Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/235

 through the medium of Albanian, two or three generations must have elapsed after the Ottoman occupation of Chios in 1566, and the seventeenth century must have well begun, before the Greeks of that island even began to adopt the new word and the new superstition involved in it. Yet the form of the word familiar to Leo Allatius since the beginning of that century, when he lived as a boy in Chios, was not karakondjolos or anything like it, but callicantzaros; while the belief that children born in the octave of Christmas became Callicantzari was of such antiquity in Chios that a custom founded upon it had already come, as I have shown, to be misinterpreted. Indeed, as the same writer tells us, the Callicantzari and their haunts and habits were so familiar to the people of Chios that two proverbs of the island referred to them. One, which was addressed to persons always appearing in the same clothes—[Greek: balle tipote kainourio apanô sou dia tous kallikantzarous], 'put on something new because of the Callicantzari'—is more than a little obscure; it would seem to imply that the clothes which were being worn would hardly be worth the while even of the mischief-loving Callicantzari to tear; but in any case the very existence of an obscure proverb is evidence that the Callicantzaros and all his ways had long been a matter of common knowledge. The second saying—[Greek: ekatebês apo ta tripotamata], 'You have come down from the Three Streams,' or in another version, [Greek: den pas 'sta tripotamata]; 'Why not go to the Three Streams?'—was addressed to mad persons, because, as Allatius explains, 'the Three Streams' was a wild wooded place in Chios reputed to be the haunt of Callicantzari. Historically then the theory that the people of Chios borrowed from the Turks the name and the conception of the Callicantzari is untenable.

Another piece of historical evidence against Schmidt's theory is that the Callicantzaros of the present day appears to be identical with the 'baboutzicarios' whereof Michael Psellus discoursed in the eleventh century. He himself indeed, with his usual passion for explaining away popular superstitions, affirms that 'baboutzi-*.]