Mindset

 A historical narrative sort of drifts through the tragedy of Euphrosyne Vasiliou , known as Kyra Frosini, a well educated Greek merchant’s wife living in Ioannina. She ends up accused of immorality, and not vaguely, but particularly for an affair with Ali Pasha’s son , Mukhtar. Her arrest and execution, together with sixteen other women , both Christian and Muslim, is described as a carefully counted political loss, like they needed it. The idea was to clamp down on the spread of “ liberal mores ”, and also the Greek intellectual influence that was, in a very real sense, worrying Ottoman authority . At the same time it helped Ali Pasha keep his domestic and regional political arrangements steady. The whole story sort of closes with the mass drowning of the seventeen women in the cold freezing waters of Lake Pamvotis, in January 1801 . After she’s gone , her uncle , Metropolitan Gabriel , saw to it that her account—and the others too—got re-told as martyrdom. That reframing turns ...