March 25th is the most important non-religious holiday on the Greek calendar. It was on this day in 1821 that a secret organization founded 7 years earlier, Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends) set into motion planned uprisings in the Peloponnese, in occupied Bulgaria and Moldavia to the north, and in Istanbul. (As a side note “Istanbul,” the Ottoman name for Constantinople was never adopted, and still hasn’t adopted, by the Greeks. Traveler’s tip: never call it “Istanbul” to a Greek. It was and is and always will be Constantinople.)
The first uprisings in the north were immediately extinguished by the Ottomans. This motivated Greeks in the Peloponnese to action.
Greece had seethed under the occupying Ottomans for four centuries. In 1453, after a 53-day siege, Constantinople, capital of the culturally Greek Byzantine Empire, had fallen to the Ottoman Turks. For seven centuries the Byzantines had served as a bulwark against Muslim aggression. When Constantinople fell, all of Europe lay before the Ottomans, who poured into the continent and were finally turned back at the gates of Vienna in 1683, which was considered the high water mark of the Turkic Empire.
Greeks tend to be a fractious and independent people, and one can only imagine how difficult it was for them to be under the authority of a foreign regime, practicing a foreign religion, for four centuries.
A number unsuccessful revolts had taken place prior to 1821, including in the Peloponnese in the 1460’s and 1470’s, local revolts in Thessaly in 1600 and in Epirus in 1611, once again in the Peloponnese in the mid-1600’s, on the mainland and in the islands in the 1760’s and ‘70’s, and again on the Aegean Sea in the late 1700’s.
In other words, the people of Greece did not go quietly into their night of occupation; there was always a seething tension and resentment towards their occupiers which regularly flared up into outright rebellion right up to their final war of independence in 1821.
At any rate, the Filiki Eteria set the date for what turned out to be the final revolt against the Ottomans as March 25th. The significance of this date, other than the practical consideration that it was in early spring, the ideal time to go to war, was that it was also the Orthodox Feast of the Annunciation, when Mary was told by the angel Gabriel that she would be the mother of the savior of the world. This helped set the clearly religious tone of the revolt: it would be Christians versus Muslims for control of the first Christian nation in Europe.
Still more fittingly, it was an Orthodox priest, Giorgios Demetrios Dikaios-Flessas, better known as Papaflessas (“papa,” like “father” in Catholicism, indicated clergy status), who was one of the revolution’s first celebrities. In a Greek movie about his life, he is credited with crying, “Either we will have victory, or we will die, under the cross of Christ!” (The modern Greek flag incorporates a cross in its design.)
Mottos such as “Freedom or death!” and “One hour of freedom is better than a lifetime in slavery!” gained common currency at that time. Lord Byron, who came from England to support the Greek revolution, famously wrote in his 1819 poem The Isles of Greece,
The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
Little Greece was too weak and disorganized to achieve independence on its own. The Ottoman Empire, though declining slowly, was still massively more powerful. It was when the Greek struggle for freedom attracted the attention and support of the Great Powers- France, Britain, and Russia- that Greece’s fortunes improved. Their navies decisively beat the Ottoman-Egyptian navy in 1827 at the Battle of Navarino, which turned the tide in Greece’s favor. The borders of the modern Greek state were eventually determined in 1832 at the treaty of Constantinople (not Istanbul). Greece adopted “Freedom or Death” as its official national motto.
Celebrations
By and large, March 25th is an excellent date for a holiday celebration in Greece. The long, rainy winter is finally over, and although the trees have not yet put out fresh leaves, many fruit trees are in full bloom and the grass is a rich, deep green that will gradually turn to tan as the hot weather progresses. For some reason the day is almost always bright and sunny. Without a doubt it’s one of the happiest days on the calendar. It’s a dual holiday, remember: it’s the Feast of the Annunciation as well as the celebration of the Greek Revolution. This means the day starts with a church service. As far as the holiday’s secular half, it’s the closest thing Greece has to commemorating her long and legendary past as Western Civilization’s founding country.
The day before the holiday, schools put on plays memorializing events of the War of Independence. One favorite such school presentation is the re-enactment of the Dance of Zalongo, which, to be fair, took place in 1803, 17 years earlier than the Greek Revolution, but so memorializes the Greek desire for freedom that many schools re-enact the event as part of their March 25th celebration. This was when the brave women of Souli, in Epirus, northwestern Greece, trapped by the Turkish army on a cliff above their village, chose death by jumping off the cliff, their children in their arms, rather than submission to the depredations of the Turks. The story is that many of these women danced and sang to their deaths.
On the day itself, Greek flags sprout from every balcony, and the largest military parades in the nation takes place in Athens and Thessaloniki, complete with the loud roar of fighter jet flyovers. In Athens, church services conclude with the raising of the flag over the Acropolis.
Every town and village has its own parade, with students in uniform and traditional dress, including the fustanella, the white tights and skirt of the Greek soldier at that time, participating.
Families gather together and eat the traditional bakaliaro, cod dipped in a thick batter of flour and beer and fried up to a tasty crispy brown, and served with skordalia, a sauce made of garlic, olive oil, and either stale bread soaked in water, or potatoes. This is in keeping with the fasting protocols in place during the Lenten season.
March 25th celebrations extend to the Greek diaspora as well, with parades and cultural events in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Melbourne.
All Greeks love this holiday; it brings a surge of pride to the Greek heart and makes its citizens proud to be Greek.
