*Beware strong language that may insult some readers
*This article has no cause of insulting any nationality or religion
Cursing and fighting: the bad language of G. Karaiskakis
Georgios Karaiskakis, oil painting on canvas
"Come damned Turks, come Jews, sent by the Gypsies; come to hear the curses, fuck your faith and your Mohammed. What do you think cuckolds? You are not ashamed to ask "us" for a treaty with a piece of shit - Sultan Mahmutin - fuck him and your vizier and Silichtar Boda the whore ".
With these insults, George Karaiskakis responded in 1823 to the envoy of the Turkish military leader of Trikala, Silichtar Boda, when he called on him in Agrafa for a conversation about the attitude of the Armatoli (mercenaries) in the area against the campaigns of the Turks.
The opinion of those who met Georgios Karaiskakis and fought with him leaves no room for doubt as to all the merits which distinguished him. Kioutachis himself had recognized his value and even loved the battles between them, from Messolonghi (1825) to the siege of the Acropolis (1827), as personal duels.
The greatest, along with Theodoros Kolokotronis, warlord of 1821 was a man "indefatigable in battle" (Christoforos Perraivos), "generous and beneficent" (Georgios Gazis), "bold and good general" (Spyromilios), "fearless" (Ioannis Kolettis), with a "very clever mind" (Panagiotis Soutsos) and "enduring bravery" (Andre Louis Gosse, Swiss philhellenic physician). As Nikolaos Kasomoulis put it in one word, he was "Leader".
Even this hagiographic portrait has a flaw. All the above-mentioned and especially his official biographers, Georgios Gazis and Dimitrios Ainian, but also Nikolaos Kasomoulis, who experienced him at first hand and dedicates extensive extracts to him in his "Memoirs", could not overlook another side of his character: his great bad language. Karaiskakis probably stood out from the other leaders by the constant use of insults in his speech.
The insults he used, as quoted by various sources, show a personality that repeatedly used every bad word in creative compositions. According to the professor of Modern Hellenism, Mrs. Maria Efthimiou, this reached the level of delirium and the use of his insults "was so continuous and intense that his competitors had to accept his fault as a bad habit, in order to coexist and fight together". In short, this man was a true poet of insult.
This, of course, is not something we consider unacceptable. Most of the Greeks who participated in the Revolution were everyday people, the vast majority of whom were illiterate and obviously ignorant of the rules of verbal kindness. Even the educated did not always have their language and pen under control, especially in the cases of political passions. Kanellos Deligiannis called Kolokotronis a "damned villager" and Palaion Patron Germanos called Papaflessas "disgraceful". From what we can now know and surmise, the linguistic habits have little to do with what was eventually perpetuated in the memorial speech.
Christoforos Perraivos, one of the most educated campaigners, contrasts the virtues of Karaiskakis with, among other things, two fundamental flaws: "obscene with exaggerations" and "bitter abuser of men, often of friends". This observation has a critical mood that allows us to understand much about the cultural "legitimacy" of the war. The first conclusion is that swearing is an integral part of the complex heritage of 1821.
The medieval model of the knight-warrior, as unconsciously formed in the imagination of the descendants of the war generation and extending to the present, breaks down comically before words and phrases like "cock" or "the Turk fucked our horn" recorded by warrior-writers like Kasomoulis and Makrygiannis. They recognized that quoting abusive words served the noble purposes of authentic writing. Ultimately, the linguistic filth of Karaiskakis is among the most authentic vestiges of a vanished world that reaches us altered by the idealistic paintings with models of political correctness.
If we were to classify Karaiskakis simply as a "blasphemer", we would do him an injustice. Freedom characterized all his movements. When he was at the court of Ali Pasha he ostentatiously showed his genitals to Ali's son Mukhtar Pasha by deliberately dancing in front of him in such a way that the clothes did not cover them, while it is known that at the battle of Kompoti in Arta (July 1821) he climbed a rock and, in order to irritate the Turks, showed his buttocks until a "Gekas" shot at him and wounded him. As he had very strong nerves, he knew how to relieve tension in difficult times.
His frequent jokes were always the best way to relax his comrades in battle, who always relied on him. His self-sarcasm knew no bounds and often revolved around the subject of his illness and the fever that kept him constantly in bed. One day, when his illness had returned (he was suffering from tuberculosis), he received a visit from a new doctor who wanted to examine him. To test him, Karaiskakis hid one of his men under the covers. The doctor seized the fellow's hand instead of his and said, "General, your strength has greatly diminished." After shaking the covers and the doctor was astonished to find that he had been examining someone else's hand, he replied to the doctor: "My cock has dropped, not my strength!".
