President of the Hellenic Republic Constantine Tassoulas attended the commemoration of the exodus of Missolonghi in Central Greece on Sunday.
The exodus of Greek fighters for independence and families took place on the night of April 10, 1826 after a year-long siege by Ottoman and Egyptian forces. The event took place during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829), and its influence in rallying forces and help influenced the rest of the war.
After laying a wreath at the Park of Heroes President Tassoulas spoke of the fighters’ “unimaginable self-sacrifice and the unimaginable self-denial of a people who summarized with its behavior on the night to Palm Sunday of 1826 the motto ‘Liberty or Death’, choosing liberty through death.”
The exodus from the fort’s three gates did not lead them to victory, the president said, but “led them to something greater, it led them to glory, and this glory gave a new spirit and impetus to the Greek Revolution, which had started to wane from 1824 due to two civil wars. It gave a new spirit and impetus to the revolution across Europe, it greatly rekindled philhellenism, and the foreign great powers, seeing the barbarity of the Ottoman empire against a Christian people, taking into account as well their interests that were being harmed by the heroic extension of the struggle, started gradually seeing the Greek Revolution as something they had to recognize.”
What followed, he said, – the St. Petersburg Protocol of 1826, the London Protocol of 1827, the battle of Navarino that destroyed the Ottoman navy in 1827 – “all these were influenced by the glory and the sacrifice of Missolonghi.”
