As a second piece of corroboration, he adduces another derivation
hardly more felicitous than those with which I have already dealt.
The word on which he tries his hand this time is καμπουχέροι
or κατσιμπουχέροι--the name of the mummers in Crete and of the
Callicantzari in Achaia. Here again, with a certain perversity, he
selects the worse form of the two, καμπουχέροι, which is evidently
a syncopated form of the other, and proceeds to derive it from the
Spanish _gambujo_, ‘a mask,’ leaving the subsequent development of
κατσιμπουχέροι totally inexplicable. For my own part I consider it far
more probable that the word κατσιμπουχέροι is a humorously compounded
name, of which the second half is the word μπουχαρί[607] (an Arabic
word which has passed, probably through Turkish, into Greek) meaning
‘chimney,’ and that the whole by-name has reference simply to the
common belief that Callicantzari try to extinguish the fire on the
hearth and thus to gain access to the house by the chimney. As to
the meaning of κατσι-, the first half of the compound, I can only
hazard the conjecture that it is connected with the verb κατσιάζω,
which ordinarily means to blight, to wither, to dry up, and so forth,
though its passive participle, κατσιασμένος, is said by Skarlatos[608]
to be applied to clothes which are ‘difficult to wash.’ If then the
compound κατσιμπουχέροι is a descriptive title of the Callicantzari,
meaning those who render the chimney difficult to wash, the coarse
and eminently rustic humour of the allusion to their habits needs no
further explanation; and it is the mummers of Crete who owe their name
to the Callicantzari, not _vice versa_.
While therefore I acknowledge and appreciate to the full the value of
Polites’ researches into the history of the Twelve Days, the inferences
which he draws from the material collected seem to me no more sound
than the derivations which they are designed to corroborate. My own
interpretation of the historical facts which Polites has brought
together is as follows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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