In the years preceding the Greek revolution no part of the Ottoman empire was more blessed by good fortune than the island of Chios. The Italian influence was strong, from intermittent occupation, going back to before the crusades, of Venetians, Genoese and Florentines; hence the Italianate names of many of the leading families, and the island’s contemporary name of Scio. The Chians had become rich through commerce, hiring the ships of Psará and Hydra for transport of goods, and wealthy Chians were established as commercial agents in major cities from Marseille to Odessa and from Moscow to Alexandria. The products of the island included cotton, silk, citrus fruit – whose blossom, it was said, could be smelt five miles out at sea – and the famous mastic which is still cultivated. This is a resin which oozes from small cuts made in the bark of the Terebinth lentiscus bush, which grows in the southern part of Chios in the twenty-two villages known as the mastichochória, which were then the personal appanage of the Sultan’s sister. This area produced over fifty tons a year of the gum, which was, says Gordon, ‘a substance highly prized by the Eastern ladies, who amuse their indolence by chewing it, deriving from that practice as much gratification as their male relations enjoy by inhaling the fumes of tobacco’.1 Chewing mastic is like chewing the end of a Biro, with an extra whiff of petroleum; some pieces remain as hard granules in the mouth and others dissolve into glutinous gobbets. The attraction of mastic is therefore hard to understand, and it is now best enjoyed as a flavouring for ouzo.
The Turkish presence on Chios was minimal, consisting only of a governor, a cadi or judge, and a few hundred soldiers in the Genoese citadel which dominates the north side of the harbour of Chóra, the island’s main town. Civil power rested with the local demogeronts, elected by the leading merchants from their own number; sixteen were of the Orthodox faith and two Catholic, a sectarian balance designed for peaceful coexistence. Taxes were light; the main one was the poll tax, for which even the richest paid no more than eleven piastres a year, at a time when two piastres was reckoned as the cost of a day’s food. Combined with all these advantages, and funded by the island’s wealth, was a welfare state in miniature: a free school, a hospital for 200 patients accepting no fees except donations from rich visitors from other islands, and special hospitals for lepers, and for victims of the plague, which was a frequent occurrence. There were even arrangements for finding homes for foundlings, for visiting prisoners and for settling the poll tax of those imprisoned for non-payment. It is thus not surprising that the people of Chios had a reputation for cheerfulness; it was said that if you had met a serious-minded Chian you had seen a green horse. A description of the Chian women, by a visitor in early 1822, has a modern ring and sounds rather more Italian than Greek:
They wear pink, green and white dresses, mostly very short, white or blue stockings, and little red shoes embroidered like a sultan’s slippers: their long hair falls to their shoulders, from which they put it up by attaching it to the head with gold pins. They paint their eyebrows, but never their cheeks, and constantly chew the mastic which is gathered in the southern part of the island. These young girls have a certain boldness combined with great artlessness; they are innocent without being modest; and if their upbringing has not made them reserved and studiously grave, it has taken nothing away from their natural simplicity and enjoyment of life.
And the visitor, writing later after the island’s destruction, asks, ‘Poor young girls, of the most beautiful island in the sea, what has become of you?’2
In early May 1821 a fleet from Hydra and Psará, commanded by Iakoumákis Tombázis of Hydra, arrived off the east coast of Chios to persuade the Chians to join the revolution. A deputation of leading Chian citizens had already met Tombázis on Psará, and begged him to leave them undisturbed as they could contribute nothing to the struggle. Tombázis now tried a direct appeal to the people, sending an emissary round the villages to stimulate revolt. His message was a mixture of encouragement (the Greeks were already victorious in the Peloponnese), promises (the Greek fleet would soon close the Dardanelles), exhortation (how could Chios, the richest island, stand apart from the revolution?) and threats. However, the villagers were no more responsive than their leaders and eleven days after its arrival Tombázis’ fleet sailed away.
