Greek War of Independence

The Greek War of Independence was an uprising by Greeks against Ottoman rule that began in 1821 and, with the intervention of European powers, produced an independent Greek state by 1829. It was one of the first successful nationalist revolts against an established European empire, and it shaped the politics of the Balkans and the wider Mediterranean for generations. The date range given for this event, which runs to 1923, reflects the longer process by which Greece sought to expand its borders and unite Greek-speaking populations; the war proper ended in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Greece had been under Ottoman control since the fifteenth century. Greeks lived under a system that granted the Orthodox Church significant authority over its community, and some Greeks prospered as merchants, sailors, and officials. Yet taxation, local abuses, and second-class legal status bred resentment. The ideas of the French Revolution and a growing sense of Greek cultural identity, nourished by intellectuals and by admiration in Western Europe for ancient Greece, encouraged nationalist hopes. In 1814 a secret society, the Filiki Eteria, was founded in Odessa to prepare an uprising.

The revolt began in 1821, with fighting in the Danubian principalities (modern Romania) under Alexander Ypsilantis, which was quickly crushed, and a more durable rising in the Peloponnese. Greek forces captured towns and fortresses, and the conflict was marked by brutality on both sides, including massacres of Muslim and Jewish civilians and Ottoman reprisals against Greeks, such as those on the island of Chios in 1822. The Greeks also fell into internal civil conflicts. The Ottoman sultan called on his powerful vassal in Egypt, Muhammad Ali, and Egyptian forces under his son Ibrahim Pasha brought much of the Peloponnese under pressure by the mid-1820s. The fall of Missolonghi in 1826 became a symbol of Greek resistance.

Philhellenism, the pro-Greek sentiment among Europeans, brought money, volunteers, and publicity, and the poet Lord Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824. Governments were initially wary of supporting rebels against a legitimate ruler, but Britain, France, and Russia eventually decided to intervene. In 1827 their combined fleet destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino, largely tipping the balance. A Russian war against the Ottomans followed, ending with the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, which supported Greek autonomy.

Greece was recognized as independent in the early 1830s under the protection of the three powers, which installed a Bavarian prince, Otto, as king. The new state was small and poor, including only part of the Greek-speaking world. This fed the "Great Idea," the aspiration to bring all Greeks into one state, which drove territorial expansion over the following century and culminated in the disastrous war with Turkey in 1919–1922 and the population exchange of 1923. The revolution remains a foundational national story in Greece, celebrated each year on 25 March.