Qualla: Massacre of Samothrace (1821)

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Auguste Vinchon, Public domain. The proverb survives in Samothracian Greek to this day: 'I am not one of the seven hundred.' It means I am not easily fooled. The seven hundred are the men who came down from the mountains in the autumn of 1821 because a turncoat named Kyriakos told them an Ottoman amnesty awaited if they surrendered. They were brought beneath a Byzantine fortress at Efka and killed there, most of them beheaded. Their wives and children were already aboard ships bound for the slave markets of Constantinople and Smyrna. The proverb is the surviving voice of a community whose population was reduced from somewhere between four and ten thousand people to roughly two hundred over the course of a few weeks. The American philhellene George Jarvis, who reached the island in July 1822, found those survivors living in absolute poverty among the ashes of their villages.

Image: Auguste Vinchon | Public domain

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): The Island Before

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Auguste Vinchon, Public domain. Samothrace is a small mountainous island in the northern Aegean, dominated by the 1,611-meter Mount Saos. It has no natural year-round harbor, which has shaped its history as much as anything. In antiquity it was the site of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, the mystery cult that ...

Image: Auguste Vinchon | Public domain

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): April 1821

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Auguste Vinchon, Public domain. News of the rising in the Peloponnese reached Samothrace in April 1821. A number of the island's prokritoi, the local notables who managed community affairs under the Ottoman millet system, had already joined the Filiki Eteria, the secret revolutionary society that prepared the G...

Image: Auguste Vinchon | Public domain

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): September 1, 1821

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Auguste Vinchon, Public domain. An Ottoman fleet sailed from the Dardanelles in August. On September 1, a force of one thousand to two thousand soldiers under Mehmed Pasha, the Castellan of the Dardanelles, landed at Makrylies and marched on Chora, the island's largest town. The vastly outnumbered Samothracian ...

Image: Auguste Vinchon | Public domain

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): Efka

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Auguste Vinchon, Public domain. Many had escaped into the mountains. To draw them down, the Ottomans turned a man named Kyriakos into a collaborator and sent him through the slopes promising amnesty for any who surrendered. Roughly seven hundred men believed him and came in. The women and children were sorted o...

Image: Auguste Vinchon | Public domain

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): What Came Back

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Auguste Vinchon, Public domain. Some came home. The Ottoman government granted formal amnesty in April 1822, and the survivors who had hidden in the mountains came down. Others were ransomed out of slavery in the years that followed by European philhellenes who raised funds across western Europe specifically fo...

Image: Auguste Vinchon | Public domain

Massacre of Samothrace (1821): What Survives

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Catlemur, CC BY-SA 4.0. An acolouthia, a service of remembrance, was written for the five neomartyrs in 1843 by a monk named Iakovos. It is still performed every year on the seventh Sunday after Orthodox Easter, on Samothrace, in Makri, and in the monasteries of Mount Athos. The relics of the saints, ta...

Image: Catlemur | CC BY-SA 4.0