“So our pa­pers say”: al­lu­sions of orac­u­lar prophecy in con­tem­po­rary Cre­tan his­tor­i­cal folk­songs (1960s & 1970s)

Folk­songs have a long tra­di­tion in Crete and are still widely cher­ished as they are of­ten used to record pop­u­lar feel­ings, col­lec­tive at­ti­tudes, facets of life or facts of his­tory. This pa­per seeks to high­light the pres­ence of prophecy in con­tem­po­rary Cre­tan his­tor­i­cal folk­songs. To this end, it fo­cuses on Cre­tan songs about the Cyprus is­sue, par­tic­u­larly those pro­duced dur­ing and af­ter the 1974 Turk­ish in­va­sion of Cyprus. As it turns out, a size­able por­tion thereof con­tains al­lu­sions to an age-old Greek prophetic tra­di­tion, orig­i­nally of anti-Is­lamic, later of anti-Ot­toman and lately of anti-Turk­ish char­ac­ter. The re­spec­tive lit­er­a­ture, here co­de­named “our pa­pers”, orig­i­nally aimed at pro­vid­ing hope and en­cour­age­ment to Or­tho­dox Chris­tians dur­ing crit­i­cal times of threat and anx­i­ety, as­sur­ing them that any poor state of com­mu­nal af­fairs would soon be re­versed. Since the 16th-cen­tury Veneto-Ot­toman wars, the fate of Crete had be­come the ob­ject of prophetic spec­u­la­tion, and prog­nos­ti­ca­tions poured out as long as the East­ern ques­tion un­folded. In this light, it is no sur­prise that orac­u­lar prophecy has an es­tab­lished pres­ence in the body of tra­di­tional Cre­tan folk­songs. This is the first con­clu­sion at which this pa­per ar­rives. The sec­ond con­clu­sion is that the 1974 Turk­ish in­va­sion of Cyprus led prophetic al­lu­sions to reap­pear afresh in Cre­tan folk­songs’ con­tem­po­rary forms. As the Turk­ish troops stormed Cyprus, the Cre­tan folk writ­ers and singers looked back in anger, re­called el­e­ments of orac­u­lar myth and in­cor­po­rated them into their song­writ­ing as late as the 1970s.