The defence of Mesolongi during its final siege has a supremely honoured place in Greek history. ‘Here in Mesolongi’, wrote Nikólaos Makrís, son of one of the garrison’s commanders, ‘Hellas, like a towering rock rooted deep in the earth, made light of the storms and withstood undaunted the cannonade of the barbarian hordes against the massive defences of the town. Thus Hellas shook to its foundations the arrogant throne of Ottoman power like a rotten oak, and hurled to the ground the autocratic might of the Sultan, to the amazement and admiration of all mankind.’1
Patriotism and filial piety had led Makrís into some exaggeration. The siege of Mesolongi ended in failure for the Greeks, and no more destroyed the Sultan than Dunkirk destroyed Hitler. The walls of Mesolongi were not massive but flimsy, and their effectiveness was all the more remarkable for that. The Greek nation was not, as Makrís implies, united in support of Mesolongi; both the national government and the Greek captains in the surrounding area gave grudging help at best. But Makrís was wholly right to characterise as undaunted the garrison and the people of Mesolongi, whose fortitude did indeed astonish the world as they held off for a year the attacks of besiegers who far outnumbered them.
The siege of Mesolongi which began in April 1825 was not the first it had suffered. In 1822 after the disastrous battle of Péta Mavrokordhátos and his shattered forces fell back to Mesolongi, and were besieged by the troops of Omer Vrionis, the victor of Péta, supported by the cavalry of Reshid Pasha, who three years later was to command the final siege of the town. Omer Vrionis began his siege in November 1822, at the start of the winter rains; mud quickly made the ditch along the landward side of the town virtually impassable, mud deadened the impact of cannon shot falling inside the town, and Mesolongi’s low defensive wall of earth proved an effective rampart for the Greeks. Omer Vrionis made a major assault on the Greek Christmas Day, hoping to surprise the townspeople at their celebrations, but the Greeks were forewarned and repelled the attack, holding their fire until the enemy was at close range as they had done at Péta. A week later Omer Vrionis abandoned his camp, which rains and the outbreak of fever had made untenable, and withdrew across swollen rivers and through the marauding attacks of Greek captains to his base at Amphilochia forty miles to the north.
A year later in October 1823 Mesolongi was again under threat. The main Turkish army had marched south via Karpenísi, where Márkos Bótsaris was killed, and laid siege first to Anatolikó, the small island at the head of the lagoon about five miles north-west of Mesolongi. Water for Anatolikó had to be brought across by boat from the nearby mainland, a traffic which the besiegers immediately stopped, hoping to force a surrender. However to the delight of the Greeks a Turkish cannon ball crashed through their church roof and opened an unsuspected spring of fresh water below the floor. One of the defenders marked this miracle in verse:
Parched heroes turned for help to God,
And He, when bombshells struck the spire,
Revealed a spring beneath the sod,
And conjured water out of fire.2
The garrison of Anatolikó put up a determined resistance, and before the onset of winter the Turkish forces again withdrew.
Thus by 1825 Mesolongi had withstood two assaults, had become linked worldwide with the fame of Byron, and seemed to be under divine protection. Mesolongi was also the only town north of the Gulf of Corinth to have remained in Greek hands since the beginning of the war. How then could it fall? How could it be allowed to fall? Mesolongi had in fact become a symbolic prize for both Greeks and Turks. After Ibrahim’s attack from the south, the invasion route for a Turkish army past Mesolongi was much less important, so Mesolongi was now of little strategic value to either side. Indeed some Greek cynics – or perhaps realists – were asking, ‘What does it matter if Mesolongi falls? Is Mesolongi the whole of Greece?’3 On the Turkish side the commander of the besieging army, Reshid Pasha, had been told by the Sultan, ‘Either Mesolongi falls or your head,’4 and he was determined to succeed where his predecessors had failed.
It was Mesolongi’s situation which made it so difficult to capture. The town was built on a spit of land projecting into the eastern edge of a huge lagoon, which was only two or three feet deep apart from a few slightly more navigable channels. The lagoon was rich in fish, and at night the waters were dramatically speckled with the flaming torches of the fishing boats, lights which seemed to float independently when a moonless night made the boats invisible. The lagoon was dotted with small islands rising just above the water level, which were to play an important part in the defence of Mesolongi. Prokopanistós, on the southern edge, formed a long thin bar to its entrance; Vasiládhi, a fortified post, commanded the main channel; Mármaris and Klísova lay just off Mesolongi; and at the head of the lagoon Anatolikó with its small town was shielded by the islets of Dolmás and Póros lying just south of it. No Turkish ship of any size could enter the lagoon, and any attempt to use small boats would meet hostile fire from the islands, especially from the three cannon on Vasiládhi. Greek ships however could unload supplies for Mesolongi at the edge of the lagoon into the small flat-bottomed punts called monóxila, and these could then make their way to the town through the winding channels which only the locals knew.