The departure of Tombázis signalled not a return to tranquillity but, as Gordon put it, ‘an end to the peace and happiness of Scio’. The Turks took forty hostages from the leading Chian citizens and held them in the fortress at Chóra as guarantees of the islanders’ good behaviour; it was later agreed that the original forty should alternate month by month with another forty. The hostages included the archbishop Pláton, two deacons and representatives of the most distinguished Chian Greek Orthodox families – Argenti, Mavrogordato, Ralli, Rodocanachi, Vlasto. In addition five or six Catholic hostages were taken. Weapons belonging to the Chians were confiscated and the Turkish governor requested help from Constantinople. As a result some 1,000 disorderly troops crossed from Chesme on the opposite coast and roamed through Chóra and the nearby countryside, attacking and murdering the citizens and plundering their houses. Three of the Chian hostages – a Rodocanachi, a Skilitsi and a Ralli – were sent to Constantinople, conveyed overland to ensure that they could not be rescued by a Greek ship. Thus Turks and Greeks on Chios awaited developments.
In the following spring the Samians, who had joined the revolution early, made their own attempt to involve Chios in the struggle. The Samian leader was the forceful Likoúrgos Logothétis, and he was supported by an expatriate from Chios, Antónios Bourniás, formerly an officer in the French army. On 22 March 1822 a Greek fleet under Logothétis and Bourniás, carrying some 1,500 armed men, anchored off Ayia Eléni a few miles south of the island’s capital.
When the Samian troops landed the local Turks retreated into the citadel, where the garrison had been increased to 4,500. Battle was now joined, with exchange of cannon fire between the Turks in the citadel and the Greeks from the shore below the citadel, and from the hills of Tourlotí and Asómati above it. The Greeks took possession of the town, burnt down the customs house and stripped the lead from the roofs of two mosques for use as bullets. Logothétis moved into the palace of the imprisoned archbishop Pláton, deposed the demogeronts who had previously represented the people of Chios, and established in their place a revolutionary committee of seven ephors, an arrangement about which Finlay was characteristically scathing: ‘Lykourgos did nothing, the ephors had nothing to do, and the camp became a scene of anarchy.’3 Logothétis and his fellow commander Bourniás quickly fell out, both demanding the title of Saviour of Chios, and settled the dispute by allotting the northern part of the island to Bourniás and the southern part, with Chóra, to Logothétis. They thus abandoned any possibility of joint action, and divided up territory as if the battle was already won, instead of only just beginning.
The Sultan’s reaction was prompt and decisive. Seven wealthy Chians in Constantinople were taken hostage, in addition to the three already sent from Chios itself. The kapitan pasha, Kara Ali, was ordered to Chios with a powerful fleet and with orders to convey 15,000 men to Chios from Chesme, where 30,000 had now gathered. Many were volunteers, including it was said a whole infantry regiment of Muslim priests, and most were simply attracted by the riches of Chios. The British consul at Smyrna reported that ‘we have got rid of all our ruffians, who have gone to take part in the plunder of Scio’.4 Strangford, Britain’s ambassador in Constantinople, was worried about the control of such large numbers of unruly troops.
If the Captain Pasha [Kara Ali] should have been charged with the supreme command of the land-forces, and that the other Pashas should have been placed under his orders (which I hope may be the case) the reduction of Scio will be effected according to the usages of civilised war. If however his command should be merely a Naval one, I fear that he will not be able to repress the barbarous spirit of vengeance which will undoubtedly animate the Turkish Army, and which will then overwhelm Scio.5
On 11 April 1822, which was the Thursday before Easter, Kara Ali’s fleet reached Chios. There was short-lived resistance from the Greeks, and a minor success when a Turkish ship with eighty men on board stuck on a shoal, and most of its complement were killed by Greek musket fire. Otherwise the Greeks were powerless against the incursion of troops from Kara Ali’s ships, which was combined with a sally of the Turkish garrison from the citadel. Logothétis and his Samian followers fled, and after a brief resistance at Áyios Georgios, a hilltop town six miles south-west of Chóra, were taken off by Psarian ships from the west coast. Chios was now abandoned to its fate.
