The Greek War of Independence.

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For those interested to read about the Greek War of Independence...


This was taken from my website HellenicLife.net giving a good insight on how the Greece won her independence. Its a good article and have collected notes from different books that I have read and created it off them. This is what happen I obviously did not put everything down it would be impossible but regardless this is a good short version of it.

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Greeks under Turkish Rule

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottomans life for Hellenes changed drastically. Some would say it was the evil era for Hellas and her people. During the rule of the Ottomans, Greeks suffered terribly at the hands of these Turks. Many Greek men, women and children where slaughtered like cattle. Their long lived memories of Hellas diminished. This was a new era for the Greeks of Greece and Asia Minor, 400 years of complete darkness. Thankfully the Greek Orthodox Church was able to keep our people together during those terrible times.
Life for the Greeks under the foreign occupation was a constant nightmare for almost 400 years. Not knowing if they would survive another day or what other tortures awaited them and their people. Thousands of churches , monuments, literature, icons where completely destroyed. Also the Christians who did not convert had to pay heavy taxes to their savage rulers. It would not be hard to believe that's some Greeks most likely converted to Islam in order to spare themselves a harsh life for themselves and their children. In fact in order to give in depth it would impossible for me to put down every detail surrounding all the events for under those 400 years.

One of the biggest issues which incensed the Greeks during the times of Ottoman rule was heavy taxation. Foreigners who visited Greece heard complaints from them about the burden of taxes, also known as the harach (non Muslim tax) or poll tax. During the centuries of this foreign occupation the Greek peasants mostly got the worst of it. They worked as tenants owned by a land lord or by the state. The taxes that they paid was very heavy, and failure to pay lead to either enslavement or death. In addition all the Greeks had to pay the central government taxes at three different levels according to their income. In the sixteenth century conditions worsened for the Greeks. Tax collection was increasingly heavy on the farmers. They paid the bid price over to the treasury, and kept for himself all the taxes he collected. The treasurer could also sell on the tax farming rights at a profit to sub contractors who then needed to be even more rapacious. Tax farmers were know for taking taxes to the maximum, legally or otherwise, from their victims in order to realize their profit. The system became increasingly oppressive. Once it was known that an area was profitable, the tax farming rights were sold for ever higher sums, requiring harsher payments from the peasants.

In the years preceding the revolution, Ali Pasha was a perfect example of a local potentate who increased his private estates at the expense of the long suffering peasants. His plan was sneak but effective. He would establish a foothold in a village by purchasing land, sometimes simply taking as his right. The next step was to put pressure on other villagers to sell to him or by stealing their land. He then would drive them into higher debt at high interest rates through extraordinary measures, and he would set his Albanian soldiers in their houses as a warning. When the peasants could no longer pay their debts, Ali made the village his chiftlik and the villagers in effect his tithe-paying serfs. Ali Pasha and his sons eventually controlled, by one count around, 915 chiftliks. Some areas were favored because the population was on a rise, but Mistra in the Peloponnesus, with a population of 3,000 had to pay the poll tax for 8,500, and the Cycladic island of Milos between 2,000 and 3,000 had to pay for 16,000, and injustice that the Turks took to an extreme. The peasants had no choice but to either flee to the mountains, or took to brigandage, creating a vicious spiral in the Ottoman administration. But as the community population fell, those villagers left the tax burden increased to make up the difference. By the end of the eighteenth century deserted villages were a common site.

Another harsh reality for the Greeks at the time, which still is runs in their national consciousness, was the Turkish system of devshirme: the forcible conscription of young men and their removal to Istanbul ( Constantinople) , to join the imperial service , especially in a military role as jannisaries. From the early days of the Ottoman empire its army had been greatly improved by slave recruits, non Muslim captives from wars of expansion, but as the empire's expansion slowed the source of its troops declined. To make the difference the Ottomans created a compulsory conscription, called devshirme by the Turks and pedhomazoma, or child collection, by the Greeks. Under this system non Muslim youth were forcibly taken as recruits for the so called new troops, the janissaries, which they were brainwashed and converted to Muslim. They became the Sultans personal bodyguard an army.

In 1601 Mehmed III called for a devhirme in Roumeli, northern Greece, ordering the governor-general to make sure that the most good looking, well bodied and spirited youths of the infidels between fifteen and twenty years of age be forcibly taken and sent to the janissary units. The officers in charge of that process were totally ruthless. The infidel parents or anybody else who resisted the surrender of their children, were usually beheaded an then hung in front of their house gate, their blood being considered of no importance. At around 1666 Mehmed IV, increased the age range from 10-20 years old as opposed from 15-20. By the turn of the seventeenth century resistance grew to the devshirme and had become open and violent. In 1705 a Turkish official sent to a northern Greek town of Naoussa to draft fifty new janissaries was killed. The leaders to the resistance fled to the hills but most of them were caught and beheaded in front of all the villagers as an example and then being sent to the governor of Thessalonica. This system was forever and still remembered by all Greeks.