The landward side of Mesolongi, about a third of its perimeter, was therefore the best place to attack. Even here the besiegers’ task was not easy. To the east of the town lies a wide plain, much of it marshy, stretching away to the foothills of Mount Zigós; a marsh is no place to pitch a large military camp, and the open plain offered no protection against Greek fire from the town walls. These walls were about a mile long, with a deep ditch on the outside as a first obstacle to attackers. At the time of the initial siege in 1822 the walls had been only four feet high and two feet wide, made of earth with stone or brick facing in parts. Since then, on the initiative of Mavrokordhátos and some said at Byron’s suggestion, the walls had been raised, broadened and fortified under the direction of an engineer from Chios, Michaíl Kokkínis, though they were still largely built of earth. Along the walls Kokkínis had built seventeen bastions facing north and east, as emplacements for the town’s forty-eight guns and four mortars. The most important bastions formed triangular projections, so that defenders could fire along the walls and support each other against attack.
Kokkínis named his bastions after famous men, about half of them distinguished Greeks, among whom Kokkínis included his otherwise obscure uncle. The rest honoured foreigners who had supported revolution in Greece (Byron, Normann) or in their own country: Franklin for America, Skanderbey for Albania, Kosciusko for Poland and, with a nod to England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, William of Orange and his councillor Lord Sheffield for England. Many of the names were soon changed to something more descriptive or familiar: Márkos Bótsaris to Megáli Támbia or Great Bastion, William of Orange to Lunetta, Franklin to Terribile. Sadly only the central bastions now remain; the rest were knocked down successively to provide a cart-track, a railway, a ring road, and finally a slaughterhouse and a public lavatory. Thus do past glories make way for present needs. Kokkínis was proud of his work. ‘The rampart will withstand any enemy attack,’ he wrote, ‘and even the English will be astounded.’5 Gordon though was scornful, and probably commenting on reports said that these were not bastions in the European sense; Trikoúpis too said that the wall was poorly built and would not impress anyone. But Kokkínis’ first claim was justified, and his defences did hold out against virtually every enemy effort to breach them.
In the spring of 1825 Reshid led his army south from Árta. The wooded hills of the Makrinóros, previously a barrier to Turkish advance, had been left unguarded. There was no Greek force to hold up Reshid’s crossing of the Achelóos river. A last-minute attempt to halt the Turkish advance from a primitive gun emplacement above the road opposite Anatolikó had to be abandoned, and Reshid’s army reached the plain of Mesolongi at the end of April. His forces probably numbered about 20,000, of whom 8,000 were soldiers and some 4,000 were labourers to work on the Turkish entrenchments, ‘Christian peasants dragged from the villages of Macedonia and Thessaly’ as Gordon described them.6 The Greek defenders on the walls therefore had the bitter experience of having to fire on their own countrymen.
The garrison of Mesolongi numbered some 3,000 fighting men, including a handful of German and Italian philhellenes, while a further thousand or so defended Anatolikó. A committee of three civilians, appointed by the central government in Navplion, was nominally in charge of Mesolongi, but these three – two merchants and a local official – had no military experience, and the organisation of the defence naturally fell to the troops. These were made up of bands under a number of captains, who met daily to concert plans, and the overall leadership only slowly emerged. By July the acknowledged primus inter pares was the Souliot captain Nótis Bótsaris. An unlettered man in his sixties, distrusted by some for greed and ambition, he drove a hard bargain over his generals’ pay and quarters, but proved himself by staying at his post for the whole period of the siege. Thus the first orders of the day, dealing with discipline, watch-keeping, food distribution and so on, were signed by eleven military and six civilian leaders, an indication of co-operative effort unparalleled in the Greek struggle.
Among the defenders were three men who wrote accounts of the siege. The twenty-five-year-old Spiromílios, from southern Albania but with military training in Italy, commanded a troop of some 200 of his compatriots; he wrote a crisp military memoir in which he did not hesitate to criticise those he thought were slow to give help. Kasomoúlis, who had two of his brothers with him, wrote a three-volume memoir of the war including his time in Mesolongi, when he acted as secretary to one of the captains. His account is discursive and colourful, unreliable for details but excellent as a picture of the hazards and hardships of life under siege. Míchos, a civilian, wrote a conscientiously detailed account, much of it drawn from the Mesolongi newspaper Elliniká Chroniká, which the indefatigable Swiss philhellene Johann Jakob Meyer continued to produce until almost the end of the siege. As well as these three Nikólaos Makrís wrote an account largely based on the memories, and honouring the memory, of his father Dhimítrios, one of the garrison’s commanders.
Reshid’s army reached Mesolongi in 1825 at the beginning of summer, not the beginning of winter as in the two previous Turkish attempts. His labourers were immediately put to work digging a network of trenches and mounds under the fire of the garrison to bring his troops closer to the town. At some places these earthworks were less than a hundred yards from Mesolongi’s wall, close enough for the customary exchanges of banter and insults, and it was said that during lulls in the fighting Greek soldiers would creep forward and light their cheroots from the Turkish fires. There were basically three ways by which Reshid could get past Mesolongi’s landward defensive walls. He could batter his way through them, he could undermine them from below, or he could position his troops to attack them from above.
