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There is a lot of foul language in what follows.Georgios Karaiskakis, commander in the Greek War of Independence, had the xoui (< Turkish huy < Persian xūy), the “bad habit”, as he admitted, of being utterly potty-mouthed. He could be trusted for many an anecdote, a lot of them not printable in family newspapers. I give one of them under Nick Nicholas's answer to What are some great threats one can make?If I live, I will fuck them [in the ass].If I die, they can fart on my dick.I’m going to take a bunch of stories and anecdotes from Το υβρεολόγιο στην «φαρέτρα» των αγωνιστών του '21 - Μελετώντας τον Γεώργιο Καραϊσκάκη, «Ας Zήσω και θα μου Kλάσει τον Mπούτσον» - Τα Ιστορικά Μπινελίκια του Καραϊσκάκη, and Γεώργιος Καραϊσκάκης - Βικιπαίδεια, but they are widely reported from contemporary memoirs and accounts, and I’d read most of them already in Ilias Papasteriopoulos’ The trial of Karaiskakis (Η δίκη του Καραϊσκάκη), 1961.Karaiskakis was, as Yiannis Tsiolis's answer says, the illegitimate son of a nun. He lived on the margins of society, and suffered from tuberculosis since childhood. He was one of the many brigands that rotated between being robbers and being irregulars chasing robbers, and he encountered Ali Pasha of Ioannina in both capacities. He was not brought up in a loving family, and was proud of the contempt society had for him as a sickly bastard, turning it into defiant humour. (“My mother sucked forty thousand cocks before she had me!”)As a warrior, he was one of the major figures of the war. He was put on trial for treason, he was convicted as an Enemy of the Motherland, and after a couple of months, he had all his titles restored, and was acclaimed by the army as Commander-in-Chief (Stratopedarches) with absolute powers.It’s worth keeping that in mind with what follows.In one of his first battles in the Greek War of Independence, at Kompoti, July 1821, Karaiskakis mooned the foe. And promptly got shot in the genitals. (As the contemporary source put it, “in both thighs, and in a more “salient” part of his body.”)He got a lot of mileage out of that.Some time later, a new doctor came to camp, and Karaiskakis wanted to test him out. He was bedridden with TB, as he often was, and the doctor tried to take his pulse. Karaiskakis had one of his men hiding under the bed, and the doctor took the soldier’s pulse instead.“General, your strength is drooping.”Karaiskakis tossed the bedclothes aside, revealing the soldier’s hand, and said:“My cock is drooping, damn you, not my strength!”And in 1825, Karaiskakis attacked admiral Georgios Kountouriotis (subject of Nick Nicholas's answer to Was the first President of Greece an Albanian who could not speak a word of modern Greek?), for his loss against the Ottomans at Kremmydi: “Oh, Kountouriotis, I kept hearing about you and thinking your head must be full of brains. But you’ve got as much brains, as I’ve got seed in my balls.”He had a big mouth. And he admitted it. When he was put on trial for treason, the following exchange took place between the old landowner Galanis Megapanou and himself:Karaiskakis: If you pay any attention to my talk, I’m not getting out of here alive, even if I have a hundred lives.Megapanou: Oh, we know that you’re all talk, but why do you do it?Karaiskakis: It’s my bad habit (huy), Master Panos.Megapanou: Well how can you have such a bad habit when you’re already fifty? [In fact he was 42.]Karaiskakis: I can’t cut it out, Master Panos. You’re eighty years old yourself, but you can’t cut out your own bad habit of fucking little girls, no matter what I tell you.(Almost all online sources leave out the word μικρούλες, “little girls”.)He was wilful, and he admitted that too. Basil Boudouris confronted him in June 1826, when he was appointed General and tasked with salvaging the Revolution in Central Greece:Boudouris: You have not done until now your duty towards the motherland as you should have, Karaiskakis. May God give you the wisdom to do so from now on.Karaiskakis: I won’t deny it. When I want to, I become an angel. When I want to, I become a devil. I aim to be an angel from now on.Badass? Well, no. That’s too simple, that fits too neatly into patriotic, heroic narratives, that’s a Hollywood whitewash. Angel and devil. He was right about that.Karaiskakis married, but he did not show any more respect for his wife Golfo than he did for anyone else. When he visited her with his soldiers, one of them was a Turkish girl