Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
The first great opportunity for the Greek Orthodox of the Black Sea coast to become free had come. Russia and its people supported the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans and it was to Russia that they looked for deliverance from the Turk.
News of Russian troop movements must have been cause for both celebration and alarm in Sozopolis. Immediately after the Ottoman declaration of war on Russia, the British and French fleets entered the Bosphorous to protect Constantinople. On 30 November Russian warships destroyed seven Turkish frigates, effectively the entire Turkish fleet, at Sinope on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March of 1854 in support of Turkey. Their warships entered the Black Sea while French troops marched north from Gallipoli through Adrianopole toward Burgas and Varna.[map / 56]
In April of 1854, units of the British and French fleet anchored off Sozopolis. When boats approached Sozopolis' beach, Sofia Zisova Ortakioglis took an ancient saber from the wall of her home and called Orthodox Greeks to arms in support of the Russian cause. Her action came to naught. British and French personnel landed without bloodshed to obtain water and establish a small military presence. However, Sofia's passionate response was not forgotten. She became known in the city of Sozopolis and its environs and in the oral tradition of the family as Yia-Yia Mahera, Grandma the Knife.
The Anglo-French alliance proceeded north, establishing a headquarters at Varna from which they were the first in history to lay underwater telegraph cable. It provided communication from their headquarters to their base in the Crimea. For one year, the alliance besieged the Russian fortress at the Crimean naval base of Sebastopol. Each side in the struggle suffered great loss of life to hunger, cold and disease. The alliance captured the burned out ruins of Sebastopol; a Pyrrhic victory. The result was, for Russia, a temporary loss of territory and, for the Ottoman Empire, a delay in its inevitable collapse.
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