Through failure of co-ordination which so often bedevilled Turkish ventures, Reshid simply did not have enough artillery or shot to blow a breach in the walls. Initially he had only three cannon, and the number had risen only to eighteen by the end of August, whereas the Mesolongi garrison had forty-eight. Turkish ammunition stores were often low as supply by sea, from Patras and then from Reshid’s port at Krionéri ten miles east of Mesolongi, was intermittent. When a temporary breach was made in the walls, the defenders drove the attackers back in hand-to-hand fighting, which had been rare in the war up till then. Also breaches could easily be filled. Stone walls will spread impact, and a well-aimed shot at the base of a stone wall can bring down a whole section, whereas earth walls absorb shock. Any damage to the walls was repaired overnight by earth-carrying gangs of Mesolongi civilians, including women wearing men’s clothes, so that darkness restored any daylight destruction. It was soon clear to Reshid that bombardment was ineffective.
A second option was to dig a mine under the walls and destroy them from below. The Turks were not expert at this. The chamber in which their explosive was placed was often incompletely sealed to drive the blast upwards; as a result its force was simply dissipated back down the tunnel and did little damage. The Greek mining engineers were much more skilful, and by September they had perfected their technique. They first detonated a small mine under the Turkish earthworks and simultaneously opened fire on the spot; the Turkish forces, expecting a sortie by the garrison, gathered in force to repel it, like a swarm of wasps, said Kasomoúlis, when you hit their nest with a stick. Two hours later the Greeks detonated a second, much larger mine under their massed enemies. The whole rampart shook, Kasomoúlis went on, and the reverberation of buildings was like the groaning of a legendary beast. ‘We too were terrified and fell to the ground … legs, feet, heads, half bodies, thighs, hands and entrails fell on us and on the enemy.’7 Mines could be brutally effective, but only if properly laid.
Reshid’s third tactic was to attack the walls of Mesolongi from above, by building a huge extended mound from which his troops could fire down on the defenders. The engineer Kokkínis, remembering his military history, called this mound ‘Ípsoma tis Enóseos’ or Linking Causeway, the name which Alexander the Great had given to his similar construction at the siege of Tyre in 332 BC. Alexander’s effort had been a failure, so perhaps Kokkínis did not mind lending this name from Greek antiquity to a Turkish project.
At the beginning of August Reshid began building his mound towards the north-facing Franklin battery, at a thirty-degree angle towards the west so that it was as far as possible from the formidable bastions which flanked it to the east. Within a fortnight the mound was 160 yards long and five to fifteen yards wide, and overtopped the Franklin battery, on which the Turks could now fire downwards from behind screens. The Greeks were forced back from Franklin, but twelve yards inside the walls dug a ditch with a rampart behind it. The attackers were now inside the town but trapped between the walls and the inner ditch, and under fire from the battery on their left, so had become the besieged rather than the besiegers. In this extraordinary contest of competitive earth-moving, the Turks now began building a second mound inside the walls, to overtop the inner ditch and rampart. But by the end of August the Greeks had detonated a mine under the Turks’ second mound, and driven them back outside the walls again by an attack in which even stone-throwing Mesolongi boys joined. The Greeks now began the piecemeal removal of the Turks’ original mound, carrying away its earth at night to strengthen their own defences. The story went that when elsewhere in Greece or the islands people asked ‘What are our people doing in Mesolongi?’ the cryptic answer was ‘They’re stealing earth.’8
Finally in a fierce battle the Greeks drove the Turks back from the remains of the original mound, and at the beginning of September, after a month of hectic resistance destroyed it with a mine. Reshid, with his army weakened by casualties, disease and desertion and disappointed by the failure of all three of his methods of attack, pulled back eastwards to the foothills of Mount Zigós.
Reshid would of course have been saved a great deal of trouble if he had managed to negotiate a surrender of Mesolongi. He tried this in July and again in September of 1825, and though some of the Greek captains wavered, and the July negotiations were spun out to give the Greeks a breathing space to strengthen their defences, in the end the Greeks would have none of it. The defenders of Mesolongi, townspeople as well as troops, had quickly become battle-hardened; Kasomoúlis, arriving in Mesolongi in August 1825, said that when bullets flew overhead he was the only one who ducked. But life under siege was tough, as Kasomoúlis describes: ‘The defender carried a spade in one hand and a gun in the other. His only relief was to go from fighting to digging and back to fighting. Picture him, with sword or yataghan at his belt beside his pistols, carrying a piece of hide on which to knead dough for bread and a mortar to grind garlic to flavour his fish, preparing them where he stood, night or day.’9 During lulls in the fighting, he said, the civilians would laugh and chat about the recent battle, while the soldiers patrolled the ramparts like caged lions.
