Lord Byron and Laskarina Bouboulina PDF

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Lord Byron and Laskarina Bouboulina - the national hero

1. Born in 1788 in London as George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron was a well known poet of his time. At a young age he inherited the title and the estates of his uncle, his life was full of adventure and love affairs. Lord Byron was seen as the Hero of the Romantics and the Greeks, an enthusiast of modern and classical literature Andrea Koczela wrote in 2014 that Byron was well known her his personal life as for his poetry was embodied a Romantic hero. Lord byron was considered a hero of this time as his poems depicted various historical periods as he idolised Greece, which is also revealed as when he died he was buried in London but his heart was brought back to Greece to be buried. Burying his heart in great reveals that his heart belongs in Greece as it was a major part of his life, this is an example of what considers him a hero of his time. As he fought and sacrificed for the National Greek Independence and at the same time he combined the idea of Philhellenism and at the same time defended the universal values, emphasises his heroic qualities and the impact that he had on people. Byron was one of the famous english poets of his eminence, he added nothing to the language, discovered nothing in the sounds and developed nothing in the meaning of individual words (T.S.Eliot 1937). All his poems helped Greece in the case of its War of Independence and informed European Governments to empathise and to support the Greek case. For the Greeks he was a Hero as he became a national hero because he died there in his attempt to help with revolution in both materially, to transfer funds from Greeks abroad and ethically with his inspiring poetry stimulated awareness to the rest of Europeans to see positively the Greek case. He was and still is a major great national Greek Hero. Laskarina Bouboulina was a educated women in French and European history. She was more considered a hero than a heroin as she revealed heroic qualities throughout her life. As she built her own fleet, captured the fortress of Nafplion during the war as well as saved hundreds of Harem women, she started a revolution. Bouboulina was a naval admiral and a warrior and was seen as the only women admiral according to historians. She was not mythical but a real hero of her time. She was not a sacrifice according to a myth but a real heroine who she sacrificed however her personal material means and her sons in order to help her country to gain freedom and national independence. Laskarina Bouboulina supported the independence movement as she joined the Finlike Etaireia (Friendly society) which was a secret underground organisation that was preparing Greece for revolution against Ottoman rule who are the Turkish. She would have been one of the few women but she is not named in the historicals members list. She bought arms and ammunition at her own expense and brought them secretly to Spetses in her ships to fight, as she said “for the sake of my nation.” She saw Greece as her own and took full responsibility. Bouboulina bribed Turkish officials to ignore the ship’s size and it was later one of the largest warships in the hands of Greek partisans. She also organised her own arm troops, composed of men from Spetses. She used most of her fortune to provide food and ammunition for the sailors and soldiers under command. Byron and Bouboulina personally did major things for Greece as they were in war to help achieve their best and this revealed that both has heroic qualities revealing that they are both heros. 2. Lord Byron was viewed differently in both Greece and in England. In Greece he became the romantic champion of the Greeks as their War of independence erupted. He tapped into many existing networks of Philhellenes that was sprinkled across to Europe, Byron would carry on a massive correspondence with friends and the public at large. He would fight a long and lonely war in which his assets were freely given to people who the majority of Europe would not help. A committee of Philhellenes, the London Greek committee, became established in England shortly after the outbreak of the War for Greek Independence. Its members included Byron, Stanhope, Blaquiere and Bowring among many others. Founded in 1823, the committee was a able to offer

services related to the transformation of the Greeks into citizens of a free state. Its agents help progressive views and were committed to the ideal of freedom (Richard Clogg). Byron wrote a letter to Lady Howard which conveys,“My voyage to Greece will depend upon the Greek Committee partly, and partly on the instructions which some persons now in Greece on a private mission may be pleased to send me. I am a member, lately elected, of the said Committee; and my object in going up would be to do any little good in my power;—but as there are some pros and cons on the subject, with regard to how far the intervention of strangers may be advisable, I know no more than I tell you: but we shall probably hear something soon from England and Greece, which may be more decisive.” Byron wrote many letters to his public friends of Greece extolling the virtues of Greek Independence. His correspondence with members of the Greek committee and his personal friends would grow a base of support in England when the Government did not want to intervene. While he was on the ground of Greece, his agents and friends were able to establish public meetings and newspaper articles in England to aid him. The news of Byron’s death spread very quickly and there was a feeling of loss not only among the Greeks, but also the Philhellenes and the general public. While he may not have been the most reliable friends, his contributions to the Greek cause were substantial. As Greece was a major deal to Byron he viewed both Greece and England is a totally different way. As Greece was his second home where he helped all his friends and England is the home that he grew up in making it a meaningful place as he not only grew up there but also was born and raised and that is where his adventure to Greece all started. 3. The tremendous deeds of Laskarina Bouboulina suggests about the changes that may have taken place in the understanding of what constitutes a heroine between the ancient Greek era and Greece in the 19th century is that her actions were very masculine as men around her did what she said as she was seen as a captain. An eye witness to the battle of Nafplion said “On December 4th, 1821, as I remember, on board her own vessel, she alone gave orders for the boats to attack the fort. For this reason, she herself lands with her forces and stays until the fall of the fort on November 30, 1822. She was indeed lionhearted… Like nad angry Amazon, she shouts, ‘Are you women then, and not men? Forward!’”. On the 13th of March 1821 Bouboulina raised on the mask of Agamemnon her own Greek flag, based on the flag of the Emperor Komnenos dynasty of Byzantine Emperors. The people of Spetses revolted on 3rd of April 1821 and later joined forces with ships from other Greek islands. Bouboulina sailed with eight ships to the city of Nafion and began a naval blockade. Later she took part in the naval blockade and capture the city of Monemvasia and Pylos. Her son Yiannis Yiannoukas died in May 1821, in battle at Argos against superior number of Ottoman troops. During the revolution, when the opposing factions erupted into civil war in 1824 the Greek government arrested Bouboulina for her family connection with now-imprisoned Kolokotronis; the government also killed her son-inlaw. Eventually she was exiled back to Spetses. She had exhausted her fortune for the war of independence. Laskarina Bouboulina was killed in 1825 as the result of a family feud in Spetses. The daughter of a Koutsis family and Bouboulina son Georgios Yiannoukas had eloped. Seeking her, the girl's father Christodoulos Koutsis went to Bouboulina house with armed members of his family.Infuriated, Bouboulina confronted them from the balcony. After her argument with Christodoulos Koutsis, someone shot at her. She was hit in the forehead and killed instantly; the killer was not identified. After her death, Emperor Alexander I of Russia granted Bouboulina the honorary rank of Admiral of the Russian Navy, making her, until recently, the only woman in world naval history to hold this title. Her descendants sold the ship Agamemnon to the Greek state, which renamed it Spetsai. It was burned by Andreas Miaoulis along with the frigate Hellas and the corvette Hydra in the naval base of Poros during the next Greek civil war in 1831. Bouboulina actions throughout the Greek civil war all plays an important

role in what constitutes a heroine between the Ancient Greek era and Greece in the 19th century. 4. Lord Byron went to extraordinary lengths to keep the Greeks in the mindset of the English public. His celebrity status allowed for a well-known, if scandalous, personality to spread information about the dire conditions of the war to a larger, public sphere. “the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity and social labor.” (J. Habermas). With this understanding of how the public sphere works one can now see how it had ramifications for the Greek Independence. Unfortunately for the interest of the Philhellenes, Byron included, direct intervention in the Greek War for Independence was not initially forthcoming from the British Government. In the first years of the Greek revolution the governments of the major European powers had little sympathy for it (Brewer, 135) “The long-expected rising of the Greeks at last began in March 1821. At first it made little impression in Europe. Byron certainly had misgivings about the success of the war due to divisions among the Greeks. A letter written by Byron to Samuel Barff on 17 May 1823 clearly illustrates this lack of faith in the Greeks: “I must stand by the cause. When I say this, I am at the same time aware of the difficulties and dissensions and defects of the Greeks themselves but allowance must be made for them by all reasonable people.” (Letters and Journals of Lord Byron). Byron was a crucial figure because he was famous and outspoken. Christopher Woodhouse tells us “he was nevertheless inevitably a central figure in the drama that was to unfold. His personality was the only possible link between two alliances on which British support for Greece was ultimately to depend.” (Ibid, 71). The radical reformers in London, and the Romantics throughout Europe, would be sparked into action by Byron’s presence in Greece. Douglas Dakin explains that the newly formed London Greek Committee “had already come back to look upon him as their agent.” One reason Byron was so important to the Greeks and Philhellenes was because of his extensive reach into the public sphere. His poetry and other writings had a massive following throughout not only elites, but the lesser classes as well. This familiar and famous face would be a public opinion magnet for aiding the Greeks. All of Lord Byron’s non military deeds where understood as heroic and the understandings of what constitutes a hero between the ancient Greek era and Greece in the 19th century.

Secondary Source: Brewer, David. The Flame of Freedom. London: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2001. Douglas Dakin, Greek Struggle for Independence: 1821-1833, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 111. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 27. Koczela. A. (2014). Lord Byron, Hero of the Romantics and the Greeks. https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/lord-byron-hero-of-the-romantics-and-greeks Richard Clogg, The Struggle for Greek Independence: Essays to mark the 150th anniversary of the Greek War for Independence, (London: MacMillan Press, Ltd., 1973), 202.

Ancient Sources Anagyros Hatzi-Anargyrou, eyewitness to the battle of nafplio, writing in his history, Spetsioti, 1830. Translated by P. Demertzis-Bouboulis, 2001. Lord George Gordon Byron. Lord Byron to Lady Howard, 17 May 1823: in Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1830) 2 Vols, 745-746. T.S.Eliot 1937...