At the end of the eighteenth century the Greeks have been ruled by the Ottoman Empires for 300 years. The Greeks still considered Turks barbarians and foreign interlopers whose occupation of their country would eventually some day have to end. During that same period ideas from abroad began to circulate in Greece.

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Forefathers of Greek Independence

Two individuals who are referred to most often with the first stirrings of the Greek ideas of independence, are Adhamantios Korais and Rigas Phereos. Rigas was born in 1757 in the Thessalian village of Velstino. After an impressive scholastic career Rigas went at the age of 23 to Wallachian in today's Romania, where he became secretary first to the principality's governor and then to an Austrian baron who brought him to Vienna for the first time in 1790. In Vienna where Rigas spent much of his years, provided both the stimulus and the opportunity for the expression of his revolutionary ideas. There was a large Greek community in Vienna, mainly merchants and students of science, who would meet at the city's Taverna ton Ellinon. Rigas had his revolutionary ideas printed in a Greek newspaper known as Ephimeris , and his revolutionary writings had to be printed secretly at night. He is known for two of his works dating from 1797, first a revolutionary hymn including an oath against tyranny which was used as hymn, and in a more philosophical a statement of the rights of man, combined with a proposed constitution for a new Greek republic.

The value of Riga's contribution to the Greek cause was that he took the principles underlying the American and French revolutionary declarations and adapted them for Greece. With the help of his compatriots in Vienna, he was able to print and distribute his calls for revolt. Three thousand copies of the revolutionary declaration, constitution and hymn were produced in October 1797, and the hymn was sung over the next two decades throughout the Greek Orthodox world, even it was said in the Turkish capital. While Rigas remained in Vienna had be able to escape the attention of the autocratic and anti revolutionary Austrian authorities. That he eventually fell into their hands was a matter of mischance and betrayal. In December 1797 Rigas with his faithful companion and biographer Perrevos set out for Trieste, sending ahead a friend a letter and boxes containing copies of all his writings, the subversive ones at the bottom. The friend was away, but his business partner opened the letter and boxes and handed them over to the Austrian authorities. When Rigas arrived at Trieste he was arrested. Seventeen others were arrested with Rigas as members of a conspiratorial brotherhood and sent to Vienna for interrogation. Those with Austrian and Russian nationality were expelled from Austria. Rigas was handed over to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade, where on the night of June 24 1798 all were murdered on orders from Constantinople and their bodies into the river Sava, drowned while trying to escape, his captors said that a story from their executioners, Rigas cried out " This is how brave men die. I have sown, the time will come when my country will gather the harvest". In the next Rigas was appropriated by the evil filthy Communist groups resistance to German wartime occupation, and his name was used by the secret society of students opposed to Greece's military dictatorship of 1967-1974.

Adhamantios Korais was born in Smyrna, modern Izmir, in 1748. His youth tells us in his autobiography, was spent in efforts to get an education in a city where at the time it was almost impossible. The Greek school in Smyrna, only recently established, had a single teacher who provided very poor teaching, accompanied by frequent beating. Languages were Korais passion. He found himself teachers of Italian and French, but they differed from his Greek teacher, he says, only in that they taught him without beatings. Latin could not be learned because the only teachers were the Jesuits, hated for their proselytising. Learning Arabic would mean a Turkish teacher, a prospect which he could not stomach. When Korais family silk business sent him to Amsterdam for six years in his twenties he continued his education there. After an unhappy return to Smyrna, devastated not long before by an earthquake and fire in which the family house was destroyed, he went in 1782 to Montpellier in southern France for six years the study of medicine, and reached Paris in 1788 at the age of 40, his period of self education at last completed.

Besides his passion for learning, two other factors dominated Korais's youth, ill health and hatred for Turks. Of his health he says " After my thirteenth year I began to spit blood, and I spat it incessantly until my twentieth year. From that time I did not cease spitting blood, but at long intervals, however, until my sixtieth year. For all this neither my unhealthy condition, nor the fear of worsening it, stood in the way of my thirst of knowledge. " Of his hatred of the Turks he says that it had been nourished in his soul since birth and that the devastation of Smyrna " transformed my abhorrence of living together with Turks into such a melancholy that I was in danger of falling into genuine madness. For Rigas some Turks were potential allies, for Korais all Turks were obviously and with good reason loathed.

To earn a living like Rigas Korais he worked as a translator, mainly from the ancient or the later Hellenistic Greek into French. He was also keen to alert the French to the situation in Greece, as he did in his Memoire sur l'etat actuel de la civilisation en Grece, delivered to an attentive human rights society in 1803. His main effort was the production of his Greek Library, translations of ancient Greek authors into a form of modern Greek, which eventually reached some thirty volumes, each preceded by an introduction. These introductions, which he called Impromptu Thoughts, were not simply scholarly essays , but were used by Korais to make rousing personal appeals to fellow countrymen. Such statements was intended of course, for a far wider audience that the learned, and here Korais fell into a difficult moment, he did not know in which form language to write. The written and spoken language had begun to diverge from around 300 B.C. The archaic written form, the only one considered suitable for serious works, had remained very close to its ancient classical ancestor, while the demotic spoken form had developed along paths of its own, generally simplifying grammar and syntax and incorporating foreign word. The spoken form was understood by all , and the written only by the educated. Korais was not a innovator but was certainly a trail blazer in the development of a new, more accesible Greek. which is called katharevousa or purged. It was largely based on the structure of the spoken variety, but retained many ancient features and rejected foreign importations.

