Captain Costentenus: The Tattooed Greek Prince

Crazy adventures, kidnapping, tattoos and a guy that looks like Zach Galifianakis, and it isn’t the film Hangover. Meet Captain Costentenus.

Djordgi Konstantinus (1833 – ?), better known as Captain George Costentenus, The Tattooed Greek Prince, The Greek Albanian and The Living Canvas Back was a late 19th century circus performer of Greek ancestry, born in Albania in the Ottoman Empire. His life, by all accounts (especially his own), was incredible and absurd. Of course, some of this is likely true… somewhere under the embellishment.

Hazy Beginnings

Was Costentenus’s mother forced to work in a harem for a Turkish pasha? Did Costentenus’s father shoot his mother in order to save her from these horrors? Was Costentenus raised in the same harem, called Fatima and dressed as a girl? Well, his biography says so, but probably not exactly. Sources generally agree on a few points. He spoke 8 languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Persian and Spanish). Additionally, Costentenus worked as an adventurer and pirate.

Captain George Costentenus

Kidnapping in Burma

In or around 1867, Costentenus was part of a 12 man mining expedition into a region now known as Myanmar (Burma) in search of gold. For reasons that vary in the telling, the Royal Burmese armed forces captured the expedition and executed 9 of the men. Subsequently, the remaining 3 men were punished by tattooing using indigo and cinnabar (mercury). In Costentenus’s retelling, the other men were an American and an Englishman, and they both died from the tattooing procedure. In contrast, other sources describe the men as an American and a Spaniard, with the American dying a few months into the punishment, and the Spaniard going blind and dying in Manila.

Costentenus received 388 symmetrically arranged and interwoven tattoos which covered his eyelids, ears (in some accounts) and genitals. The tattoos included exotic animals, geometric designs, Burmese writing and flowers.

A Tattooed Man

A Tattooed Life

Costentenus eventually made his way to freedom. It is likely he escaped with the Spaniard (if he existed). By his own account he was sold into slavery, and eventually released. He somehow arrived back in Europe and attracted the attention of medical professionals and anthropologists. Authorities noted variations in Costentenus’s narrative, but found his tattoos to be authentic representations of Burmese tattooing. Writing between his fingers described him as a person of poor character.

He began to exhibit himself in Europe to great success. In 1875 he traveled to the United States as part of the Centennial Exposition, the first World’s Fair to be held in the United States. At this time he gained the attention of P. T. Barnum, and began traveling with P. T. Barnum’s New and Greatest Show on Earth making a hundred dollars a day posing for spectators. Costentenus became a resident of New York in 1882, and an American citizen in 1883.

After 1894 he disappeared from records.

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