Ioannis Makriyannis

Ioannis Makriyannis,                                                 ΙΩΑΝΝΗΣ ΜΑΚΡΥΓΙΑΝΝΗΣ

Born 1797                                                                        Died 1864

 Grave in Section One, Number 25

Born Ioannis Triantaphyllou, Ioannis Makriyannis or “Long John” began his career as a Greek merchant, became a successful military officer during the War of Independence and then an outspoken politician.  He is perhaps best remembered today for his compelling memoirs written over a period of thirty years.

His Life

Makriyannis was born poor in Avoriti, a small village between Mounts Oiti and Parnassus.  It was an isolated area that the Ottomans could never quite wrest from klephtic bands. His early years were spent in Levadia. He then went to Arta where he became a successful merchant by 1819. The way he tells it, his journey from rags to prosperity takes on all of the characteristics of the ‘tall tale’ genre, with a few Greek twists.

 He joined the Filiki Etairia  in 1820  and came out fighting in 1821 when the revolution began. He fought in Epirus and Roumeli, and was with Odysseos Androutsos when the Greeks captured the Acropolis in 1822. He fought along with other Roumeliotes in the Peloponnese and by 1824 had become a general. His marriage to an Athenian girl brought him to Athens where he organized the defense of the acropolis against Ibrahim Pasha. He soldiered on elsewhere until the Battle of Navarino  virtually ended the struggle in 1827.

At first, Makriyannis worked with Greece’s new Governor Capodistrias but he became disenchanted with his autocratic ways and, after refusing to offer what he considered to be a demeaning oath of loyalty, he was stripped of his command in 1831. 

 The Regency and King Othon

Makriyannis hailed the arrival of Greece’s King Othon in 1833 with words of praise and hope: Today the fatherland is reborn, that for so long was lost and extinguished…for our King has come, that we begot with the power of God. But he did not like the Germans who ruled for the young king from 1832 to 1835. 

He especially disliked the government’s disregard of the ‘irregular’ war veterans whom they seemed to see as something of an embarrassment in the ‘new’ Greece. They chose not to incorporate them into the regular army or to offer them pensions, thus leaving many of them destitute. Then there was the matter of a constitution. Makriyannis had been elected to the Athens city council in 1833 and used this platform to ceaselessly call on King Otto for a constitution as did many others. In an attempt to silence him, the regency had him placed under house arrest for short time.

You have to love Makriyannis. His heart was always in the right place!  During this period he commissioned 25 engravings from the painter and veteran of the War of Independence, Panaghiotis Zographos, and used the profits from their sale for the benefit of war veterans.(1)

In 1843, King Othon was forced to create a constitution and Makriyannis was again a key player, - in the formation of the new cabinet and as Athens’ representative to the National Constitutional Assembly. On that happy note, he retired.

The Denoument

His story should have ended there, but it did not. Enemies accused him of treason in 1852. He was tried, sentenced to death, put in prison for eighteen months, stripped of his military rank, and then pardoned in 1854!  This situation is yet another example of the tortured alliances, misunderstandings and perceived betrayals that characterize the Greek efforts to create a modern state.(2)

 Makriyannis lived long enough to see King Othon dethroned and was a representative at yet another National Constitutional Conference in 1864.That must have been gratifying but we can only guess. He had stopped writing his memoirs in 1850.  His old rank of general was restored to him in 1864, a week before his death.

His Memoires: We are lucky that Ioannis Makriyannis decided to tell his story and to tell it in the vigorous demotic language of his time, the language so disliked by many educated Greeks.  He has been hailed by Greece’s Nobel Prize winning poet George Seferis as one of the greatest masters of modern Greek prose. 

His style is very much like a Zographos painting: naif, heroic, vibrant, immediate, and sincere.

 argolikivivliothiki.gr

To understand the Greek War of Independence in all of its contradictions and complexities, you could do worse than starting with his wonderful memoirs. They have been translated into English. 

His grave is in Section One, Number 25

His bust there looks very much like his picture in the National History Museum. Ioannis Makriyannis was a handsome man.

                                                                             Wikipedia

Footnotes

(1)  Some of these paintings still exist in the National Historical Museum of Athens on Stadiou Street, as does the elegant portrait of Makriyannis at the beginning of the text.

(2)  Being arrested and sentenced to death was so common for Greek freedom fighters that it almost seems like a rite of passage! The life of Ioannis Makriyannis reminds us of the vast gulf between Greeks born is places like Roumeli and the Peloponnese, men who were born poor and had to somehow survive and thrive under much more oppressive Ottoman leadership than those more fortunate Greeks from prosperous parts of the Ottoman world  (such as Constantinople, Smyrna, Chios, Syros)  who had some measure of freedom, access to wealth and education, time to intellectualize and, above all, access to the Enlightenment. Both fought for Greece’s freedom but they existed in a state of uncomfortable co-existence during the revolution and after, and have somehow collectively  insinuated themselves into the modern Greek DNA as two strands that never quite seem to merge into a homogeneous identity.  Veremis, in Greece the Modern Sequel attempts to define this distinction as one between autochthonous Greeks – those born within the realm of the free state, and heterochthonous Greeks –those born elsewhere: that works up to a point…