1. Discovery

The epic of Digenis Akritas was first published in 1875 by the Maisonneuve publishing house of Paris, edited by C. Sathas and E. Legrand under the title Les exploits de Digénis Akritas d’après le manuscrit unique de Trébizonde¹. The said manuscript had been discovered seven years ago: on the 21^st of May 1868 Savvas Ioannidis, professor in the Trebizond school “Frontistirion” and eminent scholar, “taking advantage of the holiday to collect songs and other statistical matter to complete his History and Statistics of Trebizond” ¹ had visited the monastery of Soumela, where one of the monks handed him a manuscript believing it contained a collection of religious chants. Ioannidis instantly recognized what he was given, but it is unclear whether he fully appreciated the significance of this discovery, for he simply deposited the manuscript in the library of the Trebizond Private School and mentioned its existence in his book History and Statistics of Trebizond and its surrounding area, published two years later in Constantinople. At any rate, when C. Sathas was informed by Periklis Triantaphyllidis of the existence of the epic and requested a copy of the manuscript from Ioannidis, the latter was happy to oblige. Sathas first used this copy² to prove the epic's startling resemblance to certain demotic songs, especially from Cyprus and the coasts of the Pontus, which he divided into two cycles, the acritic and the apelatic. In 1872 Sathas sent the epic to Legrand and they decided to jointly publish it. They then requested second copy from Ioannidis, this time photographed in order to avoid mistakes; unable to fulfil their request, he sent them the original manuscript, which the two scholars describe as follows: 90 pages in duodecimo shape (2,160 pages), in legible handwriting, apparently dating to the 16^th century.

2. General consequences

This first publication of the epic in Paris by the two eminent scholars of Modern Greek Literature (and not e.g. in Constantinople or Athens by Ioannidis himself), is indicative of the provincialism prevailing during that time in national literature, and defines the contours of the discussion surrounding the Akritas and the guiding lines set by the editors in their introduction: next to the known leitmotifs concerning the origin of modern Greeks (“against German scepticism”)³ and the monuments of the ancient language, we have the issue of the historicity of the hero Digenis combined with the new value attributed to the demotic songs mentioning him. These folk songs now acquire ‘titles of nobility’ and are elevated to a higher plane vis-à-vis the klephtika songs of Epirus and Mainland Greece which were until then appreciated the most by the Greek scholars: they are earlier, their reach is geographically more extensive, and, most importantly, they are not isolated but belong to circles.

Furthermore, Sathas and Legrand inaugurate a new approach to their interpretation, via their comparison to the acritic epic. Although both scholars seek in this manner to restore the lacunae in the Trebizond manuscript, which they believe to be the authentic form of the epic vis-à-vis the demotic ‘confusions’, they unintentionally create the basis for a shift in the study of Greek folklore, which Dawkins dates to the turn of the century; the influx of songs from Asia Minor and the Aegean islands creates, according to the English Hellenist,⁴ the proper conditions for the development of a viewpoint which departs from national-patriotic concerns, by posing the issue of folkloric interest per se.

3. Digenis in the Pontus

It is interesting to compare the impact of the publication of the manuscript on Greek folklore as compared to its impact on Pontic and Cappadocian folklore. Although the Akritas pointed to new directions in the study of Greek folklore by encouraging the shift from a philological-nationalistic interpretative approach to a more comprehensive approach to the subject of oral literature, in the case of the Pontus and Cappadocia we can not discern some similar shift towards this direction. Thus, in the Pontus the epic was interpreted mainly as a testimony to the national spirit, the bravery and the militancy of the Greek element against the invader; a complete testimony, sections of which still survive in the form of songs “still sung by very elderly villagers”.⁵Indicative of this reading is the interpretation of an acritic song by Perikles Triantaphyllidis:⁶ while the song clearly focuses on Death and the inability of the mortal –even of the most supernaturally gifted mortal– to escape his grasp, Triantaphyllides interprets it as a hymn to a fearless man, defender of freedom “during the first years of Turkish rule [...] to whom, because of his excellence, [tradition] accredited with interest what was done in various particular instances”. The influence of Akritas in the Pontus were thus mainly quantitative. According to A. Bryer’s observation,⁷ the acritic epic simply gave renewed impetus towards the collecting of material in the spirit which defined this scholarly activity from its inception: the deeply felt, pressing need to salvage the history of the ‘true’ culture not only of the Pontus, but of the nation as a whole. This impetus is mainly related with the study of demotic songs. The discovery of the epic was a milestone in this sense; the Akritas incited the recording of songs insofar as these were connected with the acritic epic. Through this process, the Pontic demotic songs acquired elevated prestige but were also warped, for they were deemed authentic –and therefore worthy of being recorded– only if they offered some evidence of ‘acriticity’, the main attribute being ‘manfulness’.

