On 23 September 2026, Türkiye’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commemorated the 205th anniversary of the massacre that followed the capture of Tripolitsa (Tripoliçe), the Ottoman administrative center of the Morea. This commentary builds upon this author’s earlier AVİM analysis of the Tripolitsa massacre, published during Greece’s 2021 bicentenary commemorations, which drew attention to the destruction of the Morea’s Muslim Turkish and Jewish communities and to the selective marginalization of their suffering in accounts of Greek independence.[1]

 In a statement in social media, the Ministry recalled that “the Muslim Turkish population of the Morea (Peloponnese) Peninsula was systematically massacred between the years 1821 and 1830,” and that this violence was accompanied by a “calculated campaign of destruction” directed at places of worship, madrasas, cemeteries and other cultural heritage. It commemorated “the Muslim Turkish civilians who were brutally murdered”. [2]

Türkiye’s commemoration recalls a historical loss that has received strikingly limited recognition outside Turkish scholarship and public memory: the destruction of the long-established Muslim Turkish presence in the Morea during the Greek revolt. The victims of Tripolitsa were not an incidental footnote to the emergence of a new state. They were civilians whose deaths formed part of the violent disappearance of an Ottoman-Muslim society from the Peloponnese. The Ministry’s phrase “policy of extermination” is cited here as an official commemorative formulation, not as a legal conclusion by this author.

On the same day, unnamed Greek diplomatic sources, as reported by Kathimerini, rejected Ankara’s comments as a “systematic distortion and exploitation of history.” Yet the newspaper itself described the 1821 episode as an “atrocity against Turkish civilians” in which “thousands of Muslim and Jewish non-combatants were slaughtered.” The disagreement therefore concerns Ankara’s framing and terminology, not the existence of substantial civilian suffering. [3]

This exchange, coming nine days after Greece’s 14 September declaration on Asia Minor, shows again that historical remembrance requires completeness, conceptual discipline and legal precision. [4]

As this author’s 2021 AVİM analysis demonstrated, the present controversy should not be treated as an isolated diplomatic exchange. It reflects a continuing problem in the public memory of 1821: the tendency to commemorate the emergence of the Greek state while leaving the destruction of the Morea’s Muslim Turkish and Jewish communities outside the principal narrative of liberation. The issue is not whether Greek independence may be remembered, but whether historical commemoration can remain credible when it does not also acknowledge the civilian victims of its foundational conflict.[5]

The Historical Record of the Muslim Turkish and Jewish Victims

Greek commemorative practice marks the fall of Tripolitsa on 23 September 1821. Although the scale, chronology, and composition of the victims remain matters of historical discussion, contemporary and later accounts converge on extensive violence against Muslim and Jewish inhabitants following the capture. Thomas Gordon, a British officer who had served with the Greek insurgents, put the number killed at about 8,000.[6] The Greek historians Spyridon Trikoupis and Ioannis Filimon later wrote of about 10,000.[7] François Pouqueville, a philhellene whose Histoire de la régénération de la Grèce (1825) does not seek to excuse the episode, reported more than 16,000 dead.[8] William St Clair later summarised the slaughter as “upwards of ten thousand” people.[9] These figures are not identical. They are sufficient to establish that the capture was followed by extensive killing of non-combatant Muslim and Jewish inhabitants.

The Jewish community of the town was destroyed. Independent work by Steven Bowman records that destruction as part of the same collapse of the urban population.[10] Salâhi Sonyel’s study in Belleten documents the wider elimination of the Muslim Turkish presence in the Peloponnese between 1821 and 1830.[11] Maxime Gauin has usefully recalled that several Western volunteers in the insurgent forces later resigned and testified to the crimes they had seen; Gordon and Maurice Persat belong to that file. None of these sources originates in a Turkish ministry.

The 1948 Genocide Convention postdates 1821. The Convention’s legal test is not applied retrospectively here.[12] A commemorative vocabulary, whether “massacre,” “atrocity” or “extermination,” cannot substitute for that test.

Commemoration and the Erasure of Muslim Turkish Victimhood

The problem in public memory is not that Greeks remember the siege as a military turning point. It is that the second sentence is so often missing. On 28 September 2025, Defense Minister Nikos Dendias, representing the prime minister at celebrations in Tripolis, called the siege “the turning point that laid the foundations for the Greek Revolution,” because the fall “signified the collapse of the center of Ottoman rule and presence in Morea.” He added that Greeks “sensed a notion of a country in its cradle.” He recalled Kolokotronis and the plane tree on which Ottomans had hanged Greeks. He did not mention the killing of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants that followed the surrender.[13]

Diaspora practice follows the same architecture. At a wreath-laying in Melbourne on 28 September 2025, George Kotsirilos of the Panarcadian Association said the fall “was not just a military victory” but a blow to “Ottoman tyranny.” A year earlier, he said it “paved the way for the establishment of the modern Greek state.”[14] President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, in 2021, moved in one step from the town's strategic importance to Greece as “a modern state of law in the heart of the European Union.”[15] These texts attach the language of nation-birth to the capture. They do not mention Muslim or Jewish civilians. That is selective remembrance. It is not evidence that Greek statehood is “based on” a massacre.

Selective Memory, Anti-Turkism, and the Marginalization of Turkish Victims

The concern is not commemoration as such, but its conversion into a one-sided instrument. Official statements speak of “liberation” and the “cradle” of the nation. Parallel campaigns present 1922 and Pontus under the heading of genocide, while the civilian dead of 1821 remain off-stage. Street abuse directed at Turks, which resurfaced in replies to the Ministry’s post, is in a lower register and is not “the Greek position.” What travels into European debate is the cleaned official story: a foundational victory without Muslim or Jewish victims.

That pattern sustains a familiar anti-Turkish narrative in which Turks are portrayed exclusively as historical agents of oppression rather than also as civilian victims. It does not explain every form of contemporary anti-Turkism, but it provides a selective historical vocabulary through which such stereotypes can be repeated and normalized.

It treats Turks only as oppressors and never as civilian victims.

A principled rejection of hatred against Muslims and against Turks is inconsistent with that omission. Acknowledging Tripolitsa does not cancel Chios, Psara or other sites of Greek civilian suffering. It insists on one moral standard.

Tripolitsa should be remembered as a Turkish, Muslim, and Jewish human tragedy, not only as a Greek military success. Türkiye’s commemoration is therefore neither an attempt to deny Greek suffering during the war nor an invitation to cultivate inherited hostility. It is a call to recognize that the Muslim Turkish population of the Morea also had a history, a homeland, civilian lives, places of worship, cemeteries, and descendants of memory. Their disappearance cannot be excluded from the moral account of 1821.

Türkiye should respond through documentary scholarship, archival accessibility, translation, and principled public remembrance. European actors, meanwhile, should recognize that opposition to anti-Muslim hatred and anti-Turkism is not credible if Muslim Turkish civilian victims are excluded from historical memory. Remembering Tripolitsa responsibly means refusing to accept a hierarchy in which the humanity of victims depends on their religion, identity, or place in a preferred national story.

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