Qualla: Chios expedition

Chios expedition: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlekH at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. Charles Nicolas Fabvier was a French colonel who had fought for Napoleon and then thrown in his lot with the Greeks, and in the autumn of 1827 he was handed an almost impossible assignment: take back Chios. Five years had passed since the Ottoman reprisal had emptied the island of most of its people, and as Greek independence finally came into view, Chian refugees scattered across the Aegean begged the new government not to let their homeland be left outside the borders of the coming nation. The expedition that answered them would last barely four months and end in failure, but it was an attempt to reclaim a place that had already been lost.

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Image: AlekH at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Chios expedition: A Cause Worth a Long Shot

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maarten Sepp, CC BY-SA 4.0. By late 1827 the Greek rebels were racing the clock. Independence was near, but they feared that any territory still under Ottoman control when the borders were drawn, even land that had revolted and bled, would be excluded from the new state. So they launched simultaneous operat...

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Image: Maarten Sepp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chios expedition: A Force Held Together by Will

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Krazeisen, Public domain. What Fabvier scraped together was modest and uneven: six or seven hundred men from the regular army, a handful of field guns, siege guns, and mortars, and over a thousand irregulars from central Greece alongside Chian refugees fighting for their own homes. Two hundred cavalry wer...

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Image: Karl Krazeisen | Public domain

Chios expedition: The Siege That Could Not Close

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomkeHoekstra, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fabvier brushed aside the first Ottoman troops and drove them inside the Castle of Chios, then settled in to besiege it. But his siege had a fatal flaw: he had no fleet to seal the fortress from the sea, so it could always be resupplied and reinforced. He was reinforced himself b...

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Image: RomkeHoekstra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chios expedition: Withdrawal

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 2gymkais1, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 12 January 1828 the Ottoman garrison sortied against a weak point in the Greek lines and nearly broke through, until irregulars under a captain named Gekas held long enough for the regulars to counterattack and Fabvier himself led a battalion to retake the lost ground. The Tur...

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Image: 2gymkais1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chios expedition: The Border That Bypassed Chios

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 2gymkais1, CC BY-SA 4.0. The expedition's failure had a lasting consequence. When the borders of independent Greece were settled, Chios was left outside them, just as the refugees had feared. The island would remain under Ottoman rule until 1912, almost a century after the catastrophe of 1822 and more th...

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Image: 2gymkais1 | CC BY-SA 4.0