Digenis Akritas

Descripción

Digenis Akritas roams the deserts of Cappadochia far from Constantinople, the seat of mediaeval Byzantine tyrannical power, and from modern Greek nationalism which has appropriated the errant hero for its ideological warfare against Republican Turkey. Digenis, as his name suggests, erred along the frontier of two nations: Byzantine Greek and Arab, and between two beings: his Moslem father's and his Christian mother's. Only his marginal existence from Constantinople, and his practice of alterity between Byzantine and Arab along the frontier of Southern Cappadochia, allowed him to savour the pleasures of independance, and chant this errant knighthood independance in epic form. His eight chants are compared with the Armenian epic tale, David of Sassoun, and with the Turkic epic tale, Dede Korkut, composing thus the sous-koinè of Anatolia.