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The Great Island
The Cretans did not follow at once. In June the Austrian consul at
Canea reported, ‘The bishop of Kissamos has been delivered over to the
fury of the people, who without regard for his character have dragged
him through the town, half naked, by the beard, and have cruelly
hanged him.’ This incident was followed by the massacre of some thirty
Christians in Canea. In Heraklion the Metropolitan Archbishop and
five bishops, together with other priests and laity, were cut down at the
altar of the cathedral, where they had sought sanctuary. After this, a
major uprising was inevitable.
Thus the Cretan insurrection was caused by an unprovoked and
murderous attack on the Christians. The Sphakians rose. Soon the
Turks were penned within the fortified towns. In 1824 the revolt was
crushed due to the intervention of Mehmet AH, Viceroy of Egypt,
who was called upon by the hard-pressed Sultan and sent a powerful
expedition.
This revolt had three characteristics. First, the savagery displayed by
both sides. The people of Mclidhoni, with their livestock and valuables
and enough food for six months, took refuge in a great cave near the
village. Khussein Bey, the Egyptian commander, required them to
come out. The herald who made this demand was shot. Khussein then
sent in a Greek woman to promise the villagers safe conduct. She too
was shot, and her body thrown out of the cave. Twenty-four of the
Egyptian troops had been killed in an attempt to force the cave.
Khussein then directed his men to block the mouth by throwing stones
into it; but overnight the Greeks succeeded in opening an air-hole.
After trying this method on four successive days, Khussein put down
brushwood and lit it, smoking the cave. All 300 occupants were suffocated.
The Mohammedans waited eighteen days to make sure, before
sending in a Greek prisoner who reported, ‘They’re all dead inside,
boss.’ Other incidents of this type are reported by Pashley, who
‘collected’ Turkish {and Cretan) atrocities. Xan Fielding describes the
cave at Vaphes in the White Mountains, which has this inscription:
‘Here in this coldwater cave on the ninth of August 1821 the Pashas
Resit and Osman put to death by suffocation 130 men women and
children of Vaphes, Christians fleeing from a Turkish onslaught after
three days of valiant resistance.’ The method was again asphyxiation.
The second feature of the ‘21 was the religious enthusiasm displayed
by the Cretans, which, if we are to trust Pashley’s impressions gained
from conversations with survivors in 1834, was excessive. All over
Greece the war was in some sense a sacred war; Greek church and state
were the same, and it was the church which prepared the Greeks for
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