MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER, THE AMORGOS FAIRY
MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER, THE AMORGOS FAIRY
Description
Who was the legendary fairy of Amorgos, who was magically caught and then married to the pirate, Yiorgos Kaoutsos? In one of the traditional legends of this Cycladic island, her great-grandson tells us her story.
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Credits
Field Reporter
- Euthymia Papagiannopoulou
Interviewee
- Antwnhs Roussos
Podcast Producer
- Magia Filippopoulou
Sound Designer
- Alex Retsis
Sound Editor
- Spyros Lymperopoulos
Video Director
- Stefanos Mpertakhs
My grandfather's grandfather, his mother’s father, was Giorgos Kaoustos, the pirate. This Giorgos Kaoustos gave up piracy because he fell in love. He fell in love in Lagadas, got married and he and his wife had four children, three boys and a girl. At the girl's birth, his wife died. And he was left a widower with four children.
Less than a year after his wife’s death, as he was coming back from Megali Vlychada in Lagada, passing through the place right under Tholos, he found in his field a woman, unconscious, all dressed in white.
This woman was a bride, and she had been traveling from Agios Kyrikos in Ikaria, with her entire kin, her family, to Kalymnos, to get married. The fishing boats sank, and she was the only survivor. She had been cast ashore in Megali Vlychada and she had managed to go up the mountain when her strength gave out in my great grandfather’s field.
He picked her up and took her back home and nursed her back to health. But Kaoustos couldn’t come out and say that it hasn’t even been a year since my wife’s death, and I have another woman in the house.
In the folk tradition of Amorgos, the fairies are all women, they only have one brother, Alexandris - that’s not accidental, it’s Alexander the Great - and they steal the men, because they keep looking for their lost brother. They talk normally, they sing, they dance - I mean they dance close to the springs, like the nymphs - but when you steal their scarf, you “tie” them and they lose their voice.
So he went out to the coffee shop and said this: that as he was coming back from his animals, he was surrounded by the fairies, who were singing to him, teasing him, this and that, and he managed to grab the scarf off of one and he “tied” her.
So everyone, and not just in the village, because the news traveled around in Amorgos, believed that Kaoustos had actually “tied up” a fairy. So they made a deal. He told her: “Stay here as long as you want, but you will not speak outside the house. I mean, you will speak normally inside the house, but in the outside world, nothing.” And she would go to the grocer with a note written by Kaoustos.
A few years went by and they had a child together. One night, a fishing boat from Kalymnos tied at Giali during a sea storm. The days went by, the weather wouldn’t calm down, and so the sailors came out to sell sponges, basically to exchange the sponges for eggs, oil and things like that, to be able to get by. So, a sailor went and knocked on Kaoustos’ door. She opened the door and saw her husband in front of her! The one from Kalymnos
They waited for nightfall, Kaoustos came back from the fields, they sat down and talked about it and she decided to leave with her husband. But because she could not go to Kalymnos and get married with a baby in her arms, Kaoustos decided to keep the child.
The next day, once the weather got better, they sailed off. So Kaoustos went to the coffee shop and said this: that they had lit the oven to bake bread, but he couldn’t stand her silence any longer after all these years and pretended as a joke to throw the baby in the oven. And she shrieked and vanished.
I met people who believed that the fairy was real. Two years ago, we were in the coffee shop at Tholaria, and a coffee shop regular piped up and insisted that the story is real because his grandmother had told him that she had seen the fairy leave through the chimney, seen her vanish.
Kaoustos admitted the truth to his five children two days before he died. His five children were: Giannos, Kostas, Thodoris, Mario and my grandmother, Stasino. My great-grandmother.