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Abstract Art including: Abstract Art Paintings, Abstract Art Prints, drawings, wall sculptures.>The Christeas tower by the coast
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Vacation Rental SpecialOnly 600 euros for 8 days,from June 9 to June 17, 2012
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The Christeas tower by the coast below Platsa Celebi describes the village in 1670, as being particularly rich due to a thriving trade with, particularly Venice, but also with Genoa, Spain and France. In April 1795 John Morritt landed at the, "little creek of Platsa shut in by the rock of Pephnos, near which was a tower, the residence of the Capitano Christeia…" Morritt talked at length to Christeas whom he described as around 45 years old and having no less than three bullett wounds in the chest, two more on his face and many slighter wounds on his legs and arms. The reason for this was Christeas' habit of fighting with other neighbouring kapetani. Morritt reports that just recently Christeas had attacked a neighbour with not only 80 of his male warriors but with an accompanying force of 30 women led by his sister who was wounded in the ensuing fracas. Another factor in the genesis of Christeas' formidable body-map of entry wounds was undoubtedly his piratical career. He boasted to Morritt that he had recently seized a French merchantman and then followed a strange story which points up the different cultural mores of the Maniate chieftain, his French captive and not forgetting the Englishman who narrated the story. Christeas offered to land the French captain ashore and give back one thing from the prize. Christeas was presuming that the Frenchman would choose his crew or at least part of the cargo he had been entrusted with. To his surprise (and disgust) the Frenchman chose a single item. An enamelled snuff box which had a lock of a lady's hair on the lid and inside what Morritt describes as, "a very indecent design'. I have been assured by someone who has inspected a collection that the inner lids of Gallic snuff boxes of the time were often 'erotically and indeed contortionally interesting'. Christea was not impressed as Morritt, in a very English manner, points out, "…though a pirate [he] was enraged at [the Frenchman's] unmanly and heartless levity, retracted his offer and left the captain with only a shirt and pair of trowsers in the boat to shift himself. He set the crew on shore, and had brought his prize to Platsa where he shewed us the snuff-box with great satisfaction." One wonders what prurient interest or schadenfreudlich satisfaction Morritt gained from perusing the inside of the French captain's aide memoir d'amour and how baffled was the Frenchman by his captor's inchoate rage at his choosing a simple memento d'amore? Morritt reported further of the problems of love in a distant land. He himself spares no adjective to enthuse over the beauty of the Maniate women but after watching an exuberent display of dancing and post Easter feasting told of a violent if cautionary tale. When congratulating Kapetani Christeas on the nimble fingerdness of his lyra player he heard that Christeas had, until the year before, had a German fiddler in his employ. "… a most accomplished musician… who played not only Greek dances, but many Italian and German songs; but that in 1794 his fiddler, brought up in the laxer morals of western Europe, and undmindful of the rigid principles of the Maina, had so offended by his proposals the indignant chastity of a pretty woman in the neighborhoood, that she shot him dead on the spot with a pistol." Leake reported in 1805 that a Khristodhulo Khristea of Leftro governed Platsa and the district of Zygos which contained over 1000 houses. The Christeas family name still exists in Platsa. For a map of the whole area from Platsa to Langada click here. |
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Abstract Art including: Abstract Art Paintings, Prints, drawings, wall sculptures.>The Christeas tower by the coast Copyright
© 2000-2012 Abstract Art by Abstract Art Artist Christeas
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