Korais main preoccupation was with education. It had been the basis of the French Revolution, he believed. He also attributed military success to education, the amazing French victories were the result of learning, he quoted. He encouraged rich Greeks to multiply throughout Greece schools and libraries, at common expense send promising youths to Europe, that they may bring her benefits back to you; and entrust to them the education of our people. When in 1802 the people of Souli in north west Greece were in the last stages of their resistance to the attacks of Ali Pasha, he advised them, as Albanian speakers: "When you have a little peace, bring to your country a teacher to instruct your dear children in the Greek tongue. When the warriors of Souli learn from what ancestors they have sprung, nobody will be able to defeat them, either by guile or by force." Education would ensure not only the achievement of independence but also the establishment of a proper constitution for a new state. But if education was essential to the success of a revolution, and the process of reviving and reinvigorating Greek education was only beginning in the first years of the nineteenth century, it followed for Korais that revolution must wait, in his view till 1850 or later. He held his position firm, expressing it well before the revolution.

Korais despised many foreign countries with good reason. First on list of antithapies were , of course, the Turks, "that race of sodomites". The other European powers, always excepting France, fared little better. He suspected Russia of "pushing us forward to tame the wild beast so that they can then strike the final blow", leading to a Greece occupied by Cossacks. The English " uncircumcised Turks" were to be distrusted because they too were simply pursuing their own interests. Special ire was reserved for the church even though Korais was devout.

Korais wanted liberation to come much later. But each was a force for change by disseminating Enlightenment ideas, by articulating a commitment to a regenerated nation, and by the passionate rhetoric each used to advocate it. It is that commitment which is symbolized by their supportive hands ready to raise to her feet the suffering maiden Greece.

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Philiki Eteria

In September 1814 three expatriate Greeks in the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa set up a secret society whose aim was both simple and visionary, the liberation of Greece. The names of the three founders were Skouphas, Tsakalov and Xanthos, and the society was given the bland name of Philiki Eteria or Friendly Association. All had been born in Greece but had left to seek fortunes in the Greek trading communities abroad. Rigas was said to have founded an Eteria of this sort in Vienna in the 1790's but it has never proven. In 1809 Greeks in Paris set up a mutual help group for Greeks in France, and its members were rich enough for the badge of membership to be a gold ring engraved with the society's symbol. Tasakalov one of the co founders of the Philiki Eteria, joined this association while briefly in Paris as a student.

Nikolaos Skouphas, regarded as first among equals of the trio, was born in 1779 in a village near Arta, and had worked at various times as an apothecary, a commercial secretary and a hatter. Emmanuel Xanthos, the eldest of the three, was born in 1772 in Patmos, and by 1810, at the age of 38, had risen no higher than clerk to a merchant in Odessa. Two years later set up in Constantinople, with three merchants from Iannina, a company to trade in olive oil but the company failed. While visiting Levkas, Xanthos had been initiated into the Freemasons, as a result of which, he say in his memoirs, he immediately lighted upon the idea that it would be possible to found a secret society on the lines of that of the Freemasons, having as a basis the union of all the kapetnaioi of the armatoloi, and other leaders of all classes of Greeks, whether in Greece or in other parts , with the object of bringing about, in time, the liberation of the fatherland (patrida). Athanasios Tsakalov, born in Iannina in 1788, was the youngest and perhaps best educated of the three, and brought to the society his knowledge of the Paris group.

The first aim of the Philiki Eteria had to be survival, and the betrayal and death of Rigas made it clear that this meant keeping the society a secret. They developed a number of secret codes for each other for communication. To develop their society the founders need two things, members and money. The key to how they accomplished that was a mystery. The only general objective was for one day to liberate their country, and since they were not that big they had to pose bigger than what they were. Initiations to the organization varied upon the given title to the individual, and each had to swear loyalty and secrecy to the organization, failure to do so usually resulted in death as an example Nikolaos Galatis, a young man from Ithaca who was to cause the society a great deal of trouble until he was erased from the scene. By 1816 after two years of operation, the three founders had enrolled no more than twenty members, and in 1817 their numbers reached only forty two. But eventually all that would change.