The scenes that followed were as appalling as any that had yet occurred in the bloody annals of the revolution. ‘The horrors of civil war were never more fearfully displayed than at Scio,’6 wrote Strangford. Gordon likened them to those following the sack of Tripolis, and of the events on Chios wrote: ‘Mercy was out of the question, the victors butchering indiscriminately all who came in their way; shrieks rent the air, and the streets were strewed with the dead bodies of old men, women, and children; even the inmates of the hospital, the madhouse, and the deaf and dumb institution, were inhumanly slaughtered.’7 When after a few days there were no more inhabitants in Chóra to be attacked or goods to be looted, the terror spread to the countryside, augmented by the Turkish troops who continued to pour across to the island from Chesme. Within a week two grisly consignments from the governor of Chios had reached Constantinople. They contained the heads and ears of rebels who had been killed or, worse still, the ears of some who had been taken alive, and a notice to this effect was posted outside the Seraglio.
For those not seized immediately, remote monasteries, with their walled enclosures, water cisterns and ovens to feed a community offered the three things the refugees most needed: shelter, water and food. At Néa Moní, in a beautiful setting in the hills near the centre of the island, 2,000 refugees gathered in the walled complex of monastery buildings; all were killed when Turkish bands broke through the outer wall. Even more Chians lost their lives at Áyios Minás, on a hilltop south of Chóra from which the 3,000 huddled asylum seekers could see the boats carrying their predators crossing from Chesme. On Easter Sunday 14 April the monastery, packed with Chian families, was set on fire by the Turks. It burnt to the ground and all the refugees inside perished. Áyios Minás has been rebuilt on the former site, and the dark stains on the original stone floor are said to be from burnt human flesh. In the chapel are glass cases containing the neatly stacked skulls and bones of those who died. These ossuaries raise disturbing questions about whether the dead, even if unidentifiable, should have been given a proper burial, or whether the destruction of Áyios Minás and its refugees was such an extreme atrocity that the relics of its victims must be set before each succeeding generation lest they forget.
For a time the mastic villages were safe. Kara Ali, within a week of his landing and as soon as the Samians had left, sent three of the foreign consular agents out to the villages with an offer of amnesty, supported by a letter from the distinguished hostages urging acceptance. The amnesty being accepted, protection of the villages was entrusted to Elez Aga, according to Gordon ‘a chief distinguished for generosity and probity’. Outside the mastic villages, a fortunate few found refuge in the consulates, which Kara Ali had agreed to respect; the French consulate sheltered some 1,200, and almost the whole Catholic population was protected by the Austrian consulate.
Otherwise, people went into hiding in the hope that the storm would pass, or struggled to reach the little harbours on the west coast from which ships from Psará or other islands might take them off. Nearly a century later a Chian schoolmaster, Stilianós Víos, published descriptions of the refugees’ experiences, some from themselves in great old age, others from their children and grandchildren. Over time some of the accounts had blossomed into dramatic legends. In one story, for instance, three Turks who tried to seize a priest were struck blind, and in another two Turks of a party that killed the fugitives in a cave were turned to pillars of stone ‘which can be seen to this day’. In a particularly colourful episode, a Chian fell in love with the Sultana in Constantinople, who gave him, as a token of her affection, a gold sword encrusted with diamonds. The Chian, when his house on Chios was searched on the orders of the suspicious Sultan, threw the sword down the well, but when the winch was turned the sword came up in the bucket. Though the story ended with the unfortunate gallant being taken to Constantinople and executed, it was obviously a deeply satisfying one, quite apart from the reverse Freudian imagery of her sword being plunged into his well. It showed that the Sultan could be cuckolded like any other man, and cuckolded by a Greek.
