When night falls in Crete, the devils party….!

Or so they say, in a village called Kapetaniana, just south of Heraklio. The legend of the Order of the Thousand devils is reported not only to be folklore and fairy tales people tell their kids to make them eat their veggies, but it is supposed to be backed up with testimonies of people that actually witnessed the devils having a blast every night! The Order of the devils is called the “Misiriotiko Tagma” (or Tama in Cretan dialect) because they used to be angels but they have fallen so they are now demons and apparently they are thousands! The word “Misiri” comes from the Arabic word for Egypt which shows the close connection of the island of Crete with the southern neighbours of the Mediterranean.   

According to the legend, there is this group of thousands of demons that live at the bottom of the sea just below the village of Kapetaniana. Giorgos Stamatakis, a local historian has narrated this myth in an article in the magazine Cretan Panorama and in his words this is what happens every night:

“Every night, as soon as it gets dark, the Tama emerges from the bottom of the sea, on the beach that is south of Kapetaniana, in “Volakia”. It follows a specific route. It is so alive, so real, that we know its route in every detail.

After the beach it enters the river of Ai-Yiannis and follows the river and reaches the village. On the route there is an abandoned monastery of Agios Ioannis and almost always some demons would turn around and stop there to harass the monks. Because temptations always appear to monks. But here I must open a parenthesis, tell you a story, before continuing with the route of Tama”.

“My great-great-grandfather, Daskalakis Georgios, had gone to become a monk at the monastery of Ai Yannis, at the time when Abbot Gerasimos lived there. He was a 12 or13-year-old boy, at the end of the 19th century, around 1880, the period when Parthenios and Eumenios had gone to Koudoumas to build the monastery. One day the old abbot wanted to go to Koudoumas to see the work and he called my grandfather and said to him: “I will go to Koudoumas and you will hear voices and songs at night – because this group is always singing and reveling – . If you see something suspicious, you will go inside the church and enter the holy step and stand next to the Holy Altar. No one will bother you there.”

So it happened. At the time when my grandfather was going to sleep, the Misiriotiko Tama started their walk. Some demons went to the monastery and began to dance and sing and say mandinades: (this is a kind of Cretan song that people make up in the spur of the moment with short verses that rhyme)  “If you are asleep, wake up, and if you are awake, sleep, otherwise get up and get dressed, get up, my little one.” This frightened him greatly and he went to the Holy Alter and took hold of the Gospel and hugged it tightly. The Gospel had a metal cover and my grandfather pressed it so hard on his forehead that its mark was imprinted on his forehead and stayed there for ever and he had the mark all his life… In fact, he saw them dancing, as their shadows were visible from the brightness of the moon, but as soon as they passed in front of the Holy Alter, they disappeared.”

“The Tama goes up the river and makes various stops. The first is at a point called “Demon Dancer” because that is where the Misiriotiko Tama stops and the devils have their first dance. The instrumentalists sit in the middle and everyone dances around. It is located between Kapetaniana and Ai-Yiannis. No grass ever grows there, there is no vegetation and there never was. It is a round point which is always dry and clean. From there, they re-enter the gorge and reach Goula, a point from which the village can be seen. From Goula they pass to Potamis, Kalistos, Kardia, Kokkini to Ryaki and enter the village… In the village, their spirits are high. There was always a cursed house that they entered and feasted in. They would pick the most beautiful, the most impressive house, evict the owners and make it their own. We know of at least three such houses, abandoned by their owners over the centuries. How were the owners expelled? In a thousand ways. The devils made life difficult and black for them. Their children died, their animals died, in the end the owners were driven insane and left.

The demons always chose the best house in the village. And if a nicer one was built, they would leave the old one and go there. The Misiriotiko Tama was one of the reasons why our villagers built ugly houses. They knew that if they built big and presentable houses, they would be taken by the Misiriotiko, which always chose the best ones to have their parties. After that the demons go to the area of ​​Messara and in the morning they return to Kapetaniana again, make a stop at their favorite home and then go back to the bottom of the sea again”.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, a resident of the village, Dimitris Stamatakis, “Dimitrakis” as he was called, a very wealthy man, married a very rich woman and were very prosperous. So he decided to build a very big and impressive house although everyone was telling him not to do it, because the Tama will take it from him. He said that he does not believe all this and declared that he will build a big house just as he likes. He built the tallest, most impressive house in the village and just as he finished it and settled there, the demons appeared and told him to leave. Legend has it that many bad things happened to him. His children began to die, one after the other, his family had problems, his sheep were stolen, just before he harvested his fields the crops caught fire.

At that time it was very difficult to build a house in the village and some who got married asked him to stay there. He explained the situation to them in order to prevent them, but many did not listen to him. Several tried to stay, but they only managed to do so for a very short time and then they left because of the ghosts and demons messing up their lives; others said they saw many signs and ghosts that scared them.

The house was left deserted, no one went to live there anymore, people did not go outside at night. When I was little, we went with other kids my age in the evenings to see the Tama. Terrified, scared we would stop in front of the house and be told not to look at it, but to look at the opposite wall to see the shadows. So on that wall we saw the shadows that danced when there was a bright moon. I don’t know if it was our imagination or a group hallucination. We saw shadows with horns dancing…”.

The demons are thousands, we don’t know how many, certainly a large number. They say they recruit souls who have gone astray. Among them are murderers who become demons and the devils go around the world collecting them. They also say that some of the women in the Tama are mothers who have buried unbaptized children. The “Telonia”, children who are not accepted in the underworld because they have not been baptized, and so their mothers give them their souls and those without a soul anymore, enter the Tama”.

Today the Tall House still exists. But no one ever stays there at night. (You can find the pictures and story in the link below)

https://www.news247.gr/sunday-edition/to-tagma-ton-chilion-diaolon-zei-se-ena-chorio-stin-kriti.9519639.html

Crete is full of ghost stories!!! I only knew of the legend of the Drousoulites, (wild warrior ghosts in the south of Crete, at Fragocastelo – I’m going to tell you their story next time) but I now discover that there is an actual order of thousands of ghosts and demons! From the local peoples’ testimonies about this Tama, it seems to me that those demons have a really great time! Party every night! Their daily agenda is unvarying with only a few chores: Drink, Dance – be loud about it and scare people! and then back to sleep in the bottom of the sea. Well if this is the way they spend their time, they definitely have no time to roast any human souls in the eternal fire…which means that either this Tama is the vacation section for all departments of Hell or the Catholic Church has had it wrong from the start and Hell is just an everlasting Party. Of course, there is also the possibility that this interpretation is due to the mixture of paganism and Christianity that the Greeks have managed to merge very successfully and retain the best of both in a very Greek Orthodox way!