he rescued from the massacre of Tripolizza; he had her baptised as Maria, and had her follow his men in drag, as Zafiris. When Golfo found out that Zafiris was (apparently) feeling up her female servants (that’s what Dimitrios Ainian wrote, at any rate), she protested; the way Karaiskakis saw fit to calm her down was: “Oh, don’t worry, damn you, I’ve got cock enough for you too. Don’t go getting angry on me.” Later, when he found she had cheated on her, he decided to marry the heiress of a landowner who he had robbed. He soon lost interest, and flung her picture at the feet of his soldiers, shouting: “Whoever takes her first can keep her! Fuck that whore!”The account I take that from hedges: “These outbursts are not necessarily misogyny, but rather a clear contempt [perifronisi, often a positive notion in Greek] for normal family life or social conventions associated with the conscious conformity of peasant families.”You mean, Karaiskakis was a rebel instead of being a misogynist? Nah. He was both. Being a nihilistic smart-talking rebel is not something wholly laudable, just as it is not wholly condemnable. Angel and devil.Karaiskakis recovered quickly from his conviction for treason. The conventional narrative is that the trial was a stitch up job by the evil, intrigue-ridden politician Alexandros Mavrokordatos (or, as Karaiskakis called him, “the Reis Effendi [Ottoman Foreign Minister]’s rentboy, four-eyes Mavrokordatos”), who resented the charismatic, simple peasant warlord, and made up a bogus accusation that Karaiskakis was about to surrender Missolonghi to the Ottoman commander Omer Vrioni, in exchange for the captaincy of the irregulars [Turkish armatoluk, Greek armatoliki] of Agrafa.The sympathetic source Ελληνική Επανάσταση 1821, ΚΔ' concedes that Karaiskakis was in fact in correspondence with the Muslim Albanian commander Vrioni, and claims that the Greeks were hoping for an Greco–Albanian alliance against the Ottomans. But Karaiskakis did not have the rigorous notions of national loyalty that Western Europeans and politicians like Mavrokordatos expected: after all, he was part of the revolving door between robbers and irregulars chasing robbers. Karaiskakis mooned the Ottomans in July 1821; once he gained the captaincy shortly afterwards, he submitted to Ottoman authority, and didn’t lift a finger against them for a year. The trial for treason was, as much as anything, because Mavrokordatos supported Ioannis Ragos, Karaiskakis’ rival for the captaincy of Agrafa.Was Karaiskakis a traitor? Not in his mind: he lived in a different paradigm. And the sympathetic source above nonetheless quotes Julius Millingen, who met Karaiskakis in 1823:On the 8th of December, I left Argostoli for Mesolonghi, accompanied by Caraiscachi, who […] could no longer control his impatience of revenge; having just heard of the numerous persecutions his rival Rangos had inflicted on his adherents in the province of Agrapha.He vented the bitterest rage against the Greek government, by which his adversary had been authorised to dispossess him of a province, he considered as his legitimate conquest; as he had driven out the Turks who occupied it, long before the above power existed, with no other aid than the valour of his own followers. […]On our arrival at St. Euphemia we were kindly entertained by Mr. T. Caraiscachi, who took a pleasure in relating to us how he had acquired the various rich spoils, which he then happened to wear. His diamond ring was valued at upwards of 1500 Spanish dollars; his shawl and furred mantle had belonged to a Turkish aga, whom he had killed while returning to Larissa with the produce of the caratch (Haraç) and other taxes, that he had collected in the districts of Livadia, Agrapha, and Carpenisi. Far from concealing his birth, he boasted of being a bastard as of a title, giving superior claims. Possessing considerable wit and humour, he detailed, in the most ludicrous manner, the intrigues and adventures of his mother and supposed father.