All the scholars of the "Eagle of Roumeli", from Ainiana and Gazi to the moderns Giannis Vlachogiannis and Dimitrios Fotiadis, explain his freedom of speech by the conditions of his birth and education. It seems that the use of insults was not only the unconscious way of communicating with his environment but a mechanism of defense against the difficult conditions of physical and social survival. Cursing and insulting made him feel strong, as if "all the suppressed powers of his soul were transformed into creation."
As the offspring of an illicit love affair between a captain-thief and a nun, he experienced severe social malevolence as a child, which shaped him and instilled in him a mood of hostility and anger toward the outside world. To overcome his anger at those who mocked him and the idiots who used him as a counterexample for their children, he found an outlet in delusional speech with insults. A modern biographer writes that "the conscience of his sinful mother will make him a sarcasm of all moral and social conventionality. It will deprive him of the respect which every man has for those who brought him into being, and thus free him from all moral restraint "(Nikos Anastasopoulos, Georgios Karaiskakis, Athens 2004, p. 26).
About his mother, who was also known "for her boldness and her language" (D. Ainian), Karaiskakis used to say disparagingly: "My mother had had forty thousand cocks until she gave birth to me". Finally, the famous name "son of the nun" was used not so much by others as by himself to deliberately demean himself before his interlocutors (bigotry was certainly not one of his traits), with the direct rejection of the family model extending to the family he founded. Even with his wife, Golfo, he paid no attention to his language.
After the outbreak of the Revolution, his wife had settled in Kalamos and later in the Ionian Islands while he was either persecuted or at war. When he visited her, some of the young men of his team bothered her spiritual daughters, and she protested to him, so her husband, to calm her down (?), said to her: "Don't worry, I have a dick for you too. Do not make me sick!" When he later learned that his wife had cheated on him, he decided to divorce her and marry the beautiful daughter of the landowner of Agrafa, Tsolakoglou, whose estate he had dismantled as a thief. But he soon lost interest, and, after throwing her picture at the feet of his soldiers, exclaimed, "He who takes her first shall keep her for himself! Let the whore fuck herself!" These utterances are not hatred of women, but contempt for any kind of normal family life or social contract associated with the conscious modesty of the peasant family of the time.
The labels "bastard" and "gypsy," which accompanied him throughout his life and which he adopted as his own, made him regard himself as a single unit, which partly explains why he chose sides late in the Revolution. Being the first armatolos (mercenary) of Agrafa to stubbornly survive, he took advantage (asked his "dick", as Kasomoulis confirms) of the treaties or armed conflicts he was engaged in simultaneously with Greeks and Turks, who equally persecuted him as a traitor! Until 1824, his retrogressions and constant conflicts with the Executive, the Mavrokordatos family, the Zaimis family, the Souliotes, the Messolongites, Giannakis Ragos, the Peloponnesians, etc., created much tension and even more curses.
In 1823/24, when the revolutionary government openly opposed him and the other captains of the Western Mainland persecuted him as a traitor, his (written) reply to the reconciliation proposal of Nikolaos Stournaris (the later leader of the Messolongites, who was killed in the Exodus of Messolongi) was his most famous quotes: "Brave brother Captain-Nikola, I have seen what you write to me. My dick also has tublekia, it also has trumpets. Whichever of the two I want, I will use" (The" tublekia "were Turkish instruments of the cavalry, as opposed to the trumpets used by the Greeks). Every time Karaiskakis accepted proposals for peace or cooperation - either from Turks or Greeks - he replied that he would ask his "dick" and he would answer accordingly. The word "dick" seems to be the one he used most often, and we could cite several reasons for this. The first is that he knew, of course, that the vulgar word for the male organ was much more shocking than the others. Secondly, this request was perfectly legitimate for use among members of a primitively masculine society, while there is an additional reason that by repeating it he was in a sense exorcizing his sexual disability.
Although Karaiskakis's attitude towards the revolution could be described as strange in many ways, the Turkish government made him sick. As an old thief, he was able to become extremely violent against the Turks, as he was in Katsantonis' crew from a young age, calling them "Jews". The pyramid of heads after the battle of Arachova (November 1826), and the chains with ears which he sent to Messolonghi to encourage the besieged, were proof of a ruthless war of extermination - like the whole revolution - in which insults and courses were sure. Whenever Karaiskakis decided to fight openly against the Turks, cursing necessarily accompanied his shots.