Mesolongi could hold out under these conditions only because its supply line through the lagoon was still open. From June to December Greek fleets under Miaoúlis were intermittently active off Mesolongi. They brought in supplies, mainly from Zákinthos, and in September several more bands of troops, but regularly returned to their home ports to reprovision and to secure the next month’s pay. A Turkish fleet under the kapitan pasha also patrolled the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, supplying Reshid through the port of Krionéri. The Greeks were still using fireships, but the Turks had learnt to counter them and they were no longer the threat they had once been. Clashes between the two fleets were frequent but indecisive. ‘Both parties claimed the victory,’ wrote Finlay, ‘the capitan-pasha because he kept open the communications between Patras and Krioneri, and Miaoulis because he succeeded in throwing supplies into Mesolonghi and in keeping open its communications with the Ionian Islands. But the real victory remained with the Turks, whose fleet kept its station at Patras, while the Greeks retired from the waters of Mesolonghi on the 4th December 1825, and returned to Hydra’10 – to come back, it must be added, and give support in the following year.
The Greek fleet did what it could, but help for Mesolongi from elsewhere was spasmodic at best. Karaïskákis, Roumeli’s most formidable captain, played an enigmatic role. He was prepared to harry Reshid’s lines of communication to his base at Amphilochia further north, and in September he made a successful attack on Amphilochia itself, but was very lukewarm about any direct help to Mesolongi. Karaïskákis it seems was prepared to help the Greek cause in ways which contributed to his control of his territory in central Roumeli, or which offered the chance of plunder, but saw no benefit in becoming involved in the defence of Mesolongi. Politics too played a part: Karaïskákis was an opponent of Mesolongi’s commander Nótis Bótsaris, Karaïskákis being of Koléttis’ party in the central government and Bótsaris a supporter of Mavrokordhátos. This central government in Navplion also did little to help Mesolongi, largely because it had no money. Spiromílios refers constantly to the government’s failure to provision Mesolongi in advance, to maintain the fleet off the coast, to send reinforcements and supplies, even bandages for the wounded, and to provide pay for the troops.
Nevertheless 1825 had been a triumphant year for Mesolongi. After the failure of his great mound Reshid had withdrawn, leaving only a few troops in his trenches, and in October the winter rains began, making further operations impossible. Mesolongiot wives and children, who had been sent to the island of Kálamos for safety because it was part of the Ionian islands, now returned: an unwise move as it turned out, since there were more mouths to feed later when the siege was renewed. Christmas was celebrated in the traditional way. Dhimítrios Makrís was married in a ceremony attended by his fellow captains, Mesolongi’s civilian leaders and many of the garrison. The party went on all night with constant firing of blank cartridges and when next morning the Turks outside the town shouted to ask the reason they were told ‘It’s the general’s wedding.’ In a spirit reminiscent of the Christmas 1914 fraternisation in the Flanders trenches, the Turks shouted back ‘Long life to them! May they be happy!’11 The engineer Kokkínis was able to inspect Reshid’s entrenchments, and described them as ‘earthworks with no coherence, constructions with no logic, and in short by any reckoning a muddle and a hotchpotch…. The whole thing is unbelievable – but it’s Turkish.’12 The year 1825 had seen Ibrahim’s triumph in the Peloponnese and his recapture of the key objectives of Navarino and Tripolis, but at Mesolongi the Greeks thought they had won.
They might indeed have done so if the Greek captains from other parts of Roumeli had made a determined attack on Reshid’s weakened army, and if that army had not been reinforced at the end of the year by the arrival of Ibrahim Pasha, fresh from his victories in the Peloponnese. In the previous autumn Ibrahim’s father the Egyptian viceroy had prepared at Alexandria a massive new naval expedition to support his son: a fleet of 135 sail including Egyptian, Turkish, Algerian and Tunisian ships, carrying 10,000 troops, mainly Arabs. In early November this fleet reached Navarino, from where Ibrahim marched north through the Peloponnese with half his army, destroying pockets of Greek resistance on the way, while the rest went on to Patras by sea. By early January 1826 Ibrahim’s army was encamped beside Reshid’s outside Mesolongi, having brought his stores of artillery, ammunition and provisions into Krionéri on the neighbouring coast.
Relations between Ibrahim and Reshid were understandably cool: if Ibrahim succeeded where Reshid had failed, Reshid would be humiliated – or worse. The story is told that at their first meeting Ibrahim asked Reshid why he had failed in eight months to get past that fence (indicating Mesolongi’s walls) while he, Ibrahim, had captured the fortress of New Navarino in a few days. Before Ibrahim could begin his own attack on the fence his supplies had to be brought up from Krionéri ten miles away, on the shoulders of his Arab troops since he had no carts. There was constant rain, the track was either rocky or marshy, the intervening river Évinos was in winter spate, and many of the wretched porters, used to a North African sun, fell sick or died. Those that survived a day’s work would light huge fires for warmth which often set fire to the surrounding tents and huts. The labour took six weeks, and during this time two more offers of negotiation were made to the Mesolongi garrison, which as before rejected them with disdain. By the end of February Ibrahim was ready.