[…]He had not the most distant idea of the meaning of liberty; confounding it with anarchy. He ridiculed the idea of Greeks aiming at the establishment of a regular government; and invariably spoke of it in the most scurrilous terms.That’s not a traitor. That’s also not a loyal foot-soldier. That’s a charismatic warlord. Who doesn’t particularly see why he should have to give up the territory he has conquered, or the taxes he has collected, to a central government run by a four-eyes rentboy—of whom he went on to say to Notis Botsaris:Who made him the government? Me and the others, we don’t recognise him! Did he gather up ten fools who signed for him out of their own interest? Here’s who signed: You first of all, who wants everything to happen with a shawm [i.e. easily]; Skaltsas, who is nothing more than a hollow bell going ding-dong; Makaris, a long-neck who only knows how to shake his head; Mitsos Kontogiannis, that whore, that 80,000 times wouldn’t satisfy him if he was a woman; the yoghurt-seller Giorgos Tsiongas [he was a Sarakatsani, traditionally shepherds], who pouts on his pipe and doesn’t know the time of day; and my brother Stornaris, the liar. My cock did not sign up to your campaign.That doesn’t mean he was right. Nobody made the warlord the government, after all.Or take his most notorious torrent of invective, which has been feted in song recently: see Όταν ο Καραϊσκάκης πολεμούσε την τρόικα (Δημήτρης Δημητρόπουλος). (Like so many other anecdotes, this is from Nikolaos Kasomoulis’ memoirs):Come here, shitty Turk, come here, Jew sent by Gypsies. Come hear your cuckoldries, fuck your creed and your Muhammad! What did you think, you cucks, there’s a war on, and you started it without thinking? Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, asking for a truce with your big fucking Sultan Mahmud—fuck him and your Vezir and that Jew Silihtar Boda the whore!A magnificent expression of Greek defiance against the foe? Maybe, if your notions of religious and ethnic tolerance are stuck in 1823. Maybe, if you’re happy to treat Greek Jews as the foe—and from what I gather, Silihtar Boda was an Albanian Muslim: the “Jew” is added in as invective. His outburst has accordingly gained popularity among Greek anti-semites in the last decade.Hilarious? I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I burst out laughing when I first read it. And indeed, so were his contemporaries:And he uttered a myriad obscenities against all Turks and their religion. We all laughed at him getting angry lying in bed.It’s hateful, it’s racist—and it’s farcical. It’s Karaiskakis running off his big mouth while bed-ridden. It’s a performance piece.And the context of the outburst is actually not patriotic defiance at all. It’s Karaiskakis, over the objections of Nikolaos Stornaris (“the liar”, as he’d called him), wanting a truce with the Ottomans, until he is feeling healthier. “A celebration of treason!”, those who resent its elevation into nationalist song retort (see the discussion of the song above). Again, no: it’s angel and devil, with a lot of pragmatism—Stornaris: But if such need compels us to seek a truce, what are our demands of the Turks? I believe that now that we have found their weakness, we should make such a truce that, if need be, if we see the slightest violation, we can move against them. So we should make a condition: if any of the chapters of our truce be violated, the truce shall be annulled.Karaiskakis: Oh, brother Stornaris, you’re acting like Russia’s negotiating with the Ottomans! I’ll close a truce for now; if I don’t like it tomorrow, I fuck it off, and so do you, and so do we all!—and a lot of empty big mouth braggadocio, which Karaiskakis is using to cover up the fact that he’s currently too weak to wage war. (The “If I live, I will fuck them” gets attached online to this tirade, but it’s not in the original source, at least not at that spot, and its defiance seems too genuine to fit in there.)Karaiskakis: I’ll get up and bite the flesh off you, you scum, and get my own back, for walking right into the camp presuming on my friendship, without asking permission of anybody, infidel, you and your masters!Kara Tayir: Oh, Karaiskakis, that’s enough! You’ve sworn at me and Turkey; now tell me what you aim to do, and stop the big talk.Karaiskakis: Fine, make truce with these dicks here; I’m sick, and I can’t listen to your bullshit.Kara Tayir is there to negotiate a truce, and he knows better than to take Karaiskakis’ big mouth seriously. He knows it’s a performance too.And after two paragraphs of parley between Stornaris and Kara Tayir, Karaiskakis pipes up again:Behold the Greeks! They shit on you, now and forever!Again, a brave phrase for Greeks to take pride in, so long as you don’t cite the sentence before it:You cucks! The men you took captive were your kind, Turks and Jews, because that’s what being a subject (Rayah) means.If you’re a Greek peasant, imprisoned by the Ottomans, then to the proud warlord Karaiskakis you’re no better than a Turk (or a Jew): you’re not a proud unbending warlord like him. After all, proud mountain men like Karaiskakis dismissed the peasantry of the lowlands as soft.Actually, they dismissed them as puşt, fags.