Subject: κλέφτης klepht[is] / palikari bandit

Culture: Roumeli Greek

Setting: banditry, Roumelia 18th-19thc

Event Photos

* Gerolymatos 2002 p111

"The klephts favored another curious element of ritual as well. Skirmishes were frequently preceded by exchanges of verbal abuse. Slanders against the honor of the opponents' womenfolk, couched in the appropriate sexual terms, appear to have been a favorite of the brigands. Boasts and name-calling were also quite popular. Occasionally, these exchanges were accompanied by obscene gestures. References exist to klephts who had been wounded in the buttocks while 'mooning' their opponents."

* Elgood 2009 p313 n43

"The Greeks, like the Scots, used to indicate their contempt for their defeated enemies by baring their naked bottoms at them. The idea of a dasypygal man being braver than a smooth one is expressed in the word malliarokolos ( Μαλλιαρóκωλos, 'hairy-arsed') to denote 'brave'."

Primary Sources

* Sugar 1977 p255-256

"Among those who lived under Ottoman rule not only the literary tradition of their long history was lost, but literacy declined catastrophically to the point that most parish clergymen were practically illiterates. The literary activity of the Greek on the Turkish-dominated mainland practically disappeared for two centuries. What was left was folk literature expressing itself first in the demotic songs and later in the Klephtika, ballads sung to celebrate the deeds of the klephts."

* Wheatcroft 1983 p38

"In 1810, writing at Symrna [SIC] on the coast of Asia Minor, George Gordon, Lord Byron, epitomized in two lines the land of Greece which he had recently seen for the first time. The reality of Greece had shaken his hitherto exclusively literary notion of the country:

Faire Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

"Byron responded to Greece with a paradox, as well he might, for nineteenth-century Greece embodied only the faintest trace of its classical heritage. The population was mixed with strong Turkish, Slav and Albanian elements, while the country was a backwater with all the more enterprising spirits in Constantinople, in the service of the Ottoman empire, in trade or in self-exile in Europe or Russia. The national industry was banditry. Som of the bandits had been recruited by the Turkish rulers of Greece as a militia. Others merely preyed on travellers, and engaged in a desultory warfare with other bandit groups. The militia were known as armatoli, the bandits as kleftes; to the outsider they were indistinguishable."

Secondary Sources

Field Notes