The basic reason for such a low membership was for the fact that the founders could not break into Greek society on Greek soil since they were themselves expatriates, and could not break into Greek society abroad since they were of a lower class than the prosperous Greek merchants of the Diaspora. Those limited members who joined were the same like the three founders, part of the most recent wave of financially insecure émigrés. In the established Greek communities abroad, the society was able to recruit only a handful of members in Italy, one in Vienna, and none at all in London, Paris, Marseilles or Amsterdam. When Skouphas attempted to enroll Greeks in Russia they laughed at him and send him on his way. Skouphas and Tsakalov in September of 1814 within a month of arriving in Moscow they had enrolled Georgios Sekeris, whose rich brother Panayiotis was later to become a major contributor of money to the society. Skouphas, back in Odessa in 1816 met four Greek military captains from the Peloponnesus who had served in the Russian army during Russia's occupation of the Ionian islands and were on their way to St Petersburg to try to secure their arrears of pay through Kapodistrias. Skouphas initiated them into the society, and the ex soldiers vigorously promoted it, no doubt using the recruiting sergeant's methods of persuasion. One of these captains, Anagnostaras, became the society's most successful recruiter, with forty nine new members to his credit by the time the revolution began. However , it was Skouphas who made not so good moves by initiating Nikolaos Galatis.

By the end of 1817 Eteria was in a desperate state, far too few members, and far too little money. During the winter and spring of 1817-18 in Constantinople the three founders discussed what to do next. Tsakalov was at first in favor of giving up the plan and disabling the Eteria, but by the end of their discussions the leaders had worked out a program that was a good deal more realistic and practical than any they had devised before. First they established headquarters which was Xanthos house in Constantinople. Skouphas was entrusted in fundraising , and in May 1818 Panayiotis Skeris, elder brother of the very first initiate Gerogios Sekeris, contributed 10,000 piastres, more that double the whole amount raised by the society since its creation, and he was awarded membership of the Surpreme Council. By August he donated another 25,000 piastres with promises of more. Others followed Skeris lead and finally the Council decided that they could no longer pretend that some unnamed great man, and behind him great power, was at the head of the society. The time had come to make a formal and explicit offer of the leadership to a Greek of distinction who had the backing of a major nation.

The obvious candidate for leadership to the society was the Tsar's foreign minister Iannis Kapodistrias. Kapodistrias was a Greek born in Corfu 1n 1776, into a distinguished family whose forebears had come to the Ionian islands from Italy in the fourteenth century. As a young man Kapodistrias was prominent in politics of Ionian islands, and won the respect of the Russians during their occupation. In 1808 he was invited to St Petersburg to become one of the many non Russians in the Tsar's foreign ministry, and rose rapidly. In 1815 the Tsar appointed Kapodistrias as foreign minister jointly with the German Count Nesselrode. Xanthos mission was not in fact to offer the leadership of the Eteria to Kapodistrias. Some two year earlier in 1816 the maverick Galatis had been enrolled into the society by Skouphas, who was impressed by his claims to be a count and a relation to Kapodistrias. When Galatis offered Kapodistrias this position in the Philiki Eteria he was immediately dismissed. Another mission to Kapodistrias immediately preceded Xanthos visit. A member by the name of Petrobey Mavromixalis the Maniot leader arrived in St Petersburg in late 1819 with letters from Petrobey asking, innocently enough, for funds to support a school in the Mani, but also with an oral message in which it was clearly assumed that Kapodistrias was the leader of the Eteria. Kapodistrias wrote a long and careful letter to Petrobey disabusing him of this assumption. Kamarinos was shocked to learn the truth, and on his return to Constantinople caused so much trouble by revealing what he knew that he too, like Galatis, was killed.

Xanthos now tried to persuade Kapodistrias to take leadership of the Eteria. Skouphas had died in July 1818, and Xanthos was the elder of the Eteria now. Xanthos arrived in the Russian capital in January 1820. His mission was delicate. Kapodistrias answer was again no. For a second time Xanthos visited Kapodistrias again and he explained to him that it was impossible for the Greeks to remain under tyranny, that the revolution was inevitable, and that because they had need of a leader it was not right for him, as a Greek held in high esteem by them and many others, to remain indifferent, and so on. But the latter repeated that he could not become involved for the above reasons and that if the axiom knew of other means to carry out their object, let them use them. The final sentence about other means, even if vague, was what Xanthos had been angling for. At last he had go it.

The obvious alternative candidate was Alexandros Ypsilantes , a gallant soldier who had lost an arm in Russian service, who was an aide-decamp of the Tsar and whose two brothers were already members of the Eteria. At a first meeting with Xanthos spoke about the conditions for the Greeks and Ypsilantes response was " If I knew that my compatriots had need of me, and thought that I could contribute to their well-being, I say to you honestly that I would gladly make any sacrifice, even of my wealth and of myself for them. At a second meeting the next day Xanthos made offer to Ypsilantes , and Ypsilantes enthusiastically agreed. His position was confirmed in a document that he and Xanthos signed on April 24 1820.

