her power was the granting of many boons, but her special care was the fertility of the flocks and the abundance of the crops, including in that district tobacco.
This revelation convinced me of the accuracy of what I had previously suspected only in North Arcadia and in Messenia. In both those regions I had heard occasional mention among the peasants of one whose title was simply [Greek: hê despoina], 'the Mistress.' The word had always struck me as curious, for in ordinary usage it is obsolete and the mistress of a house or whatever it may be is always [Greek: hê kyra] (i.e. [Greek: kyria]). Knowing however that the Church had preserved the title [Greek: hê despoina] among those under which the Virgin may be invoked, I was disposed at first to think that the dedication of some church in the neighbourhood had influenced the people to use the rare name [Greek: hê despoina] instead of the ordinary 'Panagia.' But when I enquired where the church of 'the Mistress' was, the answer was 'she has none': and yet, on making subsequent enquiries of other persons, I found that there was a church of the Panagia close by. Clearly then it was not in the ecclesiastical sense that the title [Greek: hê despoina] was being used. More than this I failed to elicit—the peasants of the Peloponnese are on the whole more suspicious and secretive than those of northern Greece—but I have little doubt that this goddess is the same as she who in Aetolia bears a title more colloquial in form but identical in meaning.
The existence of this deity among the survivals of the old religion has never, I think, been observed by any writer on the subject of Greek folk-lore. But in Bernhard Schmidt's collection of popular stories and songs there is evidence, whose value he himself did not recognise, to corroborate it. One of the songs[1] from Zacynthos contains the lines:
[Greek: Ekam' ho Theos ki' hê Panag[i(]a ki' hê Despoina tou kosmou,
kai epolemêsa me Tourkous, m' Arbanitais;
chilious ekopsa, chilious kai d[y(]o chiliades.]
'They wrought in me, even God and the Virgin and the Mistress of the
world, and I fought with Turks and with Albanians: a thousand I slew, a
thousand yea and two thousand.'
The editor of this song omits from his translation and does not
even mention in his notes the last phrase of the first line, assum-*
- ↑ Märchen etc. Song no. 56.
