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British media outlet, The daily Telegraph recently covered the 1821 Mora massacres commited against Turk population.
Many Europeans closed their eyes on the ethnic cleansing done by greeks against Turks during 1821 greek war of Independence It is also Interesting to say that Telegraph posted This article after France threatened Britain.
Here is the article;
Warlords, no-go areas and Muslims roasted alive: the ugly truth about Greek liberation, 200 years on
In 1821, the inventors of democracy wrestled their freedom from the Turks – but did their brutal vengeance amount to ethnic cleansing?When I lived in the Black Sea port of Odessa at the turn of the century, Grecheskaya Ploshchad – Greek Square – was the city centre’s marshrutka (minibus) terminus. In winter the deep snow was shovelled away by hand to get the yellow marshrutkas in and out of the square; the rest of the year it was a friendly inferno of crowds, horns and bootleg markets.
A little rigmarole of buildings on its south-east corner fascinated me. Two storeys tall, fronted with full-height Tuscan columns in early 19th-century Russian townhouse style, the houses were set back in shadow behind a small roofed courtyard. All around, Grecheskaya sweated mercantile urgency, but quietly these former merchants’ dwellings sat there, in the confidence they had come first – and that one of them had a further significance. In the winter of 1814, at number 18, as Mark Mazower puts it, three obscure Greeks, “a commercial clerk, a former student and an artisan”, took the step that would ignite the Greek struggle for independence and eventually force at least three empires to rethink their ideas of nationhood and the European space.
Several heavyweight new books have flocked to this year’s bicentenary flag of Greek independence. Mazower’s encyclopaedic The Greek Revolution (Allen Lane, £30) starts by reminding us how imperial Britain, France, Austria, Russia and the Ottomans all took it for granted that Greece’s fate was their property. At the Congress of Vienna, the Austrian empire’s foreign minister Klemens von Metternich had denied that the Greeks were “to be found in the catalogue of nations”. The people who had given the western world its gods and a canon of myths, philosophy, art and democracy were merely Ottoman subjects.
In the Odessa townhouse, the three obscure Greeks’ formation of a Filiki Etaireia (Friendly Society) to “gather the select and brave men of the race” to work for Greece’s liberation was in part an outraged reaction to Metternich. It was an excitable and ham-fisted move, as so much of the long independence struggle would be in the 1820s, but Emmanouil Xanthos, Athanasios Tsakalof and Nikolaos Skoufas were Greeks of their time, members of an educated diaspora spread from Venice to Constantinople, which had begun to feel strongly the lack of a land to call its own: the deep folk-hurt of nationalism.
It had been a long time coming. Inspired by the German philosopher Herder’s Romanticism and stress on language and culture as the elements that form a “nation”, Greeks had to imagine a country into existence. After the fall of Constantinople and the end of Byzantium in 1453, the territory of what we now call Greece was a mishmash of Turkish administration and no-go areas regularly disrupted by war and uprising. Even in the least bloody times, for instance, the Ottoman Sultan’s writ never ran over mountainous tracts of the Mani, which stayed in the hands of impressively belligerent Maniots, or areas of the Peloponnese run by ever-shifting alliances of klephts (brigands) and armatoles – hereditary Christian chieftains – who might be running the place for the Sultan on Monday and declaring a new warlord’s fiefdom on Tuesday. Something of modern Afghanistan pervaded the whole of rural Greece.
Mazower is a fine archaeologist of the unconsidered detail, but I don’t quite believe his opening anecdote in which Tsar Alexander I confides to his wife’s maid of honour that he, like her, is a secret republican. Nor does his book get as far as being about “the making of modern Europe” (as its subtitle overplays it). He is, though, superbly subtle and thorough in his anatomy of two labyrinths: one, the social and political background to Alexander Ypsilantis, leader of the Filiki Etaireia, crossing the Pruth river in March 1821 and starting the revolt; and two, the chaotic course that over seven years took an apparently doomed uprising to its finale in the establishment of a state in which those who spoke and felt Greek could at last call themselves free in a land of their own.
