Theodoros Kolokotronis

Theodoros Kolokotronis was born on 3 April 1770 at Ramavouni in Messenia, in the southwestern Peloponnese, then under Ottoman rule. His birth came in the open air, under a tree on a mountainside, while his family was on the move during the upheaval that followed the failed Orlov Revolt, a Russian-backed uprising that had swept the Peloponnese earlier that year ^[1]. The Kolokotronis clan had a long record of armed resistance. For generations its men had served as klephts, bandit fighters who lived in the mountains and raided Ottoman authority, or as armatoloi, Christian militiamen hired to police the very passes the klephts haunted ^[2].

His father, Konstantinos Kolokotronis, took part in the Orlov rising and was killed in 1780 when Ottoman and Albanian forces stormed the tower at Kastania in the Mani, where the family had taken refuge. Theodoros was ten years old. The boy grew up in the Mani and in the mountain districts of Arcadia, absorbing the code of the klephtic world: loyalty to kin, suspicion of authority, and skill with the long gun ^[1]. He received almost no formal schooling, a fact he acknowledged frankly in later life, yet he developed a sharp practical intelligence and a gift for reading both terrain and men.

By his mid teens Kolokotronis was carrying arms. Around 1785 he joined armed bands operating in the central Peloponnese, and in 1790 he married Aikaterini Karousou, daughter of a local notable from Leondari. He built a reputation through the 1790s as a kapos, an armed retainer protecting villages and notables in Arcadia, work that blurred the line between guardian and brigand ^[2].

Ottoman patience with the klephts of the Morea ran out in 1806. The Porte, alarmed by their growing power, ordered a general extermination campaign, and the Church was pressed into excommunicating the outlaws. Kolokotronis survived the purge that killed many of his kinsmen and escaped by sea to the Ionian island of Zakynthos, which was then beyond Ottoman control ^[1]. The persecution of 1806 scattered the klephtic families and lodged in Kolokotronis a lasting conviction that only full independence could secure the Greeks.

The Ionian Islands changed hands repeatedly during the Napoleonic wars, and Kolokotronis took service with whichever power opposed the Ottomans. After the British took the islands, he enlisted in the Duke of York's Greek Light Infantry, a regiment raised from refugee fighters, and rose to the rank of major ^[3]. The experience mattered. For the first time the mountain warrior saw European drill, regular supply, and staff organization at close range. He later said that his years in British service taught him what discipline could accomplish, even though he never abandoned the irregular tactics of his youth.

On Zakynthos he also entered the orbit of the Filiki Eteria, the secret society founded in Odessa in 1814 to prepare a Greek uprising. Kolokotronis was initiated into the society in 1818 and became one of its most valuable assets in the Peloponnese, a commander with a famous name, a wide kinship network, and three decades of fighting experience ^[2]. When word spread late in 1820 that revolt was imminent, he slipped back to the mainland, landing in the Mani in January 1821 ^[1].

Revolution broke out across the Peloponnese in late March 1821. Kolokotronis joined the Maniot leader Petrobey Mavromichalis in raising the southern districts, and on 23 March the revolutionaries took Kalamata, one of the first towns to fall ^[4]. From the start Kolokotronis argued for a single strategic aim: the capