Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
Greeks of the Pontos and Constantinople, especially the educated merchant class and leaders of the many guilds, were active participants in the early revolutionary struggle against the Ottomans. Their ships transported more than grain, lumber, dried fish and other cargo to the southern coast of the Mediterranean and to Britain, France and the Low Countries. They carried young men from the Balkans and the littoral of the Black Sea to the commercial centers and universities of the west.
When they returned to their communities in the Balkans the men did so with knowledge of the Enlightenment. The ships of those who were bound for the Black Sea fought the surface current of the Bosphorus and like the subsurface counter-current that unseen carries the salt water of the Mediterranean north and east into the Black Sea, they carried young men inspired by new dreams. They also brought Freemasonry which was to spread from the Ionian Islands to all of the Balkans' major Greek intellectual centers.
One consequence of the new ideas from the west was creation in 1814 of the Philike Hetaireia, or Friendly Society, a secret organization committed to freedom for the Hellenes. It was founded by Greek expatriates in Odessa in the Ukraine. Membership in the society grew throughout the Balkan cities of the Black Sea and it became a driving force for revolution and independence.
The Philike Hetaireia had among its members and leaders a Greek expatriate, Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, who had risen to become aide-de-camp and an intimate of the Russian Tsar Alexander. Ypsilanti knew that Tsar Alexander was sympathetic to the cause of the Greeks and confident that Russia would aid the effort, led a rebellion against the Ottomans in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1821, at the same time as the rising in Greece. Tsar Alexander, though pro-Greek and Orthodox, was in opposition to revolution against kings who he deemed appointed by God. The Tsar could not go against his conscience to assist Ypsilanti.
Moldavia and Wallachia's rising was crushed. The Sultan Mahmoud responded ferociously to the armed revolutionary actions. On Easter Sunday, 1821, Ottoman authorities seized Patriarch Gregory V as he descended the steps from the iconostasion(31) of his church in Constantinople, dragged him to his quarters and hanged him at its gate.(32) The Porte sanctioned wholesale slaughter of bishops, priests and prominent Greeks. Communities from Constantinople to the coast of Ionia and from the islands of the Aegean to the mainland of the Morea were put to the sword. Executioners spared young women and boys to sell them later at the slave markets in Constantinople, Smyrna and Alexandria.(33)
Many Greeks in Thrace were members of the Philike Hetaireia. In 1821 the Greek Metropolitan Bishop of Sozopolis and his brother, both active in the Society, led a revolutionary movement in their city that ended in a bloodbath and defeat.
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