Most of the accounts, however, have the ring not of myth but of harsh reality. When Turks appeared, often only in ones and twos, the first hiding places were in the cellar, roof or even the oven of the house, or somewhere near by: a barn, a church crypt, an old Genoese tower, a hollow olive trunk, the outlet pipe of a mill. A wet-nurse saved her two small charges by lowering them into a well, and is still remembered with gratitude by their descendants. When refugees felt unsafe in their own houses and villages, they took to caves in the hills, especially those in the mountainous north-west corner of the island, from which the rocky outline of Psará, whence salvation might come, could be seen in the distance. Getting food and water then became a pressing problem. Small groups would leave their cave at night and gather pulses and fruit, still unripe in the early spring, and sometimes manage to bake bread, but of this there was never enough, and one group spent twenty breadless days.
A continual worry was that the crying of babies would reveal hiding places. ‘Before they went into hiding,’ runs one account, ‘there was an argument, because the husband insisted that the baby should be hidden elsewhere, and the mother did not want to be parted from her child. The Turks who were roaming the mountains took up position above the cave and fired at anyone they saw. At the first gunshot the baby started to cry and so they were revealed. The wife, who was beautiful, was taken into slavery with the child, and the husband was put in front of a large plane tree and shot.’ Sometimes the child was sacrificed. One was thrown down a ravine. Another, a girl of eighteen months, was left outside a cave, ignored by Turks who were looking only for adults and covertly watched by her anxious father; after three days the danger passed, she was brought in and revived and, says the teller of the tale, ‘she grew up, got married and had as many children as me’. In another story danger was averted by quick thinking. Turks were having a party near some refugee caves and a Chian was playing the violin and singing for them. Hearing a child’s muffled cry he sang: ‘Better kill the child, my dear, Otherwise you won’t get clear.’ The Turks asked what he was singing. ‘Just a refrain,’ he replied. The child stayed quiet, it seems, and all those in hiding were saved.
The Turks used tricks of their own. They cooked some meat and went round the mouths of caves crying in Greek, ‘Fine meat! Fine meat!’ They left bread at the entrance of a cave to see if anyone came out for it. Neither ruse was successful. Sometimes, though, a friendly Turk was helpful to the fugitives. One Turk was approached by a Chian traitor who offered to show him where two girls were hidden; the Turk killed the informer and put the refugees on the road to Mestá. One Turkish official sent his men to protect fugitives from attack by a roving party of Turks, a rare instance of any control being exercised over the marauders.
The Chians put up what resistance they could. Near Kardhámila in the north-east a priest, who had the only gun left in the village, came across a Turk dragging off a woman and her children, and from ambush shot him dead. A father and son were found hiding under a fig tree by a Turk on his own; the father knocked down the Turk with a branch of the tree and killed him with a stone. Women resisted too. A Turk was leading to Chóra a group of captive women, among them the narrator’s aunt Amília. The Turk stopped at a well, and sat on the edge smoking his pipe. ‘The women then thought of drowning him, but were too frightened. Then my aunt Amília called on the Mother of God to give her strength. She gave the Turk a great shove and pushed him into the well. Afterwards they took to the hills and reached Lithí, where a ship from Psará rescued them.’
Rescue by ship was for all the refugees the best hope. As the east coast was clearly visible from the Turkish mainland the only chance of escape was from the west coast, where much the best anchorage was the long bay leading to the harbour of Mestá, which is some two miles from the town itself. At one time the cramped houses and narrow streets of medieval Mestá were said to shelter 5,000 Chians waiting to get away by sea. The rescue ships were mainly from Psará, and there was considerable resentment against Psarians who demanded money before accepting fugitives. Other rescue ships came from Sámos, Hydra and Spétses. One woman, with a newborn baby and still bleeding from the birth, plunged into the sea in desperation and was picked up by an English ship which took them both to the island of Síros. Síros, a hundred miles south-west of Chios, was a common destination for refugees, since Psará, the first stop for many, was too poor to support them. Some went on to other islands, some to the mainland to join the fight for independence there. Many eventually returned to Chios and most, it seems, cherished the dream of ultimate return.
