Astrology in the Estate Ledger of the Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis

Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou, Professor Emerita at the University of Cyprus, examines the last three pages of the estate ledger of the Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios. In this paper, given in Greek, she analyses the chronological entries in which the Dragoman recorded the births, zodiac signs, ruling planets, and astrological temperaments of his six children between 1789 and 1799.

Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou places these notes within the manuscript tradition of astrology, divination, and folk medicine in eighteenth-century Cyprus. She compares the ledger's entries and zodiacal symbols with the contemporary manuscript of the scholar Petrakis Karydis, which preserves a treatise on the twelve signs going back to Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, as well as with popular magical treatises (Solomonikes) that linked planetary houses and the four elements to human humours and character.

The paper then goes through the six children in order, comparing the astrological predictions in the ledger with their documented biographies after the family fled to Constantinople in 1804, following the Dragoman's execution in 1809, and during the reprisals of 1821. The eldest son, Christodoulos, born in 1789 under Leo and the Sun, added a note to the ledger on his twenty-second birthday in Constantinople, providing a handwriting sample that identifies him as the compiler of the rest of the manuscript; imprisoned and exiled to Theodosiopolis in Armenia in 1821, he lost his sanity and died childless in Cyprus after 1830. The second son, Michail (1791, Virgo and Mercury), had his remaining Cypriot property valued at 2,500 grosia in Ottoman confiscation records of 1821 before returning to the island.

The eldest daughter, Mariam or Mariora (1793, Virgo), born when the family moved into the renovated Konaki in Nicosia, married Michail Glykys, who was executed in Cyprus in July 1821; she later returned to Nicosia and preserved the family ledger. For the three younger children, the recorded zodiac signs diverge unexplainedly from their birth months. Tzikinou or Zoi (1795, listed under Cancer) died of a wasp sting on the Bosphorus at twenty. Anna or Annika (1797, listed under Scorpio and Mars) married her tutor Onoufrios Mikelidis, who became headmaster of the Greek School of Nicosia in 1830, and in 1857 dedicated a silver chalice to the church of Agios Pavlos. The youngest child, Ioannis (1799, Sagittarius, born at the new moon), escaped imprisonment in a dry well in Tokat after 1827 by posing as a physician, recovered the Nicosia mansion, married Iouliani Vondiziano of Larnaca, and served in high communal offices until his death in 1874. The speaker concludes by observing that all six births by their mother Maroudia occurred at two-year intervals between August and November, reflecting the cycle of a year's breastfeeding between pregnancies.