Karousos, Tzavalá.s. 1974. Yáros: He Prosopike Empeiria Enos Exoristou (Yaros: The Personal Experience of an Exile). Athens: Pleias.
- Chapter 5. 1946–1949: Emphýlios
- » Someone Saw a Skylark
“You never get three consecutive days of calm here,” the fisherman who had agreed to take me to the island in the summer of 2005 said, after the wind picked up on the second day of my stay on Tenos. “The bourini [bad weather] lasts a long time; you won't be able to go.” The bourini comes unexpectedly for those who are not acquainted with the ways of the sea. What to me looked like a perfectly calm sea, with just a faint breath on the water, to the captain of the boat was the beginning of the bourini.
Sure enough, in a few hours' time I saw realized before me a description by Tzavalás Karousos, who, at the age of sixty-two, had been transported there in April 1967, not on a small boat, as Oikonomakos describes, but on a navy transport ship: “Someone offered me his place to sit. I had to accept, I had no other place. Apart from the exhaustion, the boat had started moving back and forth. But where could I sit? People had already started vomiting. And everything, ánthropoi, packages, vomit, piss, all had become one” Karousos 1974: 95). Karousos had been detained on Makrónisos during the civil war, but he wrote only of this second experience, his exile to Yáros. “The bourini has come. As suddenly as that, as we were looking at the little blue and white islands on the horizon, we saw it coming from the tip of Andros. It was frothing with anger, running maniacally. The playful sea had turned leaden as it passed over her and turned her around. The waves now fought among themselves like immense rams, frantically charging against each other, trying to see which one will kill the other” (ibid.: 132).
As every account of the island written by prisoners there mentions, Yáros was briefly inhabited during Roman times, but its inhabitants were driven away by rats and scorpions. After it was abandoned, it became a place of exile, although so abject a place that already the Romans considered exile there to be the cruelest of all punishments. They reserved it for the most dangerous of the “enemies of the empire.” Around 80 b.c. the Roman general Sculla opened Yáros again as a place of exile for eighty thousand of his political adversaries . They were left on the island with seeds to sow and some agricultural implements, but the soil was so sterile that the exiles died within a very short time of hunger, disease, and the bites of rats and scorpions. Remnants of attempts at cultivation are still visible as terraces on the hillside above the First Cove.
During the reign of Tiberius (14–37 a.d.), Yáros was still being considered as a place of exile, until finally the emperor vetoed its use. Tacitus mentions in 109 a.d. that Tiberius was present at the trial of Vibius Serenus, who had been accused by his son (also named Vibius Serenus, who served as both prosecutor and witness against his father) of having plotted against the life of the emperor and of inciting rebellion. Despite the fact that Serenus's guilt could not be proven, even when his servants were tortured, Tiberius brought up old charges of misconduct against him. The Senate decided that he should be punished more maiorum (according to the ancient mores), but Tiberius vetoed the vote. Gallus Asinius suggested that Serenus be exiled to Gyaro aut Donusa (Yáros or Donusa), but Tiberius interceded again, stating, “both of these islands were deficient of water, and that he whose life was spared, ought to be allowed the necessities of life” (Tacitus, Bk. 4 [30]). Serenus was finally sent back to exile on the island of Amorgos, from which he had been brought, briefly, to attend his trial.
Lucius Sulla was a Roman general from 95 b.c. until 78 b.c. He was born in 138 b.c. and died in 75 b.c. In 82 b.c. he was appointed dictator (rei publicae constituendae causa) by the Senate, later approved by the Assembly. There was no set limit on time in office. This was a high honor for Sculla, since he was reintroducing an institution that had existed over a century earlier, when a dictator had been appointed in times of extreme political danger to the city, but only for a six-month period and only with the approval of the Senate and the Assembly. Sulla instituted a practice of exterminating his political opponents and banishing their relatives and anyone who would defend them in public or be found to have sheltered them in private. Their children would be banished for thirty years if they declared their relationship to their parents. Sulla passed an act granting him immunity for all his past and future acts and giving him the power of life and death, confiscation, colonization, founding or demolishing cities, and taking away or bestowing cities at his pleasure, according to Plutarch (1916: 433). The reference to Sulla's banishment of eighty thousand of his political enemies to Yáros comes from Anonymous 1950: 85, which is a survey of the conditions of the exiles on Yioúra and a historical account of the island. I have not been able to confirm the information in any of the published biographies of Sulla that I have consulted. This does not mean that the information is necessarily inaccurate, though the number of eighty thousand remains highly questionable. Yáros is a large island, but on only a small portion of it can one actually stand, as it is mountainous and precipitous. That would seem to preclude the possibility of such a large concentration of people under normal circumstances. Circumstances at Yáros have never been normal, however, and it is not inconceivable that Sulla might have sent his political prisoners there for specific periods of time, so that this seemingly improbable number does not refer to simultaneous coexistence.