Only executioners lived on this island …
We fly over the Bourtzi of Nafpliothe island that was originally called by the sailors the island of Agios Theodoros, but ended up being the residence of executioners who performed their abominable work, receiving a salary and living permanently on it.
When the guillotine was first brought to Nafplio from Marseilles, where it was made, it was accompanied by an executioner. Maybe because he had to learn how it works to Greeks who would undertake this ungrateful and difficult mission. However, he left the city quickly, not enduring the hatred with which the people of Nafplio faced him. The sad task of the executor was taken over by locals.
Executioners, as a rule, were convicts sentenced to death after the Courts had commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. They, as convicts but also because the people of Nafplio did not want them among them, had as their residence the Bourtzi of Nafplio. Closed on this island, they went out accompanied by gendarmes only when a convict was to be beheaded.
The guillotineThe carmagnole or guillotine was set up whenever it was needed, in the famous threshing floor of Palamidi, near the church of Agios Andreas, where the future dead also attended the divine service for the last time.
Well-known executioners in Bourtzi were Poriotis Sofras, the Cretan Amoiradakis and Argitis Bekiaris. Their reward was 300 drachmas per month and 100 drachmas for each beheading. The executioners’ money was considered bloody, which is why Bekiaris’s mother, although poor, worked as a hotelier to make a living and never received help from her son. The executioners had most of the money for their food and necessities, because they had to get what they needed from the guard boatman, who was trusted and only he had the right to transport the necessities, charging them each time at will. of. The assassin of Prime Minister Theodoros Diligiannis, Costas Gerakaris, was also executed by guillotine in 1906.
The last executioners in Nafplio were Ioannis Zisis from Evia and Kyriakos Sotiropoulos from Mantineia. Finally, Athanasios Alevizopoulos from Messinia was probably the only executioner who was less hated by the people of Nafplio and they even forced him to take off his skirt and dress in Frankish.
Andreas Karkavitsas, in one of his short stories, in 1892, describes Bourtzi as the “beautiful cave”, which hid the three dragons, the three executioners. Sofras, Amoiradakis and Bekiaris. Karkavitsas served as a military doctor in Nafplio, and had the opportunity to communicate with the executioners, whom he had visited at their place.
Watch the haanity video
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