While the countryside presented this picture of fear and flight, destruction and disorder, seventy-seven of the eighty Chian hostages (three had been sent to Constantinople) were still being held in Chóra, forty-nine of them in the citadel. They had been in captivity since the visit of Tombázis’ fleet in March 1821, on an alternating basis until all were called in on the landing of the Samians in March 1822. Only the Catholics had been released, through the combined efforts of the French vice-consul on Chios, the French consul-general in Smyrna and the French ambassador in Constantinople. Further hostages were still being held in Constantinople, the three sent from Chios and seven residents of the capital. The usefulness of all was now at an end. On 5 May Kara Ali, on direct orders from the Sultan, took out the forty-nine hostages held in the citadel and hanged eight from the yards of his flagship and the remainder from the trees in the road which runs below the west wall of the citadel, now named the Street of the Martyrs. This choice of location was brutally theatrical. The Chians who took this road would see, as they looked up, the bodies of their compatriots and above these the ramparts of the citadel, symbol of Turkish dominance. Turks, looking down, would see the ghastly results of their reprisal and, passing beneath, the citizens whom these hanging corpses were intended to cow. All the great families of Chios lost leading members, and Archbishop Pláton died with them. Two weeks later the Chian hostages held in Constantinople were publicly beheaded.
The Turkish troops on Chios soon turned from slaughter to the more profitable business of enslavement. Gordon estimated that by the end of May, some two months after Kara Ali’s landing, 45,000 Chiots had been taken as slaves, among them the women and children of the leading families. ‘Whole cargoes were shipped off to Constantinople, Egypt and Barbary,’ wrote Gordon, ‘and for a long period the slave market at Smyrna displayed the bustle of active trade, and attracted Moslem purchasers from all parts of Asia Minor.’8 Kara Ali at one point imposed a ban on the export of slaves from the island, but revoked it when he found that the soldiers were killing their prisoners instead. Strangford protested to the Turkish government in Constantinople about the taking of slaves and received a subtle if casuistical answer: that enslavement of the wives and children of enemies was not only permitted but enjoined by Muslim laws and religion; that the Christian powers of Europe had tolerated slavery for centuries, purely for gain and without the sanction of religion; that the Ottoman government had a right to act as it pleased towards its own subjects; and, in a final rhetorical flourish, ‘why do not the Christian Sovereigns interfere to prevent the Emperor of Russia from sending his subjects into Siberia? Because they know very well what answer they would receive!’9
Some of those taken as slaves managed eventually to escape. Some were fortunate enough to be ransomed, particularly by Chian merchants of Smyrna who through an agent would buy back the captives and arrange their shipment to Trieste or elsewhere. But this was an expensive business; the cost of rescuing the wife of one of the Turks’ hostages and her two young daughters was almost 15,000 piastres. Other captives were handed over to the British vice-consul on Chios, Giudici, because their captors could find nobody on Chios to ransom them and could not ship them to the mainland. Some hundreds were saved in this way, again at considerable expense, for which Giudici was still vainly seeking recompense a year later. Finally in mid-June an imperial order was sent to the Constantinople slave market prohibiting the further sale of Chian captives, an order said to have been instigated by the Sultan’s sister, proprietor of the mastic villages. But by then the supply of captives was already virtually exhausted.
The Greek fleet now moved into action, its failure to do so earlier being attributed by some to lack of supplies and by others to dissension between the three main naval islands. It was too late to help Chios; their present object was to stop Kara Ali’s fleet from joining up with another Ottoman fleet from Egypt, a combination which the Greeks feared would give the Turks complete dominance at sea. On 10 May 1822 a combined Greek fleet of ships from Hydra, Spétses and Psará, consisting of fifty-six warships and eight fireships, under the command of Andréas Miaoúlis of Hydra, set out from Psará to attack the Turks in the channel between Chios and the mainland. For some weeks thereafter only skirmishes took place, the Turks trying ineffectually to sink Greek ships by cannon fire, the Greeks trying to use their fireships with equally little success.