After the "cold" reception of the envoy of Silichtar Boda, which we quoted in the introduction, he told him several other things, this time as a determined Greek revolutionary who maintained the permanent status of the desecrator of everything: "Cuckolds! Those whom you captured were yours, they were Turks, they were Jews, for Ragias (the Greeks that remained slaves by their will) means that. Here are the Greeks! They fuck you, now and always! " His response to Mahmut Pasha, commander of Shkodra (Southern Albania), who marched from Ohrid to central Greece in 1823 with 20,000 elites to wipe out the fighters of Agrafa and all of Western Greece, and then descended into troubled Messolonghi. Before taking up arms, Pasha sent a letter to the leaders of Aspropotamos, urging them to surrender to avoid bloodshed. Karaiskakis shared his letter with the other captains and made sure to send a monumentally laconic reply himself that completely contradicted the conservative style of the Muslim's letter: "You tell me to worship you. I also asked my dick itself, and it answered me that I should not worship you, and if you come over me, I will fight immediately ".
The most interesting thing about this is that the intensity and extent of his insults did not fluctuate or have to be adjusted to suit the audience. Among his comrades, of course, he had even less reason to set limits to his speech, while he had argued with his comrades countless times, manifesting another similar "flaw" of his: his intense irritability.
In the famous campaign of Central Greece to cut the supply lines of Kioutachis on the front of Attica, and the great successes against the Turks at Distomo, Fontana, and Arachova, he had engaged in heated discussions with the fearless Souliotes leaders who followed him(Giorgos Tzavellas, Lambros Veikos) and with Captain Andritsos Safakas, who challenged his leadership. Unfortunately, his remarks are not known, although it is known that he was not careful about his words, especially in front of the Souliotes, whom he had openly called "traitors", "thieves" and "pigs" at the beginning of the Revolution (letter to Kitsos Tzavellas, 20 April 1823). About the chief Dimitris Kontogiannis he had said Notis Botsaris that "if he was a woman, he would not be satisfied with 80 thousand times an hour".
Giannis Gouras was a "shit Vlach". Giannakis Ragos , his constant rival in Agrafa's army and a confidant of Mavrokordatos, was "ass Ragos". To the soldiers and chiefs who were move by little more money, he gave a relatively derogatory title as "greedy". He was unrestrainedly obscene to all the "politicians" of the Revolution whom he lumped together with the "Kalamarades"(writers and people of literature) as totally useless and harmful to Greece. He also had a total dislike that set him apart from any kind of power structure and governance. This aversion became even worse when he questioned one's abilities. Vlachogiannis states that he did not hesitate to insult the "Prime Minister" Koundouriotis for the campaign against Ibrahim that ended in the bitter defeat of the Greeks at Kremmidi in 1825: "But you have as much sense as I have a seed in my balls".
He called Kountouriotis a "Hood" from his typical naval water hat. In the fourth year of the war, inaction in the face of mortal danger to Ibrahim, the incompetence of military leaders such as the Navy Kyriakos Skourtis, which led to painful defeats, and the corruption of politicians, which shaped an intolerable situation in Nafplio, made him express his rage on Kasomoulis: "I fucked the bum Mavrokordatos when he came to Niokastro; both him and Koundouriotis, who chose to make him important. I assure you, Kasomoulis, that the President wept when I left. But because he had that devil near him, I told him: "I am not staying" - and I left. He didn't give me the boys' salaries. I fucked him and his Hood, and came here, where is the nation that once saved me from the pleasures of these cuckolds, both of them. I go to our homeland, to Roumeli, and there it will be obvious who will work. I don't live here to be ruled by the bum and Hood under the leadership of Gemitzis (Skourtis)".
The bum, as evident from the above excerpt, was Alexandros Mavrokordatos. The man was deeply abhorrent to him and any mention of his name enraged him, jokingly calling him "four-eyed" (because he wore glasses). He also shared these thoughts with the chiefs of the Western Mainland (whom he called "brothers"), in the intervals of quarrels between them. Kasomoulis saves a conversation that ends in one of Karaiskakis' usual outbursts against Alexandros Mavrokordatos, whom he accuses in front of his followers:
-Karaiskakis: Captains, you are campaigning; I do not ask you where you must campaign.
-Captains: And we don't know, they said, we go where the government appoints us.
