::pulls out both of arse_hat's eyes::

gppd thinf I;m a gppd tpuch ty[ist.

my guess? Political disagreement = sleeping with somebody's (or more than one somebody's) husband, and plucking out eye = cutting off all her hair and shunning her.

An eye may have been lost somehow, somewhere along the line, and the two stories conflated and embroidered to become the stuff of family legend. I have no way to know for certain, of course, but I can almost promise you that whatever happened it wasn't something political, because:

A) The women wouldn't have involved themselves much with politics, and wouldn't have been allowed a voice anyway

B) Greece was still under Ottoman rule, and nobody had much political power except as it was dispensed by the Turks

C) The de facto leader of any village at that time would have been the priest and perhaps one or two of the richest villagers. Of course there would have been squabbles about this or that, but this context, combined with "B" means there wasn't a lot of wiggle room for huge political conflict.

So, the likeliest reasons for some attack on an individual woman would have been family feud, outright fight with another woman, or my scenario above. Assuming the above scenario, I think something like eye-plucking would have been incredibly extreme. The only thing that I can imagine in such a case, might be in an instance where she messed around with another woman's husband, and the wronged woman then committed suicide or something.

Now this would be a different story, and I can imagine something like this possibly happening for political reasons, during the incredibly bitter Greek civil war, but then she would have to be his grandmother, not his great grandmother.

HAH! "sleeping with somebody's (or more than one somebody's) husband" That was my first thought!

In related news ...

That happens all the time! It's insane.