Tribute to the Greek Patriot Rigas Fereos

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)   The restoration of Nebojsa Tower in Belgrade, Serbia where Rigas Fereos (1757-1798) was held captured and tortured will be launched this month and it is expected to be completed before the end of the year. The project will be funded by the Hellenic Parliament, the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Municipality of Belgrade. Rigas Fereos was a writer and revolutionary, an eminent figure of the Greek Enlightenment, remembered as a Greek national hero, the first victim of the uprising against the Ottoman Empire and a forerunner of the Greek War of Independence. Fereos’ vision for Greece’s emancipation from the Ottoman Empire was based on a Pan-Balkanic uprising under the guidance of Greece.  Around 1793, Fereos went to Vienna -the capital of the Austrian Empire and home to a large Greek community– in an effort to ask Napoleon Bonaparte for assistance and support.  The Austrian Empire opposed every movement which could jeopardise its territorial integrity and therefore ordered its secret services to arrest Fereos. He was imprisoned and tortured in the in the Nebojsa Tower in Belgrade and his body was thrown to the Danube River.  Fereos’ last words reportedly were: “I have sown a rich seed; the hour is coming when my country will reap its glorious fruits”.  Foundation of the Hellenic World: Ottoman Period- Towards the Greek Revolution

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Book: Paradise Lost / Smyrna, 1922

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)    Smyrna was the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire, where Levantine dynasties, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and Jews, had created together a majority Christian community that was unique in the Islamic world. In his book “Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922,” author Giles Milton describes how two million innocent civilians were caught up in the conflict as victorious Turkish troops entered Smyrna. The port was ransacked and looted for days and hundreds of thousands were deported or killed. Milton actually met survivors of the massacre, who he says are haunted by the destruction of their city “every day of their lives.” 

Secretariat General for Information: Greece in the World- Books on Modern Greek History-“Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922“; Foundation of the Hellenic World: From the 1920 elections until the Asia Minor Catastrophe