The Greek opportunity at last came on the night of 18 June when the Turkish fleet, anchored outside the harbour of Chóra, was celebrating the end of Ramadan. The wind was from the north that day, and two Greek ships spent the daylight hours beating northwards against it up the Turkish coast, giving the impression that they were trying to round the cape that lies across the entrance to the Gulf of Smyrna. In fact the two vessels were fireships, one commanded by Andréas Pipínos of Hydra and one by Konstantínos Kanáris of Psará, and they were working towards the necessary upwind position for attack. After sunset they turned to sail downwind towards the Turkish fleet. The night was dark, with only a sliver of moon, but the Turkish ships were illuminated for the celebrations, those of the kapitan pasha Kara Ali and of his vice-admiral being easily identified as the most brightly lit. The design of fireships had been improved since the Greeks’ first experiments the previous autumn, being now reinforced with copper to prevent them disintegrating before their target ship had time to catch fire.
At midnight Kanáris bore down on the kapitan pasha’s flagship, ramming his bowsprit into an open port near the flagship’s prow. The fuse was lit, Kanáris and his men were taken off and within minutes flames driven by the wind were sweeping over the flagship. The other fireship under Pipínos damaged but failed to destroy the vice-admiral’s ship, being cut loose before the flames fully caught, and it drifted on shore to burn away without doing further harm. Kara Ali’s flagship however was soon a mass of flames. People in Smyrna fifty miles away were amazed by the fiery glow in the sky to the west. Turkish sailors took to the lifeboats, but two were so overcrowded that they sank. There were many Greeks taken as slaves locked up on board, who shouted in vain for release. Kara Ali entered a lifeboat, where he was struck on the head by a spar falling from the blazing rigging. He was taken to land, but died the next day, and was buried in the little Turkish cemetery of the Chóra citadel, where his marble tomb still stands. After three-quarters of an hour the flames on the flagship reached the powder store, and the ship exploded. Of the 2,286 reportedly on board, only some 180 survived.
On Chios the loss of the kapitan pasha and his flagship prompted the Turks to a final act of reprisal against the remaining islanders. The mastic villages had until now been protected by Elez Aga after their acceptance of an amnesty in April. Survivors from other parts of the island had taken refuge there, especially in the village of Tholopotámi, which clings to a steep hillside above the plain. A horde of Turks, said to number 20,000, now descended on the mastichochória. The villages were laid waste and the inhabitants killed or taken as slaves.
The final toll on the suffering island could now be assessed. Before the catastrophe there were between 100,000 and 120,000 Greeks living on Chios, and by the end their numbers were reduced to some 20,000. Gordon’s even more shocking figure of only 1,800 survivors on the island is almost certainly wrong, perhaps a mistake for 18,000, though he may be right to say that ‘the most populous villages had only twelve indwellers’. The number of Greeks killed was put at 25,000 and of those enslaved at 45,000; that is, the catastrophe left about a quarter of the population dead and nearly half taken into slavery. Probably between 10,000 and 20,000 escaped, some to return, some to settle on other Aegean islands, some to continue the great family names of Chios – Ralli, Rodocanachi, Argenti, Vlasto – as they found fortune or fame abroad.
How did this near-destruction of a population come about? Later historians of Chian descent lay the blame squarely on Logothétis and his incursion from Sámos; Philip Argenti for example writes that ‘the Samians … were seeking personal adventure and therefore decided to coerce the Chians nolentes volentes into “liberty”, assuming to themselves a doctor’s mandate and knowing better what was good for Chios than did the Chians themselves. After all, if the expedition failed, what did it matter? could they not retreat to Samos or elsewhere?’10 But the root cause of the disaster was that the Ottoman response to Logothétis’ incursion was so wildly disproportionate. The number of Samians landing was probably no more than 1,500, and it was clear to the Turkish authorities that the invaders would get little support from the Chians. The Turkish garrison on the island, 4,500 strong, in itself outnumbered the Samian forces. Kara Ali was then instructed to bring a further 15,000 men across from the mainland, where many more were waiting to join in the plunder of Chios. Not all these thousands of Turks were on the island at the same time. It seems that most collected their booty of goods or captive slaves and returned to the mainland to sell them, and most of the accounts of the Chians themselves mention small groups or single marauders, not troops en masse. Nevertheless the sheer number of Turkish troops pouring into and out of the island presaged disaster, particularly because Kara Ali was unable properly to control his varied forces, just as Strangford at Constantinople had feared. If the Turks had limited their response to the small-scale Samian invasion merely to the minimum force needed to repel it, Chians at home and abroad could have continued in prosperity as an important contributor to the Ottoman economy, and the Turks would not have suffered the international odium which their savagery on Chios provoked. A destructive act of policy by the Ottoman government was thus, as on other occasions, ultimately self-destructive.
