On This Day 201 Years Ago: How Seven-Year-Old Chrysoula Survived Ibrahim Pasha’s Reign of Terror to Become Foremother to Generations of Karitsiotes

Dimitris Katsambis

great-great-grandson of Chrysoula Tsempeli

&

Stelios Hagias

fifth-generation descendant of Chrysoula Tsempeli

 

“On 11 September 1825, seven-year-old Chrysoula Tsempeli escaped captivity, found her way home through a night of terror, and lived to become the foremother of generations of Karitsiotes.”

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Set against perhaps the most terrifying day in Karitsa’s history, the story of Chrysoula Tsempeli is a historical legend in which documented events and local folklore are intertwined. It draws upon surviving records as well as the village’s rich oral tradition, passed down through generations from parents and grandparents to children and grandchildren around the hearth on long winter nights. In old Karitsa, belief in the unseen and the supernatural was woven into everyday life, shaping how villagers understood nature, darkness, fate and survival.

At the heart of the story is a little village girl who survived Ibrahim Pasha’s onslaught, escaped a life of slavery, and found her way home. Her survival became part of the living memory of Karitsa, carried forward through generations.

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On the morning of 11 September 1825, exactly 201 years ago today, the first light came softly over the mountains of Karitsa.

It touched the high ridges of Parnon, slipped down the folds of Tsouka and settled upon the stone houses clustered around the village spring and threshing ring. Smoke rose from the chimneys as women stirred the embers of their hearths. Somewhere, a wooden door creaked open, a mule stamped impatiently in its stable and the bells of sheep and goats could already be heard on the paths above the village.

Seven-year-old Chrysoula Tsempeli knew those sounds as well as she knew her mother’s voice.

She knew the call of every neighbour, the barking of every dog and the places where the paths turned slippery after rain. She knew the terraces where villagers sowed wheat and barley, the little vineyards behind dry stone walls and the scattered fig and olive trees that helped sustain each household.

Life in Karitsa was hard, but it followed a familiar order. Bread was kneaded in wooden troughs and baked in outdoor ovens. Water from the village spring was carried home in clay vessels. Wool was washed, spun and woven into blankets and heavy clothing. Nothing was wasted. Children learned early to feed the hens, gather kindling, watch the animals and carry whatever their small hands could manage.

That morning, however, the familiar order was shattered.

The first gunshots came from the mountain opposite Agios Giannis.

At first, they sounded like stones striking one another. Then came another volley, sharper and closer, followed by shouting that rolled across the ravines.

Men abandoned their ploughs and tools. Shepherds hurried their flocks into gullies. Mothers called for their children. From the direction later known as Mnimata, smoke from gunfire rose above the trees as Greek fighters associated in surviving accounts with Theodoros Kolokotronis resisted the advancing forces of Ibrahim Pasha.

Some of the men of Karitsa ran to help them. One would never return alive. His fellow villagers would later carry his body home on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from a ladder.

“Chrysoula!”

Her mother, Eirini, seized her by the wrist.

There was no time to gather food or clothing. Chrysoula’s father, Georgakis, urged them towards the forest of Tsouka, where other villagers were already seeking shelter beneath the thick trees. With them was Georgakis’s sister, Chrysoula’s aunt, whose name has been lost to time.

From within the forest, the villagers watched helplessly as Ibrahim Pasha’s soldiers entered Karitsa. Smoke rose from the houses. Flames climbed across roofs and through wooden doors. Before long, the fire had also taken hold among the trees of Tsouka.

People ran in every direction.

Families became separated in the smoke. Children cried out for their mothers. Animals, terrified by the gunfire and flames, broke loose and scattered through the undergrowth.

It was there, amid the confusion, that the Tsempelis family fell into enemy hands.

The surviving records name Georgakis, Eirini and Georgakis’s sister among those taken captive. Village memory adds little Chrysoula to their number.

Her hands were bound with rope. Some later said that she was placed upon a horse. Others remembered that she was dragged behind it until the rope burned her wrists and the stones cut her feet. However it happened, the child was being carried away from Karitsa with her parents and aunt, towards a fate that had already swallowed many women and children from the villages of Laconia.

The captives were to be taken first towards Messinia. From there, many would be loaded onto ships and sold into slavery far across the sea.

Chrysoula could not have understood all this. She understood only that the mountains were moving farther away and that she might never again see her village.

As the horse descended a steep place known as Stis Trokles, Chrysoula felt the rope around her hands loosen.

She pulled gently.

The rope gave a little more.

She looked towards her mother. Whether Eirini saw what her daughter was attempting, no story tells us. Perhaps she gave the child a final glance. Perhaps, without daring to move her lips, she told her to run.

Chrysoula freed one hand and then the other. At the edge of a steep enclosure, she threw herself from the horse. She struck the ground, rolled among the stones and scrambled through a gap in the wall.

Behind her, the soldiers shouted.

“Έπα κάτω! Έπα κάτω!”

“Come back! Come back!”

But Chrysoula ran.

She slid into a ravine, climbed the opposite bank and pulled herself onto a narrow patch of level ground. Thorns scratched her legs. Stones cut her bare feet. Still she ran, following the path towards Mari and then down towards Kato Mari.

By the time the shouting faded, the child was alone.

The daylight was weakening when she reached the watermills. Reeds grew thickly beside the streams, and the rushing water turned the wheels that moved the great millstones. Villagers from the surrounding settlements brought their wheat there to be ground into flour.

Here the surviving record falls silent and the old village tale takes over.