Furthermore, resting on the theory of the epic’s antecedence vis-à-vis the songs, the scholars supplemented the recorded songs which, according to them, were lacunose because of the ‘ignorance’ of the peasants who sung them. Thus, by crossing from orality into the written word in a way that severed their links to the real context in which they were created, reproduced and evolved, these songs were distorted and considered monuments of national importance as relics of the acritic epic.

4. Digenis in Cappadocia

When in 1887 S. Ioannidis finally decided to publish the epic as well in the printing press of N. G. Kephalides in Constantinople, he gave it the title Basileios Digenis the Cappadocian. In his introduction he gives us some hints as to why he elected to publish his Statistics first: for him Akritas is of interest “mostly to Cappadocia [...] as its last literary product, and because the Hero is its last defender, and the poet the last Cappadocian writer, and, further, because after the time of Akritas Cappadocia ceased to exist in the form that history describes it up to then”.⁸ Ioannidis’ stance, examined within the intellectual context of the period, appears reasonable, and one would expect the Cappadocian scholars to exhibit similar ardour for acritic songs.

When, however, in 1879 Rizos Eleutheriades published in Athens his Sinasos, A Study of its Mores and Customs, he employed questionable methods to prove that the acritic songs he published (being in all likelihood unaware of this special category) are related with the klephtika songs of Epirus, coming to the conclusion that in Sinasos “one can discover the most faithful images of the Homeric period”!⁹ Such approaches vis-à-vis the acritic songs are certainly not exclusive to Cappadocia, but they acquire these dimensions only in this region. While a dispute had erupted among acritologists concerning the historical antecedence of the songs or the epic, and the need to collect more songs for the filling in of the manuscript’s lacunae (and not of the songs, as in the case of the Pontus) became imperative, the Cappadocian scholars, not unlike the Greek Philological Association of Constantinople, continued to rehash the same theories. Thus, seven years after the epic’s publication, “in the report compiled by Papapodoulos-Kerameus the entire effort of the Association concerning the collection of living monuments is justified as a contribution towards the overturning of Fallmerayer’s anti-Greek theories. Nothing is said of the needs of acritology”.¹⁰

Interest in the Akritas takes long to become instilled into Cappadocian literature; when this interest does finally become evident, it is once more ‘imported’: it is incited by the treatise of N. Politis on the Song of the Dead Brother, published in 1885 in the Bulletin of the Historical and Ethnological Society. There, the folklorist seeks to counter the theory purporting the Slavic origins of this Greek song. At that time, the Greek Philological Association, through Papadopoulos-Kerameus, “manages to combine the contra-Fallmerayer tendencies of folklore study with acritic interests”¹¹ and to this end brings to the fore a version of the song taken from Karolidis’ collection, which the Association had not published, deeming the publishing of the work The dialect spoken in Cappadocia and the traces of the Ancient Cappadocian language preserved in it to be more important. This work of Karolidis also received an award from the Association’s committee, not so much for its theories, which did not enjoy wide support, but for the volume of linguistic material contained therein; the collection of songs was finally sent to P. De Lagarde in Gottingen, who published it in 1886.

Of course, the scholars who studied the oral tradition of Cappadocia did eventually, even if belatedly, develop acritological interests. This, however, occured in the late 19^th century, as in the cases of Levidis and Pachtikos (who was not Cappadocian), following the spread and entrenchment of Greek education and the establishment of Cappadocia as “the motherland of Greek poetry”.