The bombardment began at sunrise on 24 February and continued for three days. Some forty Turkish cannon and mortars had been set up in three emplacements, one in the centre opposite the Bótsaris bastion and one at each end of Mesolongi’s wall. From a range of only 400 yards, some 8,000 projectiles were poured into the town in the three days; according to Meyer’s newspaper, exactly 5,256 cannon shot and 3,314 mortar shells. Though many houses in the town were wrecked, the inhabitants took cover in cellars and ditches and casualties were light. The walls were not breached, and the Greeks drove off three enemy assaults in hand-to-hand fighting. The Arab troops did not live up to their fearsome reputation; they were well disciplined, said Trikoúpis, but not brave fighters. Mesolongi’s despised fence had still held.
It was now clear to Ibrahim that Mesolongi could only be reduced by the method that had been used against much more formidable fortresses: starvation. This meant getting control of Mesolongi’s lagoon, which was the garrison’s source of fish as well as the route for supplies from outside. An attempt on the lagoon had been made in the previous July. In support of Reshid, Yussuf Pasha, commander of Patras, had led into the lagoon thirty-six shallow-draught boats carrying 2,000 troops to attack Mesolongi from the sea, but had failed to capture the fortified island of Vasiládhi and within a few days was driven back. Ibrahim now prepared a larger force of eighty-two vessels, without the masts and keels of Yussuf’s craft so that they could negotiate shallower water, plus five large rafts carrying thirty-six-pounder cannon. This flotilla was towed across from Patras by a steamship of the Turkish navy originally built as an English packet-boat, a strange conjunction of the latest example of naval technology acting as tugboat to the most primitive.
Vasiládhi, near the centre of the lagoon and the key to control of it, was the first target. The island was defended by thirty-four gunners, with fourteen guns of twelve or eighteen pounds, and twenty-seven footsoldiers, under the command of the Italian philhellene Iacomuzzi. They faced a force of a thousand or more, which attacked on 9 March and was led by Hussein Bey, the conqueror of Kásos two years earlier. The island held out all day, but as evening fell their resistance was ended by an accidental explosion of their powder magazine. This may have been from an enemy shell or, as Mesolongi legend has it, because a ten-year-old boy on the island, seeing a gun loaded but unattended, incautiously fired it, igniting loose powder and hence the whole store. Four of the garrison were captured and the rest, including Iacomuzzi, escaped to Mesolongi after a four-hour struggle through the lagoon’s muddy shallows.
Three days later the Turks attacked the small islands of Dolmás and Póros, in the north of the lagoon where it narrows in the approach to Anatolikó. These islands are within a hundred yards of the shore, where the Turks set up cannon to bombard them. Both islands fell after a day of resistance, in spite of a diversionary sortie by the Mesolongi garrison from its east-facing bastions. The following day envoys from Anatolikó surrendered the town to Ibrahim under an agreement, which he fully observed, that they should be removed to Árta, where they would be fed for a month. Ibrahim had now achieved his purpose of cutting off supplies to Mesolongi by sea, and once again offered to negotiate a surrender, but on harsh terms: the defenders of Mesolongi should surrender all their weapons, ‘not retaining even the smallest dagger’,13 and either leave the town or convert to Islam. The garrison replied that they refused to surrender 8,000 bloodstained weapons, and that the outcome must be in God’s hands.
Ibrahim and Reshid now determined to push on towards the seaward edge of Mesolongi by attacking the island of Klísova, about half a mile south-east of the town. The defenders numbered only 120, reinforced when the attack was imminent by a handful of men from the garrison led by Kítsos Tsavéllas, one of its captains. There was a small church on the island, protected by ramparts behind which the defenders’ four small guns were placed. On the morning of 6 April Reshid led the first attacks of 2,000 Turkish and Albanian troops in flat-bottomed boats, but even these could not reach the shore of Klísova and the attackers had to jump into the water and wade through the mud. They were easy targets for the defence, and Reshid, himself wounded in the leg, pulled back. Ibrahim now took over, sending in an even larger force of 3,000 Arabs under Hussein Bey, who a month before had taken the fortified island of Vasiládhi. When the Arabs had jumped out into the shallows, they leant on the gunwales of their boats and tilted them as makeshift shields to cover their advance, but were still shot down in numbers. The Greeks knew that these Arabs were regular troops, dependent on orders from superiors, and directed their fire at Hussein Bey and shot him dead. Many claimed the hit, including a young boy perched with his musket on the church roof and nicknamed the wasp, a supposedly sharp-eyed insect. Ibrahim himself joined the battle encouraging and, literally, whipping on his troops, and was wounded. By nightfall the Arabs too had retreated, after what Gordon called ‘the bloodiest day Messalonghi had yet witnessed’.14
Kasomoúlis visited Klísova the next morning, and viewed the carnage with a coldly triumphant eye:
The lagoon was covered with corpses a gunshot distance away, and they were drifting like rubbish by the shore…. one could see bodies floating all round, about 2,500 of them, apart from those whom our boatmen had captured and killed at dawn when they cried out for help. Some 2,500 guns had been found, some with bayonets and some without, plus bandoliers and innumerable belts, from which the Greeks made braces. I made a pair myself, and so did everyone else. But the clothes were worthless apart from those of a few officers; the Greeks got no booty from these, and were much displeased.15
Though the combined efforts of the Turkish and Egyptian troops had failed so bloodily at Klísova, they were now masters of the lagoon and Mesolongi’s lifeline was cut. The last major supply drop had been at the end of January, when Miaoúlis’ fleet had brought in ammunition and 250 tons of maize – just in time, since the population had been reduced to two ounces of grain a day. Even the 250 tons of maize was not going to last long: about two months, allowing a pound a day for each of the town’s 9,000 or so occupants. Brave old admiral Miaoúlis, as Howe called him, continued to bring what ships he could muster to harass the Turkish fleet off Mesolongi, and even in the final days of the siege was planning an attempt to retake Vasiládhi and force his way into Mesolongi with supplies. However, his last significant service to the town was to carry a commission of six of its leaders to Navplion in a last desperate attempt to get help from the national government.
