Encountering a divine dance of solidarity at the Zalongo Monument

In this article, a combination of travelogue, personal narrative, archival research and cultural analysis, I contemplate the Monument to the Heroines of Zalongo, a sculpture by George Zongolopoulos that stands in the western Greek region of Epirus. It commemorates the Dance of Zalongo, a mass suicide, or heroic sacrifice, of women and children in 1803. The legend of the dance and the monument inspired by it evoke contradictory perspectives on the national identity of Greece and of Greeks that stretch back to the founding of the modern nation: the externally directed view of the philhellenes, and the introverted perspective of the Romii. Seen as an international, philhellenic cause, a mass suicide, the Souliote women’s leap signified helpless women and children, and a nation, in need of rescuing. Seen as a national, Greek narrative, a patriotic sacrifice, the Souliote women’s leap showed female warriors filled with pride and self-determination. The Dance of Zalongo has had many lives: as a nineteenth-century media event that sparked an outpouring of literature and art, a twentieth-century lifeline to the old country for Greeks in the diaspora and a twenty-first-century cultural meme bolstering resistance to economic austerity. The Zalongo Monument, a site for pilgrimage where Greek cultural memory is infused in stone and resonant in the air, recreates the presence of the dance, letting us feel what it means to be free. Visiting the monument as a philhellenic foreigner, I ponder its power as a tribute to solidarity among those everywhere who are pushed to the precipice.