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By Root 1280 0

garrison of Belgrade, until the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913, the Balkans were in a more or less steady state of strife. Sometimes the Balkan peoples fought against one another, sometimes they battled against the Turks, either singly or in alliance. The other major European states played an active role, backing one party or another. But in that long conflict two horrific episodes epitomized “the Balkans” for all outsiders: the massacres that accompanied the beginning of the Greek Revolution in 1821–2 (which I shall discuss here), and the “Bulgarian Horrors” of 1876 (which will be looked at in detail in the next chapter). In both cases, what actually happened and what was written at the time diverged sharply. We can see how the new Balkan myths were formed and then disseminated like the dragon’s teeth of Greek mythology.

It is indisputable that, like most highland zones, the lands south of the Danube had inherited long traditions of social violence. Life seemed cheap. In Montenegro taking heads was a common practice, as it was among the Ottomans. This was a world in which individual life expectancy was short, but where the community lived on in all its members, bound together by common bonds. The demands of honor extended throughout a whole family, or in the mountains to an entire clan. In highland Albania, honor crimes, feuds, and vendettas would survive through many generations until the wrong was avenged.38 The only security against a knife in the back or an unexpected bullet lay in killing anyone who could be linked into the chain of vengeance. This was the unspoken thought behind the cry “Kill all the Turks in the Morea” that echoed in Greek village after village in the spring of 1821.

The Ottomans too had a culture of revenge. Justice was based on summary punishment and terror. One man or a whole community would die to expiate a crime. Individual responsibility and collective responsibility were equally valid justifications for capital punishment. If a miscreant had fled, a judge would order the punishment of someone from the same family, the same village, or even from the same millet.39 This was the case when Suleiman Pasha, the governor of Belgrade, was restored to his capital after the Serb revolt in 1807. He had “men roasted alive, hanged by their feet over smoking straw … castrated, crushed with stones, bastinadoed … Outside the Stamboul Gate in Belgrade … [were] corpses of impaled Serbs being gnawed by packs of dogs.”40 When Belgrade had fallen to the insurgents, most of the men had been killed. But Muslim women and children were kept alive, to be forcibly baptized.41 It is highly unlikely that the Turks tortured to death the actual men who had committed the offenses, firing buildings and burning all inside alive. Others suffered for the community’s crimes, to discourage further acts of rebellion. Ottomans, Slavs, Greeks, and Albanians all observed the unwritten law of slaughter and reprisal.

There are many candidates for the “precipitants” and “triggers” of the Greek Revolution but none of them fully explain why, suddenly, around Easter 1821, the Greek peasants of the Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land—men, women, and children alike. Almost 20,000 were slaughtered in a few months. This killing of Muslims, and not the Turkish massacres of Christians on the island of Chios in the following year, was the starting point of atrocity in the War of Liberation. There were antecedents for slaughter on this scale, but not in the Balkans. In the three decades before 1821, indeed, it was western Europe and not the torpid East that provided the most fearsome examples of mass murder. “Terror” was elevated to a principle of government during the first years of the French Revolution. The Paris mob hideously mutilated some of its victims, while in the French provinces ingenious means, such as mass drowning, were devised to speed up the process of disposing of the enemies of the people. Goya’s etchings of the Disasters of War, showing the incomparably savage cruelty of Spain’s Peninsular War guerrilla,