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Greeks Take Action

So at last the Philiki Eteria had found a leader for the society Alexandros Ypsilantes. The first step now was to discover what support he might expect from Russia, that is from Kapodistrias and from the Tsar. Kapodistrias in his own account urged extreme caution, saying " Those drawing up such plans are most guilty and it is they who are driving Greece to calamity. They are wretched hucksters destroyed by their own evil conduct and now taking money from simple souls in the name of the fatherland they do not posses. They want you in their conspiracy to inspire trust in their operations. I repeat, be on your guard against these men." Kapodistrias also refused to allow Ypsilantes an interview with the Tsar, and Ypsilantes had to contrive the meeting himself, coming across the Tsar as if by chance while he walking in the garden of the summer palace at Starker Selo. Ypsilantes tried to talk to him about the plight of the Greeks, but the Tsar would go no further than to say" You are young and eager, as always my friend, but you can see that Europe is in peace." The tone was genial, but the message was clear, do nothing to disturb the peace of Europe. It was obvious to Ypsilantes that Greece was on her own , and that she would have no allies in the fight for freedom.

Ypsilantes had from the start and idea of the revolt to begin in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, but by October 1820, at the time of the Izmail proclamation, he had changed his mind and announced that the revolution should be launched in the Peloponnesus before the end of the year. But his contacts told Ypsilantes that Peloponnesus was not yet prepared for the revolt so therefore Ypsilantes had no choice but to follow his first idea. More importantly, Ypsilantes forces, if gathered in south west Russia, were only the width of a river from Moldavia, but would need complex and risky transport to reach the Peloponnesus. Ypsilantes also hoped that immediate neighbors of the principalities, the Serbs and the Bulgarians, would join the rising, but his hopes came to nothing. It was therefore unlikely, on any realistic view, that Ypsilantes would receive support for the Greek cause from the people of the principalities, the poor had every reason to hate their Greek overlords and the rich had no indication to changer their comfortable and cultivated lives. But one supporter was the governor of Moldavia. Michael Soutsos, ruling from the capital Iasi. He seemed an enthusiastic member of the Philiki Eteria and offered the society substantial sums of money, but he may not have been as committed to Ypsilantes cause as he appeared. Neroulos, his first minister, recorded that Soutsos warned the Turkish foreign minister of Ypsilantes imminent entry into Moldavia and asked for instructions. This was a prudent move, if Ypsilantes succeeded Soutsos could ignore the instructions, and if Ypsilantes failed, Soutsos could claim to have been a loyal servant of the Porte throughout.

Alexander Soutsos suddenly became ill perhaps poisoned by the Eteria, and on his deathbed setup a caretaker government of native nobles or boyears. These saw this interregnum as an opportunity to establish Wallachian rights, in particular the right to be governed by a native prince rather than a Greek. At the end a government's leader commander by the name of Theodore Vladimirescu was sent into western Wallachia, to put down disturbances there, but in fact with instructions to create a disturbance of his own, aimed at inciting the local inhabitants and boyars against the Greeks. Vladimirescu's private motive, however, was to make himself prince of an independent Wallachia. His game was thus a double one from the start, and its increasing deceptions finally undid him.

In December 1829 Alexandros Ypsilantes moved his headquarters north to Kishinve, the Russian town closest to the Moldavian capital Iasi, and on March 6 1821 crossed the river Pruth at the border settlement of Skulyany. He was accompanied only by two of his younger brothers, and handful of others including servants. On the same day that they crossed the Pruth Ypsilantes and his party , with a troop of 200 cavalry sent out from Iasi to escort them, entered the city half an hour after sunset. Ypsilantes first proclamation from Iasi expressed no doubts about the success of his venture. Running to well over a thousand words, it recalled again the heroes of antiquity and claimed that the descendants of Athens ancient Persia, the barbarous and inhuman Turks ( who in fact have nothing to do with Persians, Turks are known to be descendants of the mongles) we today, with very little effort, are about to annihilate completely." Ypsilantes no longer looked for foreign assistance, as in his proclamation of the previous October, but now looked to the enlightened peoples of Europe and hoped that " we will achiever their support and help". In a clear reference to Russia, he said: " Move, O friends, and you will see a might empire defend our right." But that never happen. In that same day he issued his proclamation from Iasi he sent a letter to the Tsar in a final attempt to turn his hopes of Russian support into reality; " Will you, Sire, abandon the Greeks to their fate, when single word from you can deliver them from the most monstrous tyranny and save them from the horrors of a long and terrible struggle?"