This commission comprised representatives of all the different parties sharing in the defence of Mesolongi: two Souliots, from the rival families of Bótsaris and Tsavéllas, two from West Roumeli (for parity), one from the forces who had come in during the siege, and for the Epirus contingent Spiromílios, who wrote a detailed account of the mission. It reached Navplion in late February, and immediately fell foul of the seething political intrigue. On arrival they accepted quarters from Koléttis, and were branded Kolettists. When they protested that they supported neither the Kolettists nor the Mavrokordhatists, they found that neither party would support them. A new national assembly was imminent, so members of the government were thinking of little but their re-election chances. Spiromílios as the mission’s spokesman addressed a joint session of the Executive and Senate, asking for an army of seven to eight thousand to attack the Turks and Egyptians from the east, the reinforcement of Miaoúlis’ fleet, a flotilla of shallow-draught armed vessels to retake the lagoon, and meanwhile supplies and pay for the garrison. The government glibly assented to all these demands, but of course there was no money to pay for them. The government once again revived the idea of selling off national lands – illegally, since they were already pledged as security for the first English loan – but there were few buyers, and those there were would offer only a fraction of the price in cash and the rest in promissory notes. Eventually some money was raised by private subscription, but only enough to fund another month or so of Miaoúlis’ gallant but inconclusive naval skirmishing.
The mission left Navplion, and Spiromílios wrote a bitter denunciation of all those he believed had let Mesolongi down. The captains of the Peloponnese, he said, had failed to attack Ibrahim’s bases there to draw him away from Mesolongi; the president of the Executive, Koundouriótis, expected to be removed at the forthcoming national assembly and so was wholly indifferent; Goúras, commander-in-chief of Eastern Roumeli, had done nothing to help Mesolongi; Karaïskákis’ troops at Dhervékista had merely sat there counting the distant cannon shots of the siege. Meanwhile, Spiromílios concluded, a band of 3,500 men had withstood the armies of Turkey and Egypt on land, and at sea the combined fleets of Constantinople, Algeria, Tunis and Tripoli – for twelve months, without pay and often without bread.16
Shortage of bread was indeed proving critical. At the beginning of March a rationing committee was set up which requisitioned all the corn in the town – though the Souliots were believed to have continued hoarding supplies – and distributed equal rations to all by the cupful. The Turks now controlled the lagoon so the fishing boats could not venture far, and most of the fish had been driven away by the firing. Any animal would now make a meal: horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, even mice if they could be caught. Seaweed was gathered from the water’s edge, but it was so bitter that it had to be boiled five times before it was edible. Even cannibalism was reported. Disease from such a diet was rife, especially diarrhoea, mouth ulcers, scurvy and arthritic swelling of the joints. Those who had suffered worst from malnutrition were skeletal, with livid skin, and some could hardly walk.
There were only two options left for the encircled defenders of Mesolongi: to capitulate or to break out. In mid-April Ibrahim and Reshid made a last offer of surrender terms which on any rational view the Greeks could have honourably accepted, especially as the terms were not harsh and Ibrahim had a reputation for keeping his word. But the Greeks rejected this offer as firmly as all the previous ones, and began to prepare for a mass exodus.
