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English
Etymology
Ultimately from Greek κλέφτης (kléftis, “thief”).
Noun
kleft (plural klefts)
- (now historical) A type of brigand operating in the mountains of pre-Revolutionary Greece.
1972, Douglas Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770-1923, page 18:True, the klefts often mulcted the villages, but at least they were Greeks, and they reduced considerably the marauding activities of the Albanians who in the second half of the eighteenth century were expanding westwards.
1988, Niki Watts, The Greek Folk Songs, page 60:The fear Greek peasants had of the klefts is commented upon by the evidence of an English traveller, Leake, who was impressed by a monument he saw raised in honour of a local leader who had been killed in a fight against the klefts.
1994, Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Minerva, published 1995, page 271:This kind of thing had not happened since his great-grandfather's time, in the days when those andartes were called klefts.
2019, Roderick Beaton, Greece: The Biography of a Modern Nation, Penguin, published 2020, page 38:We find much the same set of attitudes in the very many songs that have been preserved from the oral tradition that are dedicate to the lives, and usually also the violent deaths, of the mountain brigands known as klefts.