Things got off to a terrible start. At Galatz, some 120 miles south of Iasi, supporters of Ypsilantes, led by Vasilios Karavias, killed the local Turkish commander and his men, and murdered the Turkish merchants in the town. Karavias was rewarded with appointment as one of Ypsilantes two battalion commanders, and was to prove nothing but trouble throughout the campaign. A second assault took place at Iasi, where the governor Michael Soutso persuaded the Turkish guard of about fifty men to disarm, promising them security of life and property. When the news of the Galatz slaughter arrived, the promise was disregarded and these Turks too were killed. This provoked the Turks to retaliation. Ypsilantes moved towards Bucharest but not quickly enough, and it was a full month before he reached the outskirts of the city in early April. He was accompanied by a force of about 2,000 including 800 horseman and a body of 500 young Greeks from outside the principalities, designated the Sacred Battalion in memory of the picked troops of fourth century B.C. Thebes. These young men with their black uniforms and death's head cap badges formed a spectacular but wholly inexperienced part of Ypsilantes forces. It was during Ypsilantes march towards Bucharest when the Peloponnesus rose against the Turks, though it was some time before Ypsilantes had news of it. When he reached Bucharest he found that Vladimirescu had seized control of the city ahead of him. Vladimirescu had left Bucharest at the end of January, ostensibly to restore order in the west of Wallachia. Before he had gone far he learned that the ailing governor, Alexander Soutsos died, which emboldened him to issue a proclamation to the Wallachians. This called on them to assemble, at a place to be announced, with whatever weapons they had, and stated that his movement was against the government of the phanariot Greeks ( the dragons that swallow us alive) and not against the Turks. A petition that he sent to the Sultan at Constantinople at the same time, assuring the Sultan of his loyalty and asking only for a commissioner to investigate complaints, made his conciliatory attitude to the Turks even clearer. A break with Ypsilantes was becoming inevitable.

When news of Ypsilantes rising reached the conference Kapodistrias was said to have been like a man struck by a thunderbolt, probably because he realized that the Tsar would now disown Ypsilantes rising explicitly and publicly, and that he as foreign minister would have to help the Tsar to do so. Thus it fell to Kapodistrias to draft the Tsar's severe response. This expressed the Tsar's sorrow at Ypsilantes abandonment of the precepts of religion and morality, condemned Ypsilantes obscure devices and shady plots, especially his implication of Russian support, and ordered him to withdraw at once from the principalities, where the Tsar would give him no support and would in no way intervene. Ypsilantes venture was now doomed and ,as well as the blows inflicted by denunciations from the church and the Tsar, the Turks were preparing to move against him from their fortresses on the southern bank of the Danube. Vladimirescu, who, as Ypsilantes learned from intercepted dispatches, was now negotiating with the Turks, offering them military help in return for the coveted governorship of Wallachia. Ypsilantes now banned from Russian soil, could escape only northwards to the hardly more welcoming territory of Austria, and feared the Vladimirescu's forces would cut off his northern route while the Turks pressed him from the south.

Vladimirescu's harsh discipline had made him increasingly unpopular with his officers and men alike. Some of these officers, sympathetic to the Eteria and outraged by their commander's execution of one of their own number, engineered a public confrontation between Vladimirescu and Iorgaki Olimpiotis, who was now firmly in Ypsilantes camp and intent on preventing Vladimirescu blocking the route to the north. During a meeting Olimpiots publicly announced Vladimirescu who supposedly supported the Eteria and also Valdimirescu's later comprising letters to the Turks. Vladimirescu was seized and taken to Ypsilantes camp, and two nights later was brutally executed by the sabres of Ypsilantes two officers, one of them Karavias, who had in the first days of the uprising demonstrated his brutality at Galatz.

No the route to north was open. Ypsilantes forces now which consisted of Vladimirescu's men of about 2,500 cavalry, and an infantry of some 3,000 to 4,000 local militia plus the 500 youth Sacred Battalion under Ypsilantes younger brother Nicholas and a body of 500 cavalry under Karavias, moved south from Rimnicu and trapped 800 Turkish soldiers in the village of Dragasani. Rain had been incessant that day, and Iorgakis' men were exhausted by a long march over sodden ground he postponed the attack on the heavily outnumbered Turks until the next day. Karavias however, eager to attack persuaded Nicholas Ypsilantes to lead the Sacred Battalion into battle at once, promising support from his cavalry. The young men of the Battalion, exhausted by their march as well, and also no experience in battle whatsoever, stumbled forward and the Turkish cavalry turned and fled. Iorgaki led a counter attack in the course of which his horse was shot from under him, and rescued the standard of the Sacred Battalion and a hundred of their number. The remaining 400 lay dead in a muddy field cut to pieces in a few minutes, and the single direct engagement of Ypsilantes forces with the Turks ended in a devastating defeat. Also among the dead was Tsakalov, one of the founders of the Philiki Eteria.

Ypsilantes fearing for his life and betrayal from his own officers , fled to Austria with his two brothers, four other officers and seven of his closest friends disguised as servants. There he issued a final proclamation, antedated to before his flight so that it could be read as if he was still in his command of his troops and prepared to fight and die with them. Ypsilantes praised the dead of the Sacred Battalion, and those friends who have shown him loyalty and honesty to the last. Ypsilantes was arrested on crossing the frontier and imprisoned by the Austrians at Mohacs, then reputedly one of the unhealthiest places in Hungary. He remained in prison until 1827, when he was released with his health broken, and he died in the following year. This fiasco proved that their would be no pan Balkan rising against the Ottoman empire. Ypsilantes is honored as one of the first martyrs in the Greek Independence.