A council of the military and civilian leaders, including the senior cleric in the town Bishop Joseph, was held in the church of Áyios Spirídhon. There the date for the exodus was set: Saturday 22 April, the eve of Palm Sunday, and the supposed anniversary of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. The parallel was clear: Lazarus four days dead and restored to life, Greece four centuries oppressed and risen again. Envoys were sent to Karaïskákis and his fellow captains who were encamped at Dhervékista some thirty miles to the east, and it was agreed that Karaïskákis would make a diversionary attack on the appointed night, signalling his arrival by lighting fires on a hilltop out of sight of the enemy. Mesolongi’s population numbered about 9,000, made up of 3,500 fighting men, 1,000 civilian labourers and 4,500 women and children. When night fell they were to scramble over the eastern section of the walls, cross the defensive ditch on specially constructed bridges and then wait behind the earth rampart beyond the ditch. There were to be three groups, one on the right under Dhimítrios Makrís including the women and children, one in the centre under Nótis Bótsaris and one on the left under Kítsos Tsavéllas. Tsavéllas was to keep a few men on the walls till the last moment. When the noise of the planned diversionary attack was heard, all three groups would move forward together.
This was a huge and complex military operation which depended on many different things going right. Could the preparations for the exodus be kept secret, or would the enemy learn of it and block it? When the moment came could 9,000 people, half of them women and children, cross three or four six-foot-wide bridges before the enemy was alerted? Would Karaïskákis’ signalling system work? Would he come at all? If all else went well, could such a throng of escapers get through the enemy lines to safety? The plan was full of loopholes, but one must remember that it was devised not by a comfortably quartered general backed by an efficient staff and commanding regular troops, but by men of a divided command who had been fighting almost continuously for a year in worsening conditions, and were now on the edge of exhaustion.
Preparations for the exodus now went forward. A carpenter was commissioned to make the portable bridges, but his first examples were far too heavy – it would take a hundred men to lift them, said Kasomoúlis – and the work had to begin again. The women got ready men’s clothes for themselves, and laudanum for the children to ensure that they were drugged into silence on the night. Those too old or weak to leave were assembled in four or five houses, with a powder store below one of them to be blown up when the Turks approached, killing the remnants of the defence as well as the attackers. A mine was placed under one of the main bastions with the same purpose. The problem of what to do with the prisoners was brutally solved: they were all slaughtered in cold blood, and Kasomoúlis’ brother boasted of having killed twelve himself. A crazy suggestion that the women and children should also be killed was vetoed by Bishop Joseph.
These preparations did not remain secret: Ibrahim had been told of the Greek plan by deserters from the town, but appeared to do little to forestall it. As darkness fell on the night of 22 April, clouds conveniently covered the ten-day-old moon, and the exodus began. The bridges were hauled over the walls and placed across the ditch; some crossed by the bridges, others struggled through the ditch, throwing pillows and blankets into its muddy bottom to ease their passage. A thousand soldiers went first, followed by the women and children and then the rest of the defenders; all waited, with their faces pressed against the earth of the forward rampart, for the signal to go forward en masse. The signal was to be the noise of Karaïskákis’ promised attack on the enemy camp. Although there was no sign of the agreed signalling fires, in the early evening the Greeks had heard gunfire to the east – some 200 rounds – and assumed that Karaïskákis was there in force. But nothing more was heard.
Then the moon came out from behind the clouds, so that the escapers were now visible and the more vulnerable. After nearly an hour of waiting the Greeks lost patience and with shouts of embrós, forward, rushed out on to the plain. But some of the garrison were still crossing the bridges when suddenly for reasons unknown the contrary shout of opíso, back, went up. From the confused jostling on the bridges some fell into the ditch and drowned, while others pulled back into the town to fall victims to the Turks and Arabs who soon entered over the undefended walls.
Ibrahim knew of the planned exodus, and its timing, a day or two before it happened, and could have prevented it if he had wished. A few well-placed watchmen would certainly have seen and heard the bridges being placed and thousands of people crossing them, and a brief bombardment would have driven them back into the town. But the exodus suited Ibrahim very well. Mesolongi would be his without further fighting. The exodus was an even better outcome for him than a negotiated surrender, which might involve tiresome concessions. The Greeks were much more vulnerable in flight across the open plain than behind their walls. Also Ibrahim needed to keep his main body of troops around Mount Zigós, in case Karaïskákis’ attack from the east materialised, rather than in front of Mesolongi’s walls. On this interpretation the Greeks did not have to force their way out of Mesolongi as some dramatic paintings represent; Ibrahim let them out.
