The Song of Daskalogiannis: Story of a Cretan Crucifixion (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9783950626155)

Crete, 1770. Ioannis Vlachos - Daskalogiannis, "John the Teacher" - is a Sfakian shipowner who has read Voltaire, struck his own coinage, and built four ships from nothing. When the Empress Catherine promises a Russian fleet, he raises a flag in a mountain church and, for a few impossible months, makes Sfakia free.

The fleet never comes.

Betrayed by the great powers and then by the very amnesty he is offered, Daskalogiannis is taken to Heraklion. There, in the great square, before his brother and the Ottoman pasha, the executioners begin their work. For three hours he makes no sound.

What survives is a song - carried for fifteen years in the memory of an illiterate cheesemaker who had watched, and who one day sat down to make a dead man immortal.

The sixth novel of The Secrets of Crete - freedom, betrayal, and the songs that outlast empires.