1976), 99-111.
"Thessaloniki in northern Greece had a sizeable population of eastern Jews which the
Germans removed to camps for extermination.
30
Ianaros, Markos Botsares, Parry Collection, 1969.