Number 71 | March 25, 2009
March 25 is celebrated by Greeks as their national day, and marks the beginning of the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in 1821.
The day also marks the beginning of the murder of over 25,000 Ottoman Muslims of Greece, which would set a pattern for other nationalist revolts in the Balkans, and the subsequent ethnic and religious motivated slaughter and forced mass migration of hundreds of thousands civilians that would last for 100 years.
The Greek Revolution began with the murder of a number of Ottoman government officials and was followed with a general attack on the Turks of the Morea in southern Greece, in which Greek guerrillas and villagers simply murdered every Turk in the region. The patriotic cry of the revolution, proclaimed by the Greek Archbishop Germanos, was “Peace to the Christians! Respect to the Consuls! Death to the Turks!” The deaths of Turks in Greece were not the mortality of wartime casualties. All the Turks taken by Greek bands, including women and children, were killed and entire Turkish populations of cities and towns were collected and slaughtered.
When the European Powers finally forced the Ottomans to create a Greek kingdom in the Morea, it was a Greek kingdom devoid of the Turks who had lived there for centuries.