Kara Ali

The Kapudan Pasha, Kara Ali, sailed from the Dardanelles with the Ottoman fleet — some forty-six vessels, carrying a substantial landing force — and came in sight of Chios on 30 March 1822 by the old calendar, the 11th of April by the new.

The Samiots did not fight. Logothetis and Bournias were among the first off the island; the expedition that had landed three weeks earlier to liberate Chios re-embarked and sailed away, leaving behind a population it had armed, compromised, and abandoned. It is one of the least defensible episodes of the Greek Revolution, and Greek historiography has never found much to say in its favour.

The Ottoman troops came ashore against no meaningful opposition, and they were joined within days by thousands of irregulars who crossed the strait from the Anatolian mainland specifically in order to take part. This second element matters, because it was not under any effective discipline and had come for plunder and slaves.

The order, as it was understood and carried out, was to kill or to enslave. The distinction applied — roughly, and in practice inconsistently — was that males above a certain age, variously reported as twelve or fourteen, were to be killed; women and children were to be taken; and infants were killed. The distinctions were frequently disregarded.

What followed lasted, in its acute phase, about two weeks, and in its extended phase for months, as parties worked through the villages and the hills.

The town was sacked and burned. The Kambos estates were burned; the plain was close, rich, and undefended, and it was among the first places reached. The Great School was destroyed and its library — those tens of thousands of volumes, gathered over a century by merchants who had wanted their island to have the finest school in the Greek world — was burned.

Refugees fled into the mountains and to the monasteries, on the reasonable assumption that a monastery might be respected. They were not. At Nea Moni, several thousand people who had taken shelter were killed and the monastery was burned; their bones are in the ossuary by the gate. At the monastery of Agios Minas in the south-east, where a large number of villagers had gathered, the same thing happened; there is a second ossuary there. Both can be visited, and both should be.

Part-way through, under pressure from the European consuls on the island and at Smyrna, an amnesty was proclaimed. A number of Chians came down from the mountains on the strength of it. Many of them were then killed or enslaved anyway, and the memory of that particular betrayal survives in the island's oral tradition with unusual bitterness.

Now the numbers, which require care because they are among the most-quoted casualty figures of the nineteenth century and because their provenance is imperfect.

The figures that circulate are these: roughly 25,000 killed; roughly 45,000 enslaved and deported; somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 escaped as refugees; out of a pre-massacre population of about 100,000 to 120,000. They derive principally from the contemporary reports of the French, Austrian, and British consuls on Chios and at Smyrna, who were present, who were reporting to their governments rather than to the public, and who had no obvious motive to inflate; from the accounts of survivors; and from the reconstructions of later historians, above all Philip Argenti, whose The Massacres of Chios Described in Contemporary Diplomatic Reports (1932) prints the documentary record and remains the standard collection. Argenti's own conclusion was that the island's population fell from something over 100,000 to around 20,000.

These are reconstructions, not counts, and they should be quoted as such. Some modern historians argue for a lower figure for the killed and a higher one for the enslaved. Nobody seriously disputes the substance: that the great majority of the population of Chios was killed, enslaved, or driven into permanent exile within a few months of the spring of 1822.

The slave markets of Smyrna, Constantinople, and North Africa were flooded to the point where prices collapsed. Buying Chians back became an organised philanthropic activity across Europe for years afterwards, conducted by consuls, by private individuals, and by Greek diaspora committees, and the correspondence of the Chian merchant houses of the period is full of it: lists of names, sums subscribed, agents dispatched, children recovered. Many were never found. Chian families in Odessa and London went on searching for relatives into the 1830s and beyond.

One part of the island was deliberately spared. The mastic villages of the south, most of which had not joined the rising, were treated with comparative restraint, because the Ottoman government had not the slightest interest in destroying the source of the Valide Sultan's revenue. That is why the medieval villages of the south stand today essentially intact — Mesta, Pyrgi, Olympi, with their towers and their tunnels and their painted walls — while the town and the plain are nineteenth-century reconstructions. The architecture of Chios is a map of the massacre: what survives is what was profitable.