One of the central events of the Revolution, the famous second siege of Messolonghi began in April 1825 and ended on April 11, 1826 (the dawn of Palm Sunday) with the heroic Exodus of the garrison and the massacres and the captivity of those who remained (sick and wounded soldiers, women, elders, children).
“I started these current notes on November 15, 1832,” notes Nikolaos Kasomoulis (1795-1872); the account of what he experienced inside the besieged Messolonghi is one of the earliest memoirs of a combatant, and certainly a text where personal experience is captured in the most direct and genuine way.
The fighting ethos and negative behaviors, the everyday life and conflicts, the insults and jokes hurled by the besieged at the besiegers and vice versa, the efforts of Kioutachi and Ibrahim to achieve some form of capitulation, the anxiety of the besieged as to whether the ships from Hydra or Spetses would appear, the rivalries between the Souliots and the Roumeliots, the cannon fire and the continuous repairs of the wall.
Kasomoulis possesses the gift of narration and, despite the intensity of what he lived through day by day, for so many months, he managed to objectively and calmly illustrate both the events and the people.
The selected works of Alexis Politis aim to delve into the overt but also the more subtle aspects of the narration and the ideology of the text, to comment on and supplement the incidents, to present the place, Messolonghi itself, and the broader region. They focus on the central, perhaps, stake of the siege – and, of course, of the Revolution. How, in other words, through what processes developed or at times condensed the modern sense of collective “we”, in other words, the modern Greek national consciousness.
