Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History

by Charlotte M. Yonge

But the next year there was another rising all over Greece. The peasants of Attica drove the Turkish garrison out of all Athens but the Acropolis; the Suliots rose again, with secret encouragement from Ali Pasha, and hope seemed coming back. But when Omar Pasha had been sent from Constantinople with 4000 Turkish troops, he found it only too easy to rout 700 Greeks at Thermopylæ, and, advancing into Attica, he drove back the peasants, and relieved the Turkish garrison in the Acropolis, which had been besieged for eighty-three days; but no sooner had he left the place than the brave peasants returned to the siege.

The worst of the Greeks was that they were very cruel and treacherous, and had very little notion of truth or honour, for people who have been long ground down are apt to learn the vices of slaves; and when the Turks slaughtered the men, burnt the villages, and carried off the women, they were ready to return their savage deeds with the like ferocity, and often with more cunning than the Turks could show; and this

made the European nations slow of helping them. In this year, 1821, a Greek captain plotted to set fire to the arsenal at Constantinople, murder the Sultan in the confusion, and begin a great revolt of all the Greeks living at Constantinople. The plot was found out, and terribly visited, for thousands of Christian families, who had never even heard of it, were slain in their houses, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, an aged man, whom everyone loved and respected, was also put to

death. Not only were the Christians massacred at Constantinople, but in most of the other large cities of Turkey, and only in a few were the people able to escape on board the Greek merchant ships. These ships carried ten or twelve guns, were small, swift, and well managed, and little fire-ships were sometimes sent by them into the Turkish fleet, which did a great deal of damage.

The slaughter of so many Christians had only enraged instead of terrifying the others; and a Greek prince named Mavrocordato brought an army together, which took several cities, but unhappily was as cruel as the Turks themselves in their treatment of the conquered. However, they now held Argos, met there, and made Mavrocordato their President in 1822. Ali Pasha of Yanina was reduced and shot by the Turks that same year; and Omar Pasha, who had been sent against him, had a great deal of desperate fighting with the Suliots and other Albanian Greeks, but at last he was driven back through the mountains with terrible loss.

Another horrid deed of the Turks did much to turn men’s minds against them. There were about 120,000 Christians in the island of Scio, who had taken no part in the war, and only prayed to be let alone; but two Greek captains chose to make an attack on the Turkish garrison, and thus provoked the vengeance of the Turks, who burst in full force on the unhappy island, killed every creature they found in the capital, and

ravaged it everywhere. Forty thousand were carried off as slaves, and almost all the rest killed; and when these horrors were over, only 1800 were left in the place.

The cruelty of the Turks and the constancy of the Greeks began to make all Europe take an interest in the war. People began to think them a race of heroes like those of old, and parties of young men, calling themselves Philhellenes, or lovers of Greece, came to fight in their cause. The chief of these was the English poet, Lord Byron; but he, as well as most of the others, found it was much easier to admire the Greeks when at a distance, for a war like this almost always makes men little better than treacherous savage robbers in their ways; and they were all so jealous of one another that there was no obedience to any kind of government, nor any discipline in their armies. Byron soon said he was a fool to have come to Greece, and before he could do anything he died at Missolonghi, in the year 1824. But though the Greeks fought in strange ways of their own, they at least won respect and interest by their untamableness, and though Missolonghi was taken, it was only after a most glorious resistance. When the defenders could hold out no longer, they resolved to cut their way through the Turks. One division of them were deceived by a false alarm, and returned to the town, where, when the enemy entered the powder magazine, they set fire to it, and blew themselves up, together with the Turks; the others escaped.

Athens was taken again by the Turks, all but the Acropolis; but the nations of Europe had begun to believe in the Greeks enough to advance them a large sum of money, which was called the Greek Loan; and the English admiral, Lord Cochrane, and an English soldier, General Church, did them much good by making up the quarrels among their own princes, for actually, in the midst of this desperate war with the Turks, there were seven little civil wars going on among different tribes of the Greeks themselves. General Church collected them all, and fought a great battle in the plain of Athens with the Turkish commander, Ibrahim Pasha, but was beaten again; the Acropolis was taken, and nothing remained to the Greek patriots but the citadel of Corinth and Naupliæ.