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implies that, the enemy once removed, a deposit of the wicked arts by which the Greeks had outwitted him for ages, still remained: weapons now aimed at their fellow-countrymen. Abetted by the untamed customs of the mountains, they slowed up the smooth conduct of a regenerated and sovereign state. Indeed, the phrases “ romaïka pragmata! ” and “ romaïkes douliès! ”—“Romaic things!” and “Romaic doings!,” always accompanied by a series of disapproving clicks of the tongue—mean “slovenly goings-on” or, worse still, “dirty work.”
    The Turkish occupation is a boundless limbo. But it is full of wonderful stories of Odyssean ruse, picaresque adventure and the skilful exploitation of chaos. Tales abound of soaring careers and distant wanderings in search of fortune which can vie with anything in Gil Blas , Hadji Baba and the Arabian Nights. Romiosyne at its humblest and most comic level, is epitomized in the shadow-play of Karayiozi. This fascinating dramatic tradition is thought to have begun in China; at all events, it held sway for centuries in many lands from Manchuria to the Adriatic Sea and in each country it moulded itself to the ideas and manners of the inhabitants. In some parts of the Orient it was rabelaisian and lewd. Among the Greeks, it took on a lively, witty, parabolic turn. It has become profoundly and inalienably Greek.
    The actors are transparent silhouettes cut out of camel-hide and coloured, jointed and manipulated by the invisible puppet-master and his apprentices on long rods which flatten and animate the figures against a stretched white linen screen lit from behind. The scene, often adorned with palaces, mosques and seraglios, is laid in Constantinople or in occupied Greece at any time in the last two or three centuries. The one-act plays performedthere, of which there are over a hundred—a fixed canon varying slightly according to the skill and imagination of the puppet-master—aim only to amuse; but they do much more: they depict, by comedy, caricature, parody and farce, the entire Romaic predicament.
    The protagonist and anti-hero is the Karayiozi himself. He is the epitome of the poverty-stricken and downtrodden rayah; his home is a wooden hut on the point of collapse. (“Karayiozi’s hut” all over Greece, is synonymous with a hovel.) He is small, bald and hunchbacked; one of his arms, apt for the whole range of Greek gesticulations, is preternaturally long, a survival of the phallus which has such a bawdy role to play in the Arabian Karaguz. Ragged, barefoot, illiterate, nimble and versatile, he is a fast, pert and funny talker, and his speech is full of comic mistakes. Though he is a willing thief— Romaïka pragmata! —he is often caught; he is bold and timid by turns, skilled in subterfuge and disguise, volatile, restless, resilient, irascible and pugnacious, soon dashed, swift to recover. His schemes nearly always go awry and bring on a harvest of blows. Talking, jumping, gesticulating, arguing, he darts about among his towering and more static fellow-shadows with the restlessness of a firefly. However absurd and monstrous his behaviour we are always on his side. He is deeply likeable, a comic David surrounded by Goliaths. A small man pitched against intolerable odds, he corresponds to something in all of us; a pin thrust again and again into the balloons of vanity and self-importance; he is a perfect manifestation of the passion of the Greeks for mocking themselves and each other. The laughter of the audience is directed against themselves by proxy, and they know it. [3] He is the essence of Romiosyne .

    Karayiozi, then, is a Romiòs . But “ Romiòs ” covers a wider field than the candle-lit quadrilateral that confines his antics. It suggests, as we have seen, the ghostly splendours of Byzantium, the sorrows of servitude, the “dirty washing,” and the absurdities of the