One mill stood deserted. According to the story handed down through Chrysoula’s descendants, the seven-year-old found grain there and managed to set the mill in motion. She opened the water channel and listened as the wheel began to turn and the heavy stone groaned into life.

Then something stepped from the shadows.

It was neither man nor animal. It was a satanas, a creature of the night.

“What is your name?” it asked.

Chrysoula’s heart hammered, but she did not reveal her true name.

“They call me Panogomi,” she answered.

The creature tilted its head.

“How many loads do you have?”

“One on one side, one on the other side and one on top.”

The creature disappeared into the darkness, muttering the strange name to itself.

Chrysoula finished grinding the wheat. She filled the sacks and loaded them on either side of a mule. Then she climbed between them and pulled a large chirami over herself. Beneath the heavy woven covering, the small child became part of the load.

The mule began the journey towards Karitsa.

Night had fallen when the creatures returned. There were many of them now. They surrounded the mule, striking its sides and searching among the sacks.

“Here is one side,” one cried.

“And here is the other side.”

“And here is the panogomi. But where is she?”

Again and again, they struck the mule.

“Where is she? Where is she?”

Chrysoula lay perfectly still beneath the chirami. The mule climbed the stony paths, descended into ravines and climbed again. Its hooves slipped, recovered and continued through the darkness.

All night the creatures followed.

Near dawn, as they approached a water well overlooking Karitsa, a white rooster crowed from somewhere near the village.

The creatures began to dance.

“Dance, let us dance! A white rooster is crowing!”

They danced wildly in the paling darkness.

Then another sound rose from the village.

A black rooster had begun to crow.

The creatures stopped.

“A black rooster! Let us go! Let us go!”

At once, they vanished into the ravine.

The mule continued alone, carrying the child and the freshly ground flour towards Karitsa.

When Chrysoula finally emerged from beneath the covering, the first morning light was spreading across the fields. Smoke still hung above the village. Houses had been damaged or burned. The paths were filled with frightened people searching for relatives, neighbours and animals.

Chrysoula had found her way home, but her mother and aunt never did.

The villagers would remember Eirini as i Sklavomeni, the Enslaved One. What became of her and her sister-in-law was never discovered.

Chrysoula’s father also escaped captivity, although no surviving account explains how or when he returned to Karitsa. In time, he remarried and had seven more children. He died in 1861.

Chrysoula remained in the village where she had been born and where, at only seven years of age, she had survived Ibrahim Pasha’s onslaught. She grew into a woman among the same mountains, fields and ravines that had witnessed her escape.

She married Nikolaos Anastasiou Malavazos, known throughout Karitsa as Konto-Nikolas. Together they raised four daughters: Milia, Adamantia, Panagiota and Sousana.

The seasons continued their ancient turning. Wheat was sown and harvested. Grapes ripened upon the vines. Olives were gathered and taken to the press. Children once again filled the courtyards and village paths.

Chrysoula lived long enough to see her daughters marry and establish families of their own. She saw grandchildren gather around the hearth and great-grandchildren run along the same paths she had once crossed with bleeding feet.

In her later years, no one called her simply Chrysoula. To the people of Karitsa, she had become Gria Mou-Mou.

The meaning of Mou-Mou has been lost. Perhaps it belonged only to her, born from some family expression, a childish voice or a long-forgotten village incident. The name nevertheless endured when so many others disappeared.

Gria Mou-Mou died in 1913 at the age of ninety-five.

The little girl whom Ibrahim Pasha’s soldiers had tried to carry away left behind not silence, but generations of Karitsiotes. The Family Trees of Southern Parnon attribute to her more than one hundred and fifty descendants across seven generations, with the family continuing to grow and spreading far beyond Karitsa.

Her story survived with them.

Part of it rests in written records. Part was carried from mouth to mouth beside village hearths, across threshing rings and beneath the shade of trees. History preserved the names of the captives. Family memory preserved the frightened child, the loosened rope, the steep ravine, the loaded mule and the black rooster whose crowing drove the darkness away.

Two hundred and one years later, Gria Mou-Mou remains far more than a name upon a family tree.

She is the child who escaped.

The woman who endured.

The foremother whose descendants carried her blood and memory through seven generations.

And the little girl who, after the darkest night of her life, found the path home.

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Authors' note

The central historical framework of this story is drawn from lists of captives preserved in the General State Archives, genealogical records of Family Trees of Southern Parnon and later property records. The capture and escape of seven-year-old Chrysoula, together with her encounter at the watermill, belong to the oral tradition of Karitsa. The story was recorded by Stelios Hagias from Katerina Rozaklis, who had heard it from Diamanto Tountas, a granddaughter of Chrysoula. Descriptions of the landscape, domestic life and dialogue have been imaginatively reconstructed to give life to the recorded events without presenting invention as established fact.

Chrysoula married Nikolaos Anastasiou Malavazos, known as Konto-Nikolas, and they had four daughters:

·         Milia (1849–1929), who married Panagiotis Ioanni Antonis

·         Adamantia (1861–1889), who married Dimitrios Ioanni Kontogiannis and died in childbirth

·         Panagiota (1863–1918), who married first Panagiotis Spyrou Chagias and later Christos Ioanni Malavazos

·         Sousana (1864–1919), who married Georgios Ioanni Tsolomitis

 

A Final Word

As mentioned above, the two authors, Dimitris Katsambis and Stelios Hagias, are third- and fifth-generation descendants of Chrysoula Tsempeli, respectively. So why not explore your own family roots and discover how you, too, might be related to Chrysoula, the foremother of so many Karitsiotes? The answer may well be waiting in the Family Trees of Southern Parnon.