At the end of 1803 Ali Pasha wanted to finish once and for all with the Souliotes, the disobedient mountainous Thesprotiaans, who were causing so many problems for the Sultan and his own authority in Epirus. He besieged them closely and forced them to capitulate on 12 December 1803. The main condition of the agreement, which was not kept, was to evacuate their villages plus women and children. On 16 December the Souliotes were divided into three columns and left their ancestral land behind.
Two days later, the third column, heading south, was attacked at Zalongo by a large body of Turcovans led by Bekir Jogaduro, Ago Mukhurdari and Metzo Bono. During the fierce clash that ensued, a group of Suliotes were trapped by the enemy. Among them were some 60 women, many of them pregnant. In order not to fall into the hands of their pursuers, they threw their children from the steep peak of Zalongo and then, holding hands, they themselves fell dancing. Over the years, the Zalongo became a symbol of heroism and self-sacrifice.
The only specific testimony about the Zalongo Dance comes from Ali Pasha's officer, Suleiman Agha, an eyewitness to the incident. He narrated it to the Islamist French mercenary Ibrahim Mansur Effendi, who included it in a book published in Paris in 1828 with his memories of the court of Ali Pasha. According to this account, the women "took hands and began a dance, whose steps were moved by an unusual heroism and the agony of death emphasized its rhythm. At the end of the epaulets, the women uttered a piercing and long cry, whose echo died away at the bottom of a terrifying precipice, where they were thrown with all their children."
The Prussian diplomat and traveler Jakop Bartoldi (1779 1825) is the first to record the event between 1803 and 1804, while in Ioannina, without mentioning the dance. The 21st century fighter and memoirist Christoforos Perraivos (1773 1863) is the first Greek writer to refer to the Zalongo Dance in the second edition of his 'History of Souliou and Parga' (1815). In the 1857 edition, however, he makes no mention of a chorus.
In 1888 the Syriac scholar and historian Pericles Zerlentis (1852-1925) expressed reservations and doubts about the chorus of Zalongo, after field research, without disputing the fact of the self-sacrifice of the Souliotes. Years later, the philologist Alexis Politis, professor at the University of Crete, argued in an article in the magazine 'O Politis' (2005) that the song that accompanied the dance, the well-known 'Ehe hija kaeimenenos κόσμε', was first mentioned only in 1908.
In this year the author of "Golphos" Spyridon Pereciadis presented for the first time the theatrical play "The Dance of Zalongos", which spread widely in Greece through performances of "bouloukis" and amateur local troupes and perhaps this is the reason for the formation of the "Dance of Zalongos" as a historical event.
Source.
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Sourcehttps://cyprustimes.com/san-simera/18-dekemvrioy-1803-o-choros-toy-zaloggoy/
