It’s the first time I’ve heard of this folk song.
The historian Efthymiou mentioned it on one of her programmes.
The content is roughly as follows.
A white eagle on the summit of Mount Smolikas held a man’s head (that of the community leader) in its talons and spoke to it, accusing it of injustices in taxation.
It took 100 from the rich, 200 from the poor, and 500 from the widow.
Has anyone come across it anywhere?
I don’t know this particular one, but it’s definitely a more recent (perhaps even 21st-century) adaptation of earlier lyrics—what we call “neo-demotic” …
Eftymiou was referring to the structure of local government under Ottoman rule and its entanglement with the Turkish administration.
Ah, I see. So things are different: under Ottoman rule, the sultan would decide how much each region was to give him and instruct the local and regional “interested parties” (the “proestoi”, as we called them a little earlier) to go and collect it by whatever means they knew, then hand over what he had demanded. He examined nothing else. Those with understanding, let them understand.
Here is the “episode”.
the song in question is discussed at 13:20.
It is found in various versions. For example:
Dimitsanis, Stemnitsis, Karitainis of Gortynia.
(From the unpublished collections of Char. Meletopoulos [A] and K. Kasimatis [B, C].)
An eagle was sitting on a rooted stone,
and held a soldier’s head in its talons.
Sometimes it pecked at it, sometimes it said to it:
“Wretched, ill-fated head,
head, what evil did you do, that the birds tore you apart?
Did you not haggle over taxes, did you not overcharge?
–I neither haggled over taxes nor overcharged,
but I was a village elder and apportioned the debts.
I charged the rich one hundred and the poor two hundred,
a widow with two or three orphans I charged five hundred,
for she had a vineyard, a fine one, and I wanted to take it from her.
And when the widow heard it, she was deeply grieved;
she went to her vineyard and greeted it again and again;
–My broad-leaved, short-pruned vineyard,
for so long you had me as your mistress, now I shall sell you;
a heavy debt has been laid upon me, they want to take you away.
–Do not sell me, my little mistress, and do not bargain over me;
just bring young men to dig me and old men to prune me,
and three unmarried girls to strip off my shoots,
make sixty-two casks and sixty-five loads,
and with my grapes at the top I shall pay off your debt.”
………………………………………………………………………….
Karyes in the province of Kavakli, in Eastern Rumelia.
(Louloudopoulou, unpublished collection, p. 98, no. 99.)
“Wretched, ill-fated head, what are the crows pecking you for?
–Once I was a young notable and ruled the country,
I charged the rich one hundred, the poor two hundred,
the widow, the poor widow, I charged three hundred,
for the widow has a fine vineyard and wants to sell it,
so that a rich man may take it.”
–He would take his little shoes and go alone to the vineyard,
and only the vineyard would he speak to, only the vineyard would speak to him.
“My broad-leaved, newly planted vineyard,
do you remember when I planted you, with laughter and songs?
and now how shall I sell you, with tears and pain,
so that a rich man may take you?
They have imposed a heavy tax, an impost and a levy.”
Then the vineyard spoke and comforted him.
“Do not sell me, my little mistress, and do not bargain over me;
just take young men and have them dig me, old men to prune me,
take young children too, to strip my shoots,
and set your barrels out in rows of forty,
and you will pay your tax and your heavy impost.”
…………………………………………………………..
Epirus.
(Aravantinos, p. 297, no. 495.)
A golden eagle was sitting high upon a stone,
and held a human head in its talons;
sometimes it rolled it about, sometimes it said to it:
“Head, what evil did you do, that I hold you in my talons?
–Back in those old days, in that bygone time,
the country had made me its notable, the country had made me its chief,
and I would levy the dues and the heavy tax register,
I charged the rich ten, the widows fifteen,
and the poor wretches thirty-five;
and the poor folk raised a cry, they cried out because of me,
and the Pasha ordered them to cut off my head.”
(Journal LAOGRAPHIA, 1909)
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Well done, Anthimos!
How little we’d know without you!
The most left-wing traditional song I was fortunate enough to discover in 2025!
From the first variant:
You weighed it short! “Short” means anything that weighs less than it should.
I’d translate this as “I was selling dear”, but the ending seems a little odd to me. Perhaps the transcriber made a mistake.
There may be a mistake here too. It would logically be “I was throwing”, and in any case that is what the other variants say.
No, surely they didn’t make exactly the same mistake here too? Perhaps there really is a dialect verb “rino” which directly or indirectly means “to charge, to tax”.
From here on, it also exists as a standalone song, with a plot entirely unrelated to the posthumous punishment of the unjust tax collector.
From the second:
In today’s terminology, Eastern Rumelia, which roughly corresponds to today’s northern Thrace in Bulgaria.
This “tan man” is odd and metrically irregular. From the context, we understand it as “when I was”. Perhaps it was “onta ’man”. The familiar line “When I was young and youthful” is also Thracian (from an unrelated song that happens to have the same opening line), so perhaps it was “anta” here too. “Iman” = “I was” is, of course, a well-known form in northern Greek dialects.
I imagine it should say “I threw four hundred at her”
This oddly detached half-line, which is repeated later as well, gives us a faint indication of the song’s melody too. Presumably, the second half-line would have been repeated in all the other verses.