(Why yes, if you take the man out of 1820s and Greek, and put him in 2020s English, he sounds very alt-right. The thing is, of course, back in the 1820s, most people sounded like the alt-right does now.)Karaiskakis was proud enough that, when every warlord was against him in the leadup to his trial for treason, in April 1824, Nikolaos Stornaris asked him to send troops to help him attack the town of Trikala, sending his own son as a hostage, as a show of good faith. Karaiskakis’ response was:Most brave brother, Captain Nikolaos. I see what you have written me. My cock has both Goblet drums and trumpets. I’ll use whichever of the two I want.The goblet drum, the tabla or dumbelek, was the instrument of marching Turks. The trumpet, brought in by Westerners, was the instrument of marching Greeks. That’s Karaiskakis, still flirting with siding with the Ottomans. And of course, that too is Karaiskakis’ big mouth.(And this time Stornarnis matched him: “Since you have both goblet drums and trumpets, hold on, because our cock is going to hunt you down, with goblet drums and with trumpets.” Admittedly, that’s what the Dutch call a jij-bak, “I know you are but what am I?”)Karaiskakis was an angel to some of his contemporaries, and a devil to others; his contemporaries often enough changed their minds, and they switched to “angel” quickly, when they were in dire need of his military skill. It was the military skill that motivated them, not his big mouth or his flexible allegiances. A legend clearly grew around Karaiskakis, and not every incident attributed to him is necessarily true. The legend grew because of his mouth and his charisma (the first biography of Karaiskakis, written by Dimitrios Ainian in 1833, has an appendix full of his cudgel wit); but it would not have taken root if he wasn’t also the commander-in-chief of the armies of Rumeli, and the victor of the Battle of Arachova.Karaiskakis is an angel to most Modern Greeks, for his mouth as well as his military skill. To them, his potty mouth is salt-of-the-earth sincerity, a populist hero against the rule of subtle politicians, and speaking truth to power (Nick Nicholas's answer to Why do people who swear a lot seem to be very sincere?). That is why the song setting of his swearing became an anti-German anthem during the Greek financial crisis.He’s less of an angel to revisionist Greeks; I wince at the conclusion of Όταν ο Καραϊσκάκης πολεμούσε την τρόικα (Δημήτρης Δημητρόπουλος), pointing out that Karaiskakis’ constant appeal to the authority of his cock is in fact rape culture; but I can’t exactly say that’s wrong.I haven’t been able to track down when he said:If I live, I will fuck them [in the ass].If I die, they can fart on my dick.But something very similar is attested in Ainian, reproducing Karaiskakis’ own surmise as he was dying at the Battle of Phaleron, shared by many since, that he was killed by friendly fire, and possibly at the instigation of Mavrokordatos. It’s the same trademark defiance; and yet, in that context, I dare say, somewhat more resigned, somewhat more clearsighted.Ξέρω τον αίτιο και αν ζήσω, παίρνουμε χάκι, ειδέ και πεθάνω, ας μου κλάσει τον πούτσο κι αυτός. Τι κέρδισε;I know who’s responsible, and if I live, we will be avenged. If I die, he too can go and fart on my dick. What good has it done him?I have enough vestigial romanticism and patriotism to feel… bad about what I’ve gathered and written. Thinking of Karaiskakis as a plaster saint is an injustice he himself would have resented. Thinking of him as a badass rebel, which the popularisation of his invective has achieved, is an uncritical dumbing down. But calling him a racist traitor is imposing a frame of reference he and his troops would not have comprehended, and is just as wrongheaded. And Mavrokordatos still doesn’t emerge a hero, even if Karaiskakis was no plaster saint himself.Karaiskakis was angel and devil, wit and thug, brave and bigmouth, robber and irregular, soldier and warlord. He knew that full well. Take what’s good from him, reject what’s bad, and use your judgement to work out which is which. As with anything else in life. Like the Tsakonian proverb goes,Τουρ οργήνιε του γέρου να νίνερε, του πφούντε σι να μη σι νίνερε.Hearken to an old man's counsels—not his farts.