Souliots

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Map of Souli, Kiafa, Samoniva and Avarino and the course of the Acheron River (William M. Leake 1835)
Suliots in traditional robes ( Eugène Delacroix around 1825; Louvre Museum, France)
Group of Suliot Fighters (19th century painting)

The Soulioten (other spelling: Sulioten ; Greek Σουλιώτες Souliótes ; Albanian  Suliotët ) were a warlike community that can be assigned to the Çamen and inhabited the mountains around Souli in the south of the Vilayets Ioannina , of ancient Epirus (Albanian Çamëria ).

history

The Souliots sought refuge in the mountains near the town of Parga in the 17th century from the Ottoman pressure .

With the exception of the village of Souli itself, three other important villages developed that were closely related to it: Kiafa , Samoniva and Avarino (southeast of Paramythia , in the valley behind the village of Glyki ). The inhabitants consisted of so-called Faras (Albanian for "grain", "seeds" or "clan", "clan"). These four large villages united and a council was formed from the heads of the largest clans. They made all decisions together and also judged disputes and criminal offenses. There were no written laws; it was decided according to custom. A similar legal system of clans and their relationships to one another can also be found in the Kanun in northern Albania .

The Soulioten ran cattle and some agriculture. They also had a dubious reputation as persistent and cunning thieves and robbers. Their attacks were particularly aimed at the warring Ottomans, against whose superiority they withstood for a long time with a simple but persistent defense system. They were not defeated until 1803 and then left the region of Souli, first moving to Parga and then, driven from there by Ali Pasha's threats and intrigues , to the Ionian Islands . A group of souliotic women were ambushed in the Zalongo Mountains. They arranged a mass suicide and plunged their children and themselves into the depths. Today the monument to the dance of Zalongo and Greek and Albanian folk songs commemorate the event.

Here they entered the military service of various powers ( Russia , France , Great Britain ), which then owned these islands one after the other. Ali Pascha, trapped in Ioannina by the Turks under Hurschid Pascha in 1820 and abandoned by the Albanians , sought help from the Souliots and gave them the Kiafa fortress. The Soulioten accepted his invitation, but got into great distress due to the conversion of the Albanian leaders to Hurschid Pascha and the unfortunate failure of the campaign undertaken from Greece to support them in the summer of 1822 and had to surrender their Souli festival to the Turks in September. Around 3,000 Soulioten were brought to Kefalonia on English ships , while the others fled to the mountains. Many of them bravely took part in the Greek struggle for freedom and later achieved prestige and dignity in Greece, such as the Botsaris and Tzavelas .

Ethnicity of the Soulioten

Greeks and Albanians are fighting over the ethnic affiliation of the Souliots , which reflects the current dispute about minority rights in the Albanian northern Epirus ( Greek Βόρειος Ήπειρος Vórios Ipiros ) and the Greek southern Epirus ( Albanian  Çamëri / -a ). Members of both peoples see the fight of the Soulioten against the Ottomans as a heroic national commitment that contributed to the establishment of their modern state. Originally, the Soulioten were Çamen , i.e. ethnic Albanians. After the liberation of Greece from 1821, which was largely fought for by the Soulioten, the Albanian language was also used as the official language in parliament for a few years until, after the subsequent influence of Russian Orthodox oligarchs in Greece, it was used in public education systems and offices from 1827 as it had been under Ottoman Reich was banned. As a result, the Albanian-speaking communities often passed into the Greek nation .

The strengthening of the Greek state, shaped by Slavic-Orthodox interests, became an oppressive doom for the Albanian community with the help of the military alliance between Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria, primarily against the Ottoman Empire.

By the 19th century at the latest, the Soulioten were largely Graecised, but considerable remnants of their Albanian colloquial language remained, as the Greek-Albanian dictionary written by Markos Botsaris testifies.

The name of the city, after which the Soulioten are named, comes from the Albanian suli , in German "mountain peak".

Famous Suliots

literature

  • Christoforos Perrevos (Χριστόφορος Περραιβός, also transcribed Perraebos ) Ιστορία του Σουλλίου και Πάργας story of Souli and Parga . 2 vols. (Modern Greek Parga 1803, English London 1823).
  • Wilhelm von Lüdemann: The Suliotenkrieg (Leipzig 1825) books.google.com .
  • Lexicon on the history of Southeast Europe .

Web links

Commons : Soulioten  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ * Balázs Trencsényi, Michal Kopecek: Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945): The Formation of National Movements . Central European University Press, 2006, ISBN 963-7326-60-X , p. 173. “The Souliotes were Albanian by origin and Orthodox by faith”.
    • Giannēs Koliopoulos, John S. Koliopoulos, Thanos Veremēs: Greece: The Modern Sequel: from 1831 to the Present . 2nd edition. C. Hurst & Co., 2004, ISBN 1-85065-462-X , p. 184
    • Eric Hobsbawm : Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Program, Myth, Reality . 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-43961-2 , p. 65
    • NGL Hammond: Epirus: the Geography, the Ancient Remains, the History and Topography of Epirus and Adjacent Areas . Clarendon P., 1967, p. 31
    • Richard Clogg: Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural Society . Hurst, Oxford 2002, p. 178. [Footnote] “The Souliotes were a warlike Albanian Christian community, which resisted Ali Pasha in Epirus in the years immediately preceding the outbreak the Greek War of Independence in 1821.”
    • Miranda Vickers: The Albanians: A Modern History . IB Tauris, 1999, ISBN 1-86064-541-0 , p. 20. “The Suliots, then numbering around 12,000, were Christian Albanians inhabiting a small independent community somewhat akin to tat of the Catholic Mirdite trive to the north”.
    • Nicholas Pappas: Greeks in Russian Military Service in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries . Institute for Balkan Studies. Monograph Series, No. 219, Thessaloniki 1991, ISSN  0073-862X .
    • Katherine Elizabeth Fleming: The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece . Princeton University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-691-00194-4 , p. 59. “The history of the Orthodox Albanian peoples of the mountain stronghold of Souli provides an example of such an overlap.”
    • André Gerolymatos: The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond . Basic Books, 2002, ISBN 0-465-02732-6 , p. 141. “The Suliot dance of death is an integral image of the Greek revolution and it has been seared into the consciousness of Greek schoolchildren for generations. Many youngsters pay homage to the memory of these Orthodox Albanians each year by recreating the event in their elementary school pageants. "
    • Henry Clifford Darby: Greece . Great Britain Naval Intelligence Division. University Press, 1944. “… who belong to the Cham branch of south Albanian Tosks (see volume I, pp. 363-5). In the mid-eighteenth century these people (the Souliotes) were a semi-autonomous community ... ”
  2. ↑ Emanuel Turczynski: Social and cultural history of Greece in the 19th century . Möhnesee 2003.
  3. ^ Heinz A. Richter: Greece in the 20th century . tape 1 . Cologne 1989.
  4. ↑ http://ellines-albanoi.blogspot.com/2010/06/5.html