Herder had written that “A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see”, and one prism through which to look at these complex histories is that of the writers invested in defending Christian Europe’s freedoms. The beginning of the end for Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean had happened as early as 1571 at the naval battle of Lepanto, at which Miguel de Cervantes fought and lost the use of his left arm. Two hundred and fifty years later, in Bessarabia, Alexander Pushkin mixed with Etairists and wrote a poem with the prophetic line: “Blood I behold; I see the feast of vengeance.” And a couple of years after Pushkin, George Gordon, Lord Byron, proved at Missolonghi that a poet’s death could catalyse the fervour of all Europe to sue for their governments’ intervention in the cause of Greek freedom.
"Mazower is also clear-sighted about the moral equivalence between Greeks and Turks. On the ground, you might look for a moral high ground among the revolutionaries in vain. Freedom or death was the Greeks’ watchword: Collective death haunted the Greek revolutionary imagination… not to fight was tantamount to a living death. Others worried about the very real threat of annihilation… Nor was this fear entirely baseless since the Sultan indicated early on that he felt within his rights in ordering the killing and enslaving of disobedient Christian populations en masse. This prospect of communal death at the hands of the Ottomans – a fear shared by Greeks in the Peloponnese, Rumeli and Asia Minor alike – was unquestionably one of the ways in which an idea of the Greek nation emerged."
The flip side is that the Greek imagination “also encompassed the mass killing of Muslims”, as a corollary of the rebirth of Orthodox Christendom – and Greek vengeance was as casually savage and vindictive as any acts the Sultan’s troops inflicted. When the Peloponnese administrative centre of Tripolitsa was stormed, the acts of massacre, amputation and roasting alive of the Turkish population were horrendous, and in the countryside the kind of inter-neighbour violence towards unarmed families is depressingly familiar to us from the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Priestly Etairists wondered how fellow Greeks could have forgotten that murder was a sin. At Missolonghi, Byron was exhausted by the violence and demands of the Souliot warriors who milled around him. It is sometimes hard to avoid the conclusion of an earlier historian, William St Clair, that the so-called Greek revolution was just “a series of opportunist massacres”.
But war is most frequently one-tenth nobility, nine-tenths bloody muddle. Without Byron and his death, and the philhellenism that, as Roderick Beaton in his all-inclusive The Greeks (Faber, £25) writes, made “so many progressive Europeans, and indeed Americans, [believe] that they, too, had a stake” in Greece’s independence struggle, that struggle – undermined by military inferiority and constantly distracted by Greek infighting – would have been far longer in creating a nation. Even the British, French and Russian crushing of the Turkish-Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827 hardly concluded the fractiousness. Another Russo-Turkish war was to come, as was Britain and France’s squabble with Russia about whether Greece should be sovereign, and the assassination of its first head of state, Capodístrias, by offended Maniots.
Greece’s “true paradise” inspired other nation-based uprisings throughout the 19th century, but the new nation was fragmented and Balkanised in its loyalties, far from having a nation’s identity, and had to be content with an imported Bavarian prince as king. A hundred years later, when the visionary reforming Eleftherios Venizelos became prime minister – his rise to power arrayed in superb detail in the first volume of Michael Llewellyn-Smith’s biography Venizelos (C Hurst & Co, £30) – Greece was also still dealing with the “humiliating provocations of the Turks”.
Another hundred years, and those provocations are just a scratch compared to what the true paradise has faced: Axis occupation, Cold War and civil war, the colonels’ dictatorship, sovereign debt crisis, a refugee crisis. In 1827, when the fearsome revolutionary Nikitaras, known as Turkophagos (“Turk-eater”), heard of the enemy fleet’s annihilation at Navarino, he wrote to his uncle Kolokotronis, “Rejoice. For today our much-beloved fatherland Greece has risen and its unbearable woes are at an end.” He was right – and like many idealists who yearn to regain their nation’s independence, he also spoke much too soon.