“Sbouriazo” must be the same as “sbourizo”, meaning “I speak” in some Macedonian dialects.
???
From the third:
There’s the “anta” we mentioned earlier. “When I threw.”
This third variant seems the most complete of them all. Certainly more so than the second, which has quite a few metrical errors, but also in comparison with the first, which has no such errors: here we do not see even a hint of an incorrect word. It is also the only one of the three that reaches a conclusion within the same narrative thread, without continuing with the story of the vine. One therefore assumes that in the other two we probably have a conflation of two originally independent and complete songs—the tax collector’s song and the vine song—rather than the opposite: that there was one song which subsequently split into two.
One of the countless variants of “The Vine” (on its own) that remain alive in today’s local repertoires.
None of the three variants gives any geographical indication. Either simply on a stone, or not even that. The variant mentioning Smolikas that the speaker has in mind presumably comes from somewhere in or around Smolikas, in the Epirus–Grevena area.
[quote=“Νίκος Πολίτης, post:10, topic:48336, username:nikos_politis”]
It isn’t all that rare for the people themselves to have made the mistake! Apparently, the folk lyricist meant to say “mēdé akrivopoúla(g)e”, but the final e was swallowed by the metre… Such cases do occur, sporadically and, admittedly, rarely.
“érrina, ríno”:
Yes, such a verb probably did exist, but it has been lost today.
“Tán man niós”
Most certainly “Ondá ’man niós”!
??? ???
Vasilis Michaelides uses it a lot, for example in 9 July:
When the hidden winds began to blow
We also find the form “ρήνω” in the folk song “Tou Konstantara” — and it does not mean “to charge/tax”
Let me put gunpowder in the censer instead of incense
so that it reminds me of war, of my youth long past
(N. Politis, Selections from the Songs of the Greek People, 1925: p. 73)
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So, I am right to note above
Indeed, then, such a verb did exist, but it no longer does.
I’m not a philologist, but I remembered
our well-known ecclesiastical hymn.
The Myrrh-Bearing Women came very early and sprinkled the tomb with myrrh.
sprinkle [réno] [Ρ7](javascript:rIU(‘dl’, ‘Ρ7’, true)).1a : throw or scatter flowers, drops of water, etc. over someone, usually during a ceremony, an official reception, etc.; (cf. spray): The guests sprinkled the newlyweds with rose petals. (expression) he did it and sprinkled it, ironically, of a failure.
[ancient Greek rhainō]
If in one version they use rínoun for putting gunpowder into the censer (putting, placing, pouring, etc.) and in the other they use rínoun for incurring debts, it is probably a local variant of «ríchnō» (which, after all, is used in the other variants too).
Or, quite the opposite. Based on the principle of lectio difficilior, there may indeed be a verb rínō, unknown not only to us but also to someone who heard it in the tax collector’s song and mistook it for the more common ríchnō.
(Lectio difficilior, literally “the more difficult reading”: when, in the same text, you find an unusual, rare or dialectal word in one version that is replaced by a more common one in another version, the rarer one is likely to be the original.)
But I think that even today, the expressions “I issue a fine” and “they gave me a penalty” are commonly used, in the sense of “impose”.
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Of course. But that does not rule out the independent existence of a verb rēnō (ρήνω), unknown and concealed in some hidden corner of a local dialect (how many people knew sbouriazō (σμπουριάζω)? I happened to learn it only recently), which need not necessarily mean “to throw” in the literal sense, but might coincide with ríchno (ρίχνω) in some secondary uses.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Folk songs are oral works, and are therefore fluid in form by their very nature. We will always find them being sung one way here and another way there; indeed, if we find them identical in two instances, that is suspicious!
However, “fluid by their very nature” does not mean that any change whatsoever is equally likely to occur, or that everything is entirely haphazard. There are mechanisms at work. I examine one such mechanism here, prompted by a line that appears both as «τ’ Αντρόνικου τ’ ακράνη του» and as «τ’ Αντρόνικου τ’ αήττητου»:
Why do I say this? To show that, if the verb rēnō (ρήνω) does indeed exist—as the lectio difficilior suggests—then there is a specific explanation for the presence of the verb ríchno (ρίχνω) in the other variant. For the time being, we are not in a position to confirm either that such a verb exists or that it does not; all we can say is that we do not know it.
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What Pepe sets out is both lovely and interesting. And given the oral tradition surrounding the songs of that era, and the lack of any digital record of the lyrics — thank goodness for the internet and its lyrics — it was very easy for each singer to alter the words as they saw fit, or as they heard them according to their local dialect.
We should also bear in mind all the mondegreens we used to sing — and still sing — until we happen to see the lyrics written down somewhere!
A prime example is “οδό Γραφημώνος”, which puzzled many people until we realised who this “Γραφήμων” was!
I only recently realised that it was “τα γυριστά της τα ματοτσίνορα” and not “να γίνει στάση στα ματοτσίνορα!”
(By chance, I’m looking at it again)
“ακριβοπούλα (γ) α” is implied. So yes, it’s probably a transcription error; the transcriber knew “ακριβοπουλούσα” but not “ακριβοπούλα(γ)α”. Many local dialects drop the medial consonant.
it is obviously alluding to
“‘When I was young and a wealthy man, and ruled the country’”
(when I was young and … )