from here, and be a traitor? Yes, that is what so many thousands did in 1453. They abandoned their hearths and the graves of their ancestors. They abandoned their lands and their schools, and above all they abandoned St Sophia. To go away from here is to forsake our country—for ever to relinquish it to the conqueror. We must stay here!" he thundered, "and bear with our patrida the yoke of slavery, till the day shall come, when again strong, we shall rise to break that yoke, and hear again a Christian priest in St Sophia!"
I was seven years old when he died; yet I felt almost as old as he. Having never seen other children, and therefore having never shared in childish frolics, my world consisted of the woes of Greece.
His death was a terrible shock to me, and yet I cannot say that I quite understood what death meant. For days and days I pondered as to where he was, and whether he were comfortable or not. I saw his body, wrapped in a huge Greek flag, the icon of his patron saint clasped in his cold hands, lowered to rest beside the men of his family, who, like him, had lived and died under the Turkish yoke.