[Prokomenos]

The War Begins

The Greek revolution broke out in a number of different locations during the later part of March 1821. There were four towns that its thought that revolution actually first started. First Areopolis in the southern part of Peloponnesus and a hereditary stronghold of the Mavromixalis family, Kalamata in the outer Mani, where Petrobey and other leaders soon assembled, Vostitsa on the Gulf of Corinth, where the important pre revolutionary meeting had been held and Kalavrita in the hills high above Vostitsa, close to the monastery of Ayia Lavra where Pouqeville set hit his dramatic story. The first outbreak of the revolution is the legendary raising of the standard at Ayia Lavra on March 25 old style, which is April 6 new style, but the Greeks adopted it for March 25 old style, which the annual celebrations are, strictly always twelve days early.

Outside Kalamata armed Greeks began to assemble from 20 March onwards, a force under Papaphlessas on one side of the town, and on the other 2,000 men under the command of Kolokotronis and the heads of the Mani's leading families. Kolokotronis described their progress, "As we went along all the Greeks showed the greatest enthusiasm, they came out and met us everywhere, carrying the sacred icons, with the priests chanting supplications and thanks giving's to God. Once I could not forebear weeping, on account of the ardor which I beheld. So we went on, followed by crowds. when we came to the bridge of Kalamata we exchanged greetings, and I marched forward." On 23 March the Turks of Kalamata, faced these overwhelming forces, surrendered and then were executed. The capitulation was followed by a great celebration at Kalamata's main church. The victorious Greek leaders immediately set up Seneta of Messenia, and Petrobey was proclaimed bother leader of this senate and commander in chief of the Spartan forces. The Greeks were now united Petrobey proclaimed.

At Vostitsa the Turks, hearing rumors that the Greeks have finally had enough of 400 years of illegal occupation, their people murdered and enslaved and have started the uprising, took refuge in the inland town of Salona, modern Amphissa. The Greeks under Londos did not chase them, and on a date which was probably no later than 23 March, when Kalamata fell, Londos raised over the town a Greek flag of a black cross on a red background. Vostistsa was one of the first towns to be liberated from Ottoman control. At Kalavrita matters were resolved as well. On March 21 a force of 600 Greeks compelled the Turks to take refuge in their fortified buildings, and on the 26th the Turks surrendered. The Greek losses at Kalavrita were reported as two killed and three wounded, including one of their commanders, while the gain was a hundred or so guns to increase their own arsenal. In these four towns the Greeks were very successful.

The rising of Patras

The rising of Patras in the last days of March was a long battle. Patras contained around 18,000 inhabitants, two thirds were Greek. There had been a fortress on the high ground north-east of Patras for over a thousand years. By the middle of March the Turks who were illegally living in Patras were moving there families and possessions into the citadel, and the Greeks were hiding their property or shipping it off to the Ionian islands. The Greeks were also arming themselves preparing for what was to come. The spark that ignited the revolt came, as it were, from a burning house. On March 23 the Turks tried to search the house of a leading Greek citizen of Patras on su****ion that he was hiding weapons, and finding the doors barred they set on the house on fire. The flames spread quickly destroying some 200 houses in the twelve hours, and street fighting broke out between Greeks and Turks. Many Greeks who had withdrawn to the hills for fear of their lives by the Turkish army could see the chaos and they decided to turn back to help their fellow Greek brothers.

The street fighting escalated in siege warfare. The Turks barricaded themselves in the fortress, from which they commanded the town, and the Greeks brought up six small-caliber guns to a house some forty yards from the castle walls. They both were attacking each other with no success. The fortress was impregnatable. Both sides were anxiously awaiting reinforcements, and help for the Greeks first arrived. On the evening of March 25, Bishop Yermanos having put behind him the doubts expressed at the Vostitsa conference, arrived on the plain outside Patras with a party including Andreas Londos and a force of 200 men, and next morning entered the town. The Turks were now shut up in the citadel of Patras, while the town was held by some 5,000 angry avenging Greeks. The Greeks cut off the water supply to the fortress hoping that would force the Turks to eventually surrender, only a few did but most remained.

Turkish reinforcements arrived under the leadership of Yussuf on 3 April on Palm Sunday and the Greeks had begun preperations to celebrate their religious festival. Instead, surprised in their beds by Yussu's dawn arrival, all who could took flight retreated. With the Greeks in retreat Yussuf gave orders, on the day after his arrival, for the houses of the Greek leaders to be set on fire, thus restarting the conflagration of ten days before. Around 700 houses were burned down. The Turkish troops went on a rampage, and about forty Greeks were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the streets, a few of the Greeks managed to stay alive by taking shelter in the foreign consulates. One by the name of Green refused to take in a number of the Greeks , his claim was that their was no room. He was labeled a philoturko. Bishop Yermanos wrote " For the sake of plunder, and because of his basic ill-will towards the Greeks, Green showed every sort of inhumanity in this situation, and when defenseless women with infant children sought refuge in his consulate he turned them away and shut them out." Green later defied the English naval blockade to sell supplies to the Turks , and was accused in England of doing so for personal rather than company profit.