-Karaiskakis: What government, captain-Noti (Notis Botsaris)? Reiz-efent's bum, the four-eyed one? Who made him a government? I and the rest know him not! Or did they gather ten fools and sign him for their own interests? Here are those who signed it: First you, that all you want is to have fun with the trumpet, Skaltsas, who is nothing but a fool, Makris, the macro-neck, who only knows to shake his head, Georgios Tziogas, who does not know what he is doing, and my brother Stornaris, the liar? My dick didn't sign it and your campaign! You campaign for Arta. Go and I'll carry your rifle. I've fucked your horns off, and I will fuck you off again! "
His head-on clash with the representatives of law and order and political legitimacy was constant and almost cost him more than his military "discharge" and the loss of the Agrafa fleet. In his famous trial in Messolonghi on April 1, 1824, the "Gypsy" was condemned, apart from the "final betrayal" (he was said to have made peace with Omer Vryoni ), for all his bad habits, and of course for his way of talking that was intolerable to them. Those who were in the church-court of Panagia in Aetoliko that day were fortunate enough to hear an amusing verse narrative between the accused Karaiskakis and a judge, the elderly Galanis Megapanou:
"Karaiskakis: If you take my words seriously, I will not escape even if I had a hundred lives.
Galanis Megapanou: We know you keep saying various things, but why do you say them?
Karaiskakis: I have a bad habit, Mr Panos.
Megapanou: Um, why do you have a bad habit when being in your fifties?
Karaiskakis: I can't break it, Mr. Panos. You are also eighty years old, but you do not give up the bad habit of fucking - and you do not listen to me ". At that moment the entire audience and jury burst out laughing and the trial was stopped due to uncontrolled laughter. Karaiskakis won the audience with his jokes and immediacy and finally he was dismissed amid the laudatory comments of the residents of Messolonghi, who said to each other that "there has never been such a person with a big dick!".
A completely fearless and solitary warrior, Karaiskakis was a man who valued only verbal agreements and manly honor. In the years of betrayal, dishonesty, and instability of behavior, the code of honor seemed to be the only solid point of reference for Armatoloi in search of allies and friends. He had one such bond with Kitsos Tzavellas, to whom he had even procured his daughter for a wife. But when he fell in love with a woman from Mesolonghi, he broke his word, and dissolved the union of the two families, his prestige dwindled in the eyes of Karaiskakis. So when Tzavellas once sent him a letter asking for his help, sealed with the sign of the cross, Karaiskakis replied in a tone of raw traditional way, not hesitating to fill the letter with his familiar words: "The man who denies the Cross for pussy should not have put the sign of the Cross in his letter and in his name to ask help from what he has rejected."
The Greeks cursed and fought. They fought and they cursed. When they fired, they cursed. When they attacked, they cursed. When they were wounded, they cursed. If they were captured, they cursed. When they disagreed, they insulted each other. None of those who have yet studied Karaiskakis' life, work, and character consider his bad speech a "defect". Instead, it seems like an added charming element to an overall fascinating personality. Politically unorthodox, pure human being, independent and always sarcastic, he retained a revolutionary authenticity. His comparison with Kolokotronis is between the self-sarcastic "bum" and the respected "old man". Although they were of equal importance personalities, some similarities of their characters are evident in their different traits. Karaiskakis' personality is archetypal, for he embodies the spirit of Armatolos(mercenary) in all his earthly grandeur. His choices reveal many things about him.
The common code of communication he found with fighters like Kolokotronis, Androutsos, Makrygiannis reveals a commonality: All of them found themselves at some point in front of the self-proclaimed "upper class" of revolutionary Greece, an element that automatically counts them among its most authentic representatives of 1821. A socially neglected son of a nun, who successively became bodyguard of Katsantonis, bodyguard of Ali-Pasha, Armatolos in Agrafa, general, general commander, awakener of the Revolution in Roumeli, victor of Kioutachis in 18 battles, certainly claims the laurels of the popular hero. Unfortunately, his value was not perceived until after his death. When he was killed, he was already a recognized leader and had thousands of loyal and devoted men, and he was ready to end the cause of the Revolution in Central Greece once and for all by ending the siege of the Acropolis in a way that only he knew how. His honesty and bravery in running to the front and taking care of his men like a good soldier cost him dearly. According to Perraivos, he died excitedly in a mortuary in Salamis, bidding farewell to his comrades with warm, patriotic words about the fight to which he had devoted himself wholeheartedly, motivating them with jokes and tears in his eyes to "love your brothers and support the fatherland" (Makrigiannis).
And this would be the blameless, polite impression which would mark the name "Georgios Karaiskakis" in any school jubilee, purged of his old, "vulgar" self, if Kasomoulis did not consider it appropriate to save the last words which the captain shouted to the Turks, as he fell wounded in the groin, on that bitter Thursday of the 22nd April 1827, the day before his name-day, on horseback near a makeshift bastion somewhere in what is now Neo Faliro: "You can suck my dick now!".
