Ottomans

Greece will honor Haiti for being the first nation in the world to recognize Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821.

On December 1st, 1913, the island of Crete was officially integrated into the Greek state, after exactly one month earlier, Sultan Mehmet V had relinquished all sovereignty over the island. Crete's liberation from Ottoman rule was a violent struggle that...

On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman army, led by Mehmed the Conqueror, seized Constantinople, putting a violent end to one of the longest-lasting empires in history. Along with it, the seizing of the great city also ended the life...

Michael Goodyear* May 29, 1453: the final Ottoman assault on Constantinople succeeds. Ottoman cannon fire had battered the great Theodosian Walls of the city. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos-Dragases, had torn off his imperial regalia and died fighting...

The systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914 and 1923 is commemorated on April 24 every year. The Armenian Genocide was an atrocity which...

The Chios massacre of 1822 was perhaps the worst atrocity carried out by the Ottomans against Greeks during the War of Independence. Approximately three-quarters of the population of 120,000 were killed, enslaved or died of disease after thousands of Turkish...

February 21 marks the day in 1913 when the historic city of Ioannina, the capital of Epirus in north-western Greece, was liberated from the Ottoman troops. The city, which endured centuries of Ottoman rule until 1913, celebrates the union with...

What is widely known about the history of Greece's splendid Ionian islands is that they never had to endure direct Ottoman rule during the dark years between the 15th and the 19th centuries, when the rest of Greece was...

By Michael Goodyear* In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman government under the Committee of Union and Progress (“CUP”) orchestrated massacres of its Christian minorities, resulting in ethnic cleansing that would lead to the deaths of hundreds...

To this day, the "Holocaust of Arkadi" remains a universal symbol of self-sacrifice for freedom in the face of barbarism, while filling another page in the glorious history of Greece. It was November 9, 1866 when over a thousand brave...