244 | The Province Goes to the Center
dragoman and his associates managed to concentrate the vast majority of the
island’s wheat and barley production into their own hands. While the Ottoman
Empire banned trade of certain sensitive goods, such as cereals necessary for
subsistence, Hadjiyorgakis, in partnership with Maltese merchants, exported
these commodities to Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. The embargo and war
conditions in Spain ensured handsome profits to anyone willing to take the risk
of illegally exporting the goods and breaking the blockade. In the meantime, the
people of Cyprus experienced dearth and famine. The price of wheat increased
fourfold, and a contemporary observer aptly summed up the situation as one of
“great hunger.”
A fascinating source narrates these events on the back of a church icon. The
choice of inscribing an account in such an obscure location can be explained
only by the polemical nature of the opinions expressed against the all-powerful
dragoman. Clearly, the author felt very strongly about recording his views, yet
this could not be done in an overtly public fashion. Thus, Hadjiyorgakis is never
mentioned by name but only as “the lord.” Furthermore, the dragoman is not
criticized directly, and responsibility is attributed to his entourage—very much
along the lines of blaming the sultan’s advisors rather than the sultan himself, a
topos in Ottoman political culture and literature.
With explicit ideological overtones and a partisan opinion in favor of the
archbishop of Cyprus, this vivid description constitutes nothing less than a dia-
tribe against Hadjiyorgakis and his associates, whom the iconographer described
as “these indiscreet, or shall I say godless,” people. He then draws attention to
the deal of the wheat... that they sold abroad at double the price, and they
were not even ashamed to confess that they had made so much money....
[T]hey stripped the island of Cyprus of wheat and barley and it starved....
[T]he archbishop was shouting and screaming—who listens? He was pulling
his hair (I was present)—who paid any attention? The lord a lways prevailed, he
listened to nobody anymore; he took the advice of neither the archbishop nor
anyone else.... [A]ll these things and many more outraged the Turks against
the lord.This dramatic depiction could not convey the agony of the times in a more el-
oquent fashion. It illustrates the dominant position of Hadjiyorgakis and the
degree of control he commanded over the economy of the island, so much so
that he was able to achieve the speculative manipulation of a market of a staple
food. By negating the local politics of consensus, balance of power, and moral
economy, he had created the very kind of problems that such mechanisms were
designed to prevent: dearth, famine, economic collapse, popular unrest, and
revolt—all elements that threatened the very sustainability of surplus extraction
from the province.