Archive:Tripolitsa massacre

The Tripolitsa Massacre was the massacre of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Tripolitsa following the capture of the city by Greek revolutionary forces during the Greek War of Independence in 1821. The killings took place during the three days following the city's capture and included combatants, former combatants and non-combatants.

Background

Map showing the first phase of the siege of Tripolitsa during the Greek War of Independence

Plan of the siege of Tripolitsa. The detachments of Kolokotronis' division, which have surrounded the town are symbolized by the letter "O".

The region had a history of atrocities. Around fifty years before the siege in question, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, the Turks had slaughtered 3,000 of the Greek civilians of Tripolitsa. According to German historian Template:Interlanguage link, the massacre was committed as retaliation to the Constantinople massacre of 1821.

Before and during the siege, eight Greek Orthodox prelates of Peloponnese were incarcerated inside the city, and five of them died before the fall, due to "hardships, torture, and illnesses". They were imprisoned by the Turks, chained in a cramped underground cell, suffered starvation and disease, and were in extremely poor physical condition by the time of the fall. Two of them died before being released, while three died immediately, the day they were released and a few weeks before the city's fall.

Massacre

In the three days following the city's capture, most of the Muslim (including combatants, former combatants, and non-combatants) and the Jewish inhabitants of Tripolitsa were massacred.

Opposition by Greek leaders

The massacre was not planned and was also opposed by the Greek leaders, including Theodoros Kolokotronis, Template:Interlanguage link, Template:Interlanguage link, Petrobey Mavromichalis, Alexandros Mavrokordatos, Demetrios Ypsilantis and others, who made great efforts to stop it. Ypsilantis ordered that "we are fighting in order to be able to live with the Turks in a state based on law. The cities we conquer are our cities and you should not destroy them". When Kolokotronis arrived, he immediately instructed his soldiers to protect Turkish homes and explicitly ordered for no innocent Turk to be harmed, stating in a written order that "whoever touches them shall receive punishment in the same manner in which they harm them, and even more".

Fotakos wrote how he "begged them to cease the slaughter". The sole non-Greek witness to the massacre, Jean-François-Maxime Raybaud, wrote that, apart from Fotakos, "many [other] captains and other Greeks out of compassion wanted to save some Turks". He reports that "Rhodios, Patroklos, and some Peloponnesian villagers" succeeded in saving many Turks.

When the First Hellenic Republic was declared in 1822, the First Provisional Constitution banned troop misconduct and the Greek government passed a number of provisions and laws to make sure that such atrocities would not be repeated again.

Death toll

The total number of Muslims, combatants and non-combatants, killed during the sack is unknown. Template:Interlanguage link, who arrived in Greece two years later, estimated around 6,000 dead. Josiah Conder and Thomas Curtis agreed with that number. Thomas Gordon, who arrived in the city shortly after its fall, estimated it at 8,000. Scholar Aristides N. Hatzis believes this to be the most realistic estimate. Greek historians Spyridon Trikoupis and Ioannis Filimon, both disavowing the atrocity, estimated the number at 10,000, including former combatants and non-combatants. This number is considered close to the truth by historian Kyriakos Simopoulos.

Historian Theophilus C. Prousis, citing David Brewer, reports that: "Flight, disease, starvation, and death in battle reduced the town’s population by almost one-half (from 30,000 to 15,000 residents). Nearly 8,000 Turks and Albanians died in combat during the siege, while an additional 2,000 non-combatants, mostly women and children, were massacred by Greek forces in a nearby gorge". Hezekiah Niles quoted the London Courier in December 1821: "8,000 Turks bearing arms were put to the sword on the taking of Tripolitza".

Many Muslims were saved or spared. Some Greek officers and villagers saved many Turkish civilians. A tiny contingent of Turkish cavalry escaping to Nauplion, a few women, most notable Turks, as well nearly all Albanians, i.e. around 2,000–4,000 individuals, were spared. The commander of Hurshid Pasha's cavalry set fire to the seraglio in order to burn the harems with the women inside, but the Greeks managed to extinguish the fire in time, and the pashas' harem was placed under the protection of Petrobey Mavromichalis who later freed them.

Assessments

Kolokotronis says in his memoirs:

Inside the town they had begun to massacre. ... I rushed to the place ... If you wish to hurt these Albanians, I cried, "kill me rather; for, while I am a living man, whoever first makes the attempt, him will I kill the first." ... I was faithful to my word of honor ... Tripolitsa was three miles in circumference. The [Greek] host which entered it, cut down and were slaying men, women, and children from Friday till Sunday. Thirty-two thousand were reported to have been slain. One Hydriote [boasted that he had] killed ninety. About a hundred Greeks were killed; but the end came [thus]: a proclamation was issued that the slaughter must cease. ... When I entered Tripolitsa, they showed me a plane tree in the market-place where the Greeks had always been hanged. I sighed. "Alas!" I said, "how many of my own clan – of my own race – have been hanged there!" And I ordered it to be cut down. I felt some consolation then from the slaughter of the Turks. ... [Before the fall] we had formed a plan of proposing to the Turks that they should deliver Tripolitsa into our hands, and that we should, in that case, send persons into it to gather the spoils together, which were then to be apportioned and divided among the different districts for the benefit of the nation; but who would listen?

