Tripolitsa and Chios: The Violence in Both Directions

There is a way of writing about a war of independence that keeps only its heroes. It preserves the fireships and the sieges, the martyrs and the oaths, and lets the rest fall out of memory — the sacked towns that were not enemy strongholds, the civilians who were not combatants, the markets where the war’s captives were priced and sold. The Greek Revolution has been remembered this way for two centuries, and the remembering has required a great deal of forgetting. What follows is not an indictment of one side. It is an attempt to hold in view what the national narrative edits out: that this war ran in both directions, that atrocity was answered by atrocity, and that the mechanism of national history is not falsehood so much as selection.

Tripolitsa

The revolution’s largest single effort of 1821 ended not in a battle remembered for its valour but in a massacre. Yanni Kotsonis, whose history treats the episode as the template of national “unmixing,” fixes the scale and the season:

“The largest single mobilization of 1821 took place in the autumn around Tripolitsa.”

— Yanni Kotsonis, The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism, p. 205

What that mobilization produced was the destruction of the town’s Muslim and Jewish population. The structural meaning of the event is drawn out by John Milios, who reads it not as an excess of passion but as the working of a new political logic — the logic by which a nation defines itself by subtraction:

“any person who cannot be integrated into the nation must be necessarily expelled from the national dominion and erased from national memory”

— John Milios, Nationalism as a Claim to a State, p. 111

Erased from memory: the phrase names both the fate of the victims and the operation of the histories written afterwards. And the erasure extends to the war’s captives, who were not all killed. Kotsonis documents what happened to the women and children taken at Tripolitsa, in the flat commercial language of the sources themselves:

“Soldiers leaving the massacre of Tripolitsa offered up girls at very low prices, and travelers passed homes with Muslim girls on display, for sale. The low price was a sign of oversupply.”

— Yanni Kotsonis, The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism, p. 221

The economist’s word — oversupply — is the one the national memory cannot metabolize. It records a market, and markets have no heroes. Nor was religious office any restraint in a war organized around faith rather than ethics. Kotsonis records the bishop of Methoni, at the surrender of Neokastro, disposing of four hundred surrendered civilians in a manner no liturgy could redeem: “tired of the shooting and stabbing, he abandoned sixty surviving families or four hundred people on a small desert island where they died of exposure and thirst” (p. 205).

Chios, and the answer to it

If the war ran only one way, the destruction of Chios in 1822 would be its refutation, for that atrocity was the Ottomans’. William St. Clair describes the ruin of one of the Levant’s most flourishing communities in terms that leave no room for mitigation:

“They burst into the mastic villages and soon the whole of Chios was given over to massacre and destruction. One of the most peaceful and thriving communities in the Levant was utterly and irretrievably ruined.”

— William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free, p. 115

The image of Chios reduced to ash shocked Europe and would furnish the revolution’s most famous painting. But it did not go unanswered, and the answer belongs in the same frame. Weeks later, the Greek fireships struck back inside the harbour where the massacre had been staged. The Critical Dictionary records the reprisal that killed the Ottoman admiral with his flagship and crew:

“On June 6, 1822, Constantinos Kanaris and Andreas Pipinos dealt a severe blow to the Ottoman navy with their fireships, within the harbor of Chios.”

— eds. Kitromilides & Tsoukalas, The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary, p. 209

Atrocity, then reprisal, then further atrocity — the sequence is the war itself, not a departure from it. Nor were Greek fighters innocent of the same conduct at sea that they suffered on land. George Finlay, a veteran of the war and no friend of the Ottoman cause, recorded the Hydriots’ treatment of the passengers of a captured ship in a sentence he did not soften:

“The Hydriots murdered all on board in cold blood ; helpless old men, ladies of rank, beautiful slaves, and infant children, were butchered on the deck like cattle.”

— George Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution, p. 216

Ibrahim’s Morea, and the cost to the burners

The severest devastation of the war came with Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptian campaign in the Morea, and it too was systematic. St. Clair records that Ibrahim’s soldiers were licensed to lay waste the peninsula as they moved through it:

“His troops were permitted and encouraged to burn all the Greek towns and villages through which they passed.”

— William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free, p. 238

The captives of that campaign met the same market that Tripolitsa’s had. The Critical Dictionary records Ibrahim selecting among captured women, keeping those he wanted and distributing the rest to his officers as gifts (p. 473) — the mirror image, in the enemy’s camp, of the scenes Kotsonis documented among the victors. And the burners paid their own toll. Kotsonis totals the ruin visited on the invaders themselves: of some 24,000 Egyptians sent to the Morea by the end of 1826, “only 8,000 were still alive” (p. 309), most of the dead carried off not by battle but by disease.

To this external war the Greeks added an internal one. Twice, in 1824 and 1825, the revolution turned openly on itself in civil war, and endemic brigandage consumed its strength between times. Finlay, listing these conflicts in his own chapter syllabus beside the campaigns against the Ottomans, describes the chiefs who “caused frequent civil broils, and the whole military strength of the nation was, by this system of brigandage and anarchy, diverted from opposing the Turks” (History of the Greek Revolution, Vol. II, p. 175).

Set these records side by side and the moral shape of the war becomes clear, and clearly symmetrical. There is no side without a massacre to its name, no side whose captives were not sold, no year without its atrocity or its reprisal. The purpose of recovering these facts is not to apportion greater guilt but to notice what national history does with them. It keeps Kanaris and forgets the market at Tripolitsa; it keeps the martyrdom of Chios and forgets the deck of the Hydriot ship. The war was fought in both directions. Only the remembering runs one way.