Qualla: Chios massacre

Chios massacre: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Friedrich Campe, Public domain. Before the spring of 1822, Chios was home to perhaps 100,000 to 120,000 people: merchants and shipowners whose families had traded across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean for centuries, scholars, mastic farmers, priests, and the children of a wealthy and cosmopolitan island. Within a few months, roughly four-fifths of them were dead, enslaved, or in flight. Whole villages were emptied. The catastrophe that destroyed this community is remembered now as the Chios massacre, and what follows is an account of the people it consumed.

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Image: Friedrich Campe | Public domain

Chios massacre: An Island That Did Not Want War

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kostisl, Public domain. When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, the leaders of Chios were reluctant to join it. They had reason to be. The island lay only a few miles off the Anatolian coast, well within reach of the Ottoman heartland, and its prosperity depended on the careful autonomy th...

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Image: Kostisl | Public domain

Chios massacre: The Reprisal

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FLIOUKAS, CC BY-SA 4.0. An Ottoman fleet under the admiral Nasuhzade Ali Pasha arrived on 22 March and began to pillage the town. Over the following four months, an estimated 30,000 troops landed on the island. The order was given to burn the settlements, and the violence moved through the countryside, ...

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Image: FLIOUKAS | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chios massacre: The Enslaved and the Scattered

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charles-Philippe Larivière, Public domain. Behind those numbers were people whose lives did not end with the killing. Tens of thousands of survivors were carried off to slave markets or fled across the Aegean, scattering into a diaspora that reached deep into Europe. Some of the enslaved were children. A boy named Georgio...

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Image: Charles-Philippe Larivière | Public domain

Chios massacre: The World Looks Away, and Then Cannot

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, Public domain. On 7 May, the British warship HMS Seringapatam passed the burning island and received signals from Greek ships pleading for help. Under orders to observe strict neutrality, the ship gave no assistance and sailed on. But Europe could not look away for long. The French painter Euge...

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Image: Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse | Public domain

Chios massacre: Remembrance

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maarten Sepp, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dead of Chios have been mourned for two centuries. In Nea Moni, the island's great Byzantine monastery, human remains from the massacre are still kept, a physical reminder that resists abstraction. In 2021, the Orthodox Church of Greece formally recognized Metropolitan Plato ...

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Image: Maarten Sepp | CC BY-SA 4.0