"Women and children were tortured before they were murdered"

Arcadia was known to be the country of longing of the Romantic era. It was dreamed of as a lovely landscape under the southern sun, in which lemon and olive trees bloom and happy people go about their daily work. However, it was overlooked that the heartland of the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece is a wild, rugged mountain landscape in which ski tourism is practiced today. In October 1821, the vision of Arcadia was shattered in a massacre that exemplified the fractured social fabric that shaped the inhabitants of this supposed paradise.

The battle for the capital of Arcadia in the autumn of 1821 makes it clear that the so-called liberation wars of the Christian nationalities against Ottoman rule in the Balkans did not only have a heroic side. Tripoli, once also called Tripolitsa or Tripoliza, was besieged by Greek troops. The Greek Revolution broke out in March of that year.

The first reaction from the Turks came from the Greek elite in Istanbul. Their religious and political leader, the Ecumenical Patriarch, was hung from the door of his church. In the Peloponnese, the center of the uprising, the front positions were more complicated. In the towns and valleys, the Turks were in charge and in some cases made up the majority of the population. At higher altitudes, however, Christian clans had established rulers who were able to gain a certain autonomy in the course of the Ottoman decline.

The power of their bosses rested on armed gangs, who made their living not only by raiding Muslim neighbors but also harassing Christian rivals. There were also klephts, gangs of robbers who went on their own raids under charismatic leaders. The liberation struggle was waged with these irregular forces, in which Greeks often shot at Greeks.

One of the best-known leaders was Theodor Kolokotronis (1770-1843). He came from a relevant family from the southwestern Peloponnese, of which it was said that "no one of the tribe died of natural causes... The people identified blood and sin with the lineage of Kolokotronis," wrote Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The historian from the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy dynasty has researched the history of the Greek Revolution for decades. The wealth of sources makes his books fundamental works. A chapter in the second volume of the History of Greece (from 1453 to the present day; 1870) is devoted to the siege of Tripoli by Kolokotronis.

By the end of the summer of 1821, Tripoli was the only stronghold in the interior of the Peloponnese where an Ottoman garrison could still be held. After Kolokotronis managed to block the roads around the city, he began the siege with 12,000 fighters. This was initially interrupted by mutual agreement from time to time when a real market was held in front of the walls, where the townspeople could buy supplies - for exorbitant prices, of course.

But by the end of September, the food source had dried up, and the Turkish leadership decided to start surrender negotiations. However, they dragged on, which caused considerable unrest in the Greek camp. The simple warriors suspected that they would get nothing when the booty was distributed. The loss of about 4,000 women and children, who, driven by hunger, stormed out of the gates, made it clear how bad things were in the city. What followed was an example of the brutality of the fighting: both the Greeks and the Turks opened fire on the unfortunate. Modern historians would speak of unlimited violence.

The already manageable discipline of the Greek guerrilla fighters melted away. Their leaders were barely able to keep the people under control unless they wanted to lose their authority (or their lives). When the Turks announced the surrender modalities at a meeting in the city on October 5 and the walls were only manned by a few guards, the Greeks recognized the opportunity and began the assault. "Streams of predatory soldiers poured through the open gate," writes Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

The noble and wealthy who promised ransom were captured. A terrible vengeance was immediately imposed on the other residents. It was the Greek answer to the murder of the patriarch... Women and children were tortured before they were murdered; unspeakable atrocities were committed against the Jews in particular... A year later, traces of these atrocities could still be seen in the rooms of individual houses; Blood clung to the charred walls, the Greeks had written names on them in blood... The corpses lay so heaped in the narrow streets that Kolokotronis' horse 'did not walk on the ground' from wall to seraglio."

The Greek commander even found his life in danger when he tried to protect Turkish troops, who had been granted free withdrawal, from his soldiers. She found other victims for her bloodlust. "Two thousand people of all ages and sexes, mainly women and children, led them to a mountain gorge in the Maenalon and massacred them all there... Since there were no gravediggers, most of the corpses rotted under strange skies and polluted the air."

The most reliable reports put the number of Turks killed at that time at 10,000; Kolokotronis, who according to Mendelssohn Bartholdy at least tried to keep his people under control, later claimed that 32,000 infidels were killed. Thus Arcadia was in the hands of the insurgents. Their massacre should set the pace for further warfare. The heroic liberation struggles against the Ottomans always had a genocidal downside. When the viceroy of Egypt used his army to put down the revolution from 1825, his troops acted no less brutally.

Within the borders of the Kingdom of Greece, which was finally born in 1832 through the intervention of the great powers, there were not many Muslims left - in the Ottoman Empire, religion was not the criterion of national affiliation, rather than language or ethnicity.

The modern Greek national state could not make friends with Kolokotronis. The hero of the war of liberation appeared in the eyes of the Bavarian officials and military, who wanted to build a modern state for their King Otto von Wittelsbach, as a disturber of the peace, as a symbol of atavistic traditions. Sentenced to death but pardoned, Kolokotronis eventually found a new role as leader of the so-called Russian party, which leaned on the Tsarist Empire. Monuments in Greece still commemorate him today.

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