The struggle in Patras continued, the Greeks periodically reoccupying the town and trying to capture the fortress, the Turks periodically being reinforced and holding out. By the end of 1821 the town was a wasteland, with only ten or twelve houses of the original 4,000 still undamaged. The citadel of Patras remained occupied by the Turks throughout the war, as did the Castle of Roumeli and the Morea, and the three strongholds formed a compact triangular bridgehead which gave the Turkish troops vital access to the heartland of Greek resistance.

[Prokomenos]

Battle of Valtetsi

In the head of the early days of the revolution Theodoros Kolokotronis had marched triumphantly into Kalamata through cheering crowds, but in the weeks immediately following few things went right for him. On the day after the taking of Kalamata Kolokotronis headed north to Karitena, an isolated village on a rocky outcrop in the central Peloponnesus some twenty miles west of Tripolis, where a group of Turks was besieged in the village's small fortress. The Turks in Tripolis learned that their compatriots were under siege in Karitena and sent out a force of 3,000 infantry and cavalry to relieve them. Kolokotronis stationed himself on hill with his telescope, which he would let nobody else use, to warn of the approach of the Turkish forces, but when he gave the signal the Greeks turned and fled. Kolokotronis was left alone, and had to hide in the trees as a Turkish unit passed. When he rejoined his fellow captains they were moving away to besiege the south-western fortresses of Methoni, Koroni and Navarino, but Kolokotronis who consistently argued for the capture of Tripolis first, refused. " I shall stay here on these hills where the very birds know me, better that they my neighbors, should eat me that any others." At that point Kolokotronis was is in his darkest hour but that would not last long.

Kolokotronis' despair was short lived, and he was soon back with Greek forces around Tripolis. His first task was to rebuild the army of the central Peloponnesus, on a sounder basis so that it did not vanish at the first threat. The forces which had gathered around Karitena and had now dispersed had been chaotic. The assembly was like a village carnival, said one observer. The men stayed with their own family or group, under no overall authority. Their weapons were knives, spits and anything else which can be used as a weapon. The problem was that no Greek in those villages were used to this kind of warfare with a one in command. They usually fought in a single clan and ambush their target and disappear. Kolokotronis now began to introduce some system into the disorder. Officers were appointed formally, with written commissions. A central commissariat was developed. Recruiting methods were hard, Kolokotronis son Panos was sent out with orders to burn the houses of those who would not rise, and to distribute their possessions to the revolutionary forces. Only a few Greek had served in an organized army such as Kolokotronis so it was hard to get the army organized but in the end he managed and he was officially declared man of overall command, and in early May he was formally appointed archistratigos. Armed camps of Greeks were established in a rough semi circle of villages to the west of Tripolis, where the mountains come down to the plain, at Levidhi, Piana, Chrisovitsi, Vervena and closest of all to Tripolis, Valtetsi.

The Greek reorganization had come just in time. In mid May Mustafa Bey, the newly appointed lieutenant of the Morea, reached Tripolis from Epirus, standing in for Khurshid , who was still away besieging Iannina. This new pasha was warlike and Kolokotronis considered him a formidable enemy. The Greeks prepared to make a stand a Valtetsi. This village was in the center of the semi circle of the Greek held posts west of Tripolis, it was on a defensible hill in the plain, and it was much closer to Tripolis than the other villages, so that if the Greeks held it they would be a step nearer to the capture of Tripolis itself.

The village church of Valtetsi was now fortified, and three tambouria were build, redoubts of stone wall about three feet high, with apertures for firing and a ditch running around the inside so that the defenders heads were below the parapet. Mustafa planned a movement on Valtetsi, attacking from north and south while a smaller third force was to move behind Valtetsi to cut off the Greeks expected flight. At dawn on the morning of 24 May Kolokotronis watchers on the hills immediately above Tripolis lit their signal fires to show that Mustafa's forces had set out, and two hours later they attacked to Valtetsi fortifications. Against Turkish expectations, the Greeks did not flee but maintained their positions. Kolokotronis joined the battle from Chrisovitsi and harried and divided the Turkish forces. The Turkish cavalry were useless when trying to attack up a rocky slope against a fortified position, and the Turkish gunners were not skillful enough to lob cannon shots into the fortifications. The battle continued all day, and at nightfall both sides remained in position, each hoping that the other would have retreated by daybreak, but a dawn both sides were still in position. After an hour of further ineffectual cannon shot Mustafa began to withdraw his forces and their retreat soon degenerated into a rout, in which the Turks lost some 600 or 800, while the Greeks only lost from 50-100 soldiers. If Kolokotronis had not established some system with the Greek fighting units, the battle of Valtetsi would have been lost. Kolokotronis showed his exceptional skills as a general and showed with unity and organization between the Greeks anything was possible. Kolokotronis said in his speech to his men at the end of the battle " We must all fast, and render up thanksgivings for this day, which should be kept holy for ever, as the day upon which the Greek people made a stand, whereby our country achieved her freedom."