The execution of the hostages seems to have been on the direct orders of the Sultan, and behind him we glimpse again the shadowy figure of his minister Halet Effendi. A year earlier, at the time of the execution of Patriarch Grigórios, Halet Effendi seems to have been a cautious moderate but by now he had changed his stance. Strangford describes him as urging the execution of the Chian hostages, in opposition to other ministers, and writes of ‘the barbarous system of terrorism which Halet Effendi pursues, for the sake of diverting public attention from his own misdeeds’.11 In this he failed, or at least he failed to ingratiate himself with the Sultan; he was shortly afterwards exiled to Konya, where before the end of the year he was beheaded on the Sultan’s orders, another victim of the deadly pavane in which advisers of the Sultan moved in and out of his favour.
Waves of shocked reaction to the fate of Chios spread throughout Europe. One of the most immediate concerned money: the prosperous and widespread Chian commercial houses owed, in the natural course of trading, considerable sums to European firms, and these were now largely irrecoverable debts. Thus the Italian vice-consul in Smyrna wrote as early as 31 March 1822, when Kara Ali’s fleet had only just reached Chios: ‘Our trade has been gravely prejudiced by this insurrection because of the sums owed by Chians to Europeans, which probably cannot be paid.’12 On 17 June, the day before the destruction of Kara Ali’s flagship, the British consul in Smyrna reported that the Chian merchants there owed the English merchants a staggering 195 million piastres.
Revulsion, however, was the overwhelming response. It was forcibly articulated by Castlereagh, as Britain’s foreign secretary, in a despatch to Strangford of 9 July 1822 after the destruction of Chios was complete. Castlereagh acknowledged receipt of Strangford’s despatches, ‘which convey the painful and disgusting recital of the bloody scenes growing out of the Scio War’, and which he said had been laid before the King. The execution of the innocent Chian hostages in Constantinople particularly concerned both Castlereagh and the King, and, though Britain could not regard the Chian hostages as in any sense under her protection, Strangford was given a stern message to transmit to the Turkish government:
By a repetition of such deeds of blood, they will not only render all pacific arrangements impracticable, but they will leave to friendly and allied States, no other alternative but to withdraw their Missions from being, as it might seem, the approving witnesses of Transactions for which no human offences can furnish a pretext, much less a justification, and which, if repeated, must stamp the Council of the State that tolerates them, with the reproach of the most ferocious and hateful barbarism.13
Within a year the British government led the way in recognising the Greeks as belligerents, rather than rebels, by its acknowledgement that the Greek blockade of the Turkish coast was legal. Thus Britain took the first steps down the path of involvement in the Greek revolution, an involvement which was to culminate at Navarino.
A second crowned head of Europe added his authority to the appalled response to the events on Chios. At the Paris Salon of 1824 Delacroix exhibited his painting Scènes des massacres de Scio. In the foreground women, children and the wounded sit or lie in disconsolate attitudes. Behind them a Turk on horseback has seized and manacled two women. In the distance a fleeing crowd is being attacked, and far away towards the sea the blackened countryside is still burning. Théophile Gautier, a friend of Delacroix, described the impact of the work, with its feverish and convulsive drawing, rushing brushstrokes and violent colours, which aroused the disdain of the classicists and the enthusiasm of the young. The painting stirred public opinion in much the same way as today’s television pictures of tragedies in distant parts of the world. At the end of the exhibition Delacroix’s picture was bought for the Louvre by King Louis XVIII of France.