William St. Clair also argued that: "
with the beginning of the revolt, the bishops and priests exhorted their parishioners to exterminate infidel Muslims."
[28] St. Clair wrote:
The Turks of Greece left few traces. They disappeared suddenly and finally in the spring of 1821 unmourned and unnoticed by the rest of the world....It was hard to believe then that Greece once contained a large population of Turkish descent, living in small communities all over the country, prosperous farmers, merchants, and officials, whose families had known no other home for hundreds of years...They were killed deliberately, without qualm or scruple, and there was no regrets either then or later.
[9]
Atrocities toward the Turkish civilian population inhabiting the Peloponnese had started in
Achaia on the 28th of March, just with the beginning of the Greek revolt.
[29] On 2 April, the outbreak became general over the whole of Peloponnese and on that day many Turks were murdered in different places.
[29] On the third of April 1821, the Turks of
Kalavryta surrendered upon promises of security which were afterwards violated.
[29] Followingly, massacres ensued against the Turkish civilians in the towns of Peloponnese that the Greek revolutionaries had captured.
The Turks in
Monemvasia, weakened by the famine opened the gates of the city, and laid down their weapons. Six hundred of them had already gone on board the brigs, when the
Mainotes burst into the town and started murdering all those who had not yet reached to the shore or those who had chosen to stay in the town.
[30] Those on the ships meanwhile were stripped of their clothes, beaten and left on a desolate rock in the Aegean, instead of being deported to Asia Minor as promised. Only a few of them were saved by a French merchant, called M. Bonfort.
A general massacre ensued the fall of
Navarino on August 19, 1821. See
Navarino Massacre.
The worst Greek atrocity in terms of the numbers of victims involved was the massacre following the
Fall of Tripolitsa in 1821:
For three days the miserable inhabitants were given over to lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared. Women and children were tortured before being put to death. So great was the slaughter that
Kolokotronis himself says that, from the gate to the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground. His path of triumph was carpeted with corpses. At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains and there butchered like cattle.
[31]
Although the total estimates of the casualties vary, the Turkish, Muslim Albanian and Jewish population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community.
[2] Some estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15,000, 20,000 or more out of 40,000 Muslim residents
[32][33] to 30,000 only in Tripolitsa.
[34] Massacres of Turkish civilians started simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolt.
[28][29][35][36]
Historian George Finlay claimed that the extermination of the Muslims in the rural districts was the result of a premeditated design and it proceeded more from the suggestions of men of letters, than from the revengeful feelings of the people.
[37] William St. Clair wrote that:
"The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in the Peloponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill."