The Greeks’ initial move forward did apparently meet relatively light opposition. Kasomoúlis said that the Arabs in the forward positions kept well down in their trenches, so that their shots flew six feet over the Greeks’ heads. Trouble came later. The Turkish cavalry attacked the fleeing columns, and Makrís’ group in particular suffered heavy losses. In the foothills of Mount Zigós the Greeks were surprised by a body of Albanian troops who killed many of the men and took the women and children captive. This was where Karaïskákis’ troops should have been in position to help them, but only fifty or so under two other captains were there. The fugitives struggled on, and before the mountain slopes hid Mesolongi from view Kasomoúlis looked back at the town, now in flames. ‘The torch that was Mesolongi’, he wrote graphically, ‘shed its light as far as Vasiládhi and Klísova and over the whole plain, and even reached us. The flashes of gunfire looked like a host of fireflies. From Mesolongi we heard the shrieks of women, the sound of gunfire, the explosion of powder magazines and mines, all combined in an indescribably fearful noise. The town was like a roaring furnace.’17
Eventually the fugitives reached Karaïskákis’ camp after a thirty-mile journey. They found him ill in bed, which partly justified his inactivity, but in tactlessly jocular mood. According to Kasomoúlis he claimed to have counted 1,500 survivors and greeted them with ‘Why so many of you? Did the Turks kill only women?’ Makrís was incensed. ‘We got our backsides here through the gunfire without any help from you,’ he told Karaïskákis. ‘We have kept our word, and are doing no more. We’re going, and you can fight the Turks now.’18
Makrís had survived the exodus, as had Nótis Bótsaris and Kítsos Tsavéllas, the leaders of the other two groups, and the Italian philhellene Iacomuzzi, hero of the defence of the Vasiládhi island fortress. But many had died, including some of the leading captains, Kokkínis the engineer, six German philhellenes, and Meyer the newspaper editor, who perished with his wife and child in the foothills of Mount Zigós. The total number of Greek casualties in the exodus is impossible to determine; many recorded figures are what Finlay calls ‘rhetorical arithmetic’. Finlay’s own careful estimate is probably the most reliable: 4,000 dead, 3,000 captured, mainly women and children, and only 2,000 escaped.
When news of the fall of Mesolongi spread it evoked first a gasp of stunned horror as at some unimaginably awful catastrophe, then blame, then a determination to try to retrieve the situation. Kolokotrónis was at the National Assembly meeting to appoint a new government. ‘The news came to us that Missolonghi was lost,’ he wrote. ‘We were all plunged in great grief; for half an hour there was so complete a silence that no one would have thought that there was a living soul present; each of us was revolving in his mind how great was our misfortune.’19 When Kolokotrónis recovered himself he urged the Greeks to intensify their own efforts, and to look for help to foreign powers. Howe described his feelings in a letter from Navplion. ‘I write you with an almost breaking heart. Missolonghi has fallen!’ and he saw in its fall ‘damning proof of the selfish indifference of the Christian world’. He concluded heatedly: ‘You may talk to me of national policy, and the necessity of neutrality, but I say, a curse upon such policy!’20
In France, Germany and Switzerland the drama of Mesolongi had stimulated, by the end of the year, a flood of poems, songs, musical plays, essays and sermons. A frequent symbol for Mesolongi’s fall was the death of an innocent Greek maiden, and a common explicit theme, as for Howe, was that the Christian powers of Europe had shamefully neglected the Greek cause.
Perhaps the most ambitious rendering of the story was in London, where The Grand Historical Mimo-Dramatic Spectacle of the Siege of Missolonghi ran for a week in September 1826. The cast of characters included well-known Turks and Greeks, as well as extras such as Mahmood, supposed to be a Turkish officer but in reality a disguised Greek maiden, and, after scenes of a parade of Turkish troops, the Greek ramparts and a ‘grand triumphal ballet’ on horseback, concluded with a ‘Terrific Explosion, laying the City in Ashes’.21
The most potent use of the drama of Mesolongi to help the Greek cause was probably in painting. In July 1826 Delacroix exhibited his La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi, completed in a mere three months. The picture is almost filled by the figure of a young woman, hollow-eyed and in disordered dress, half kneeling on the broken slabs of Mesolongi’s walls. In the foreground grisly human remains can be seen, and far in the background, to represent Ibrahim’s Egyptians, a turbaned black Oriental holds the Crescent flag. The woman’s direct gaze and outstretched hands make an appeal for human, not divine aid; her eyes are not raised to heaven, and there is no Cross, no bishop, no angel, no Christ Himself in the sky, symbols common to many representations of Greece’s struggle. The message was clear: Greece now looks to her fellow Christians for aid.
The theme was further developed in the Paris Salon exhibition of the following year, when twenty-one works on contemporary Greek subjects were exhibited by Delacroix and others. As one radical art critic wrote, ‘The Salon is as political as the elections; the brush and the chisel are party tools just as much as the pen.’22 From Greeks and philhellenes in Greece and from writers and artists throughout Europe the call went out that the powers of Europe must abandon neutrality and intervene actively to help the Greeks, a call that was ultimately answered at Navarino.
Mesolongi had become a symbol, and the drama of its fall tended to overshadow the reality of its gruelling year-long defence. The leading figures of that defence have their memorial, in the pages of history and in the statues of Mesolongi’s Garden of Heroes near the remains of the central bastions. But the common people too played a heroic part, and it is fitting to end with one of them. The story is told that years later a woman of Mesolongi, now ninety and on her deathbed, begged to be buried in the clothes that were at the bottom of her locked chest. When she died her family opened the chest expecting to discover her finest dress, but found instead men’s clothing with belt and shoes, preserved from the time that she had worn them as a labourer during the Mesolongi siege and in the final exodus.