Based upon accounts and descriptions provided by officers, William St. Clair wrote:

Upwards of ten thousand Turks were put to death. Prisoners who were suspected of having concealed their money were tortured. Their arms and legs were cut off and they were slowly roasted over fires. Pregnant women were cut open, their heads cut off, and dogs' heads stuck between their legs. From Friday to Sunday the air was filled with the sound of screams... One Greek boasted that he personally killed ninety people. The Jewish colony was systematically tortured... For weeks afterwards starving Turkish children running helplessly about the ruins were being cut down and shot at by exultant Greeks... The wells were poisoned by the bodies that had been thrown in...

The Turks of Greece left few traces. They disappeared suddenly and finally in the spring of 1821 unmourned and unnoticed by the rest of the world....It was hard to believe then that Greece once contained a large population of Turkish descent, living in small communities all over the country, prosperous farmers, merchants, and officials, whose families had known no other home for hundreds of years...They were killed deliberately, without qualm or scruple, and there was no regrets either then or later.

Historian Kyriakos Simopoulos wrote that the spurious accounts cited by St. Clair were exaggerations, created simply by taking accounts of previous Ottoman crimes and projecting them onto the Greeks. He notes that people who were actually present in the scene of the massacre state that Turks were killed simply by being shot, as the Greek soldiers did not want to get close to them due to the ongoing epidemic in the city.

Accounts of the behavior of the Greek forces during the atrocity, and the religious exhortations associated with them, closely resemble what St. Clair describes as the longstanding Ottoman methods employed in the Massacre of Chios, suffered by the Greeks themselves eight months later, in 1822.

The massacre at Tripolitsa was the final and largest in a sequence of massacres against Muslims in the Peloponnese during the first months of the revolt. Historians estimate that upwards of twenty thousand Muslim men, women and children were killed during this time, often with the exhortation of the local clergy.

Rationale

The rationale behind the massacre has been debated. Although the Greek leaders definitively opposed the massacre, seeking to stop it, and most Greeks and other Europeans condemned it as well, some Greeks and non-Greek philhellenes tried to rationalize it in context.

George Finlay suggested that the Greeks were simply imitating the cruelty they had endured, stripping them of total moral blame by pointing to their environment, a concept known as "mirroring". Meanwhile, Thomas Gordon said in an 1823 speech:

Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his poem Hellas, implied how extreme oppression naturally breeds extreme revenge. Samuel Gridley Howe, recounting Olivier Voutier's story of an old Greek shepherd whose son was killed by a Turk, wrote that: "Where is the father, with a soul so free from the frailties of human nature, as not to have exclaimed with the old shepherd – 'give me vengeance and let me die!'Template:Nnbsp". Mary Shelley, novelist and author of Frankenstein, wrote positively of the siege, while noting that the cruelties were plainly justified, as "the oppressor must in the end buy tyranny with blood – such is the law of necessity".

Historian Template:Interlanguage link considered the massacre:

Abraham John Valpy shared a similar assessment. Valpy wrote:

Hezekiah Niles quoted an article in the London Courier without any personal comment: "But the Turks, acting under the orders of a legitimate government, may murder the Greeks, and their women and children—their patriarchs, archbishops and priests at". He then proceeded to note how, during the siege of the city, the Greeks had found out that the Turks had just murdered "12,000 to 13,000 [Greek] hostages of all ages and both sexes" in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Historian Charles L. Booth wrote:

According to German historian Template:Interlanguage link, the massacre was committed as retaliation to the Constantinople massacre of 1821. Jean-François-Maxime Raybaud, the sole non-Greek eyewitness to the massacre, agreed, writing that: "Alas, a considerable population was to be offered to the spirits of the victims of Smyrna, Constantinople, Scala-Nova, and Ayvali, and new sufferings, new outrages against humanity, were about to avenge four centuries of oppression and injury".

Jews

Steven Bowman believes that, although the Jews were murdered, they were not targeted specifically, in fact: "Such a tragedy seems to be more a side-effect of the butchering of the Turks of Tripolis, the last Ottoman stronghold in the South where the Jews had taken refuge from the fighting, than a specific action against Jews per se." A friend of Kolokotronis, Template:Interlanguage link, along with Fotios Chrysanthopoulos, rescued a Jewish family named Hanam before the siege. During the siege and the subsequent massacre, another Jew, called Levi, was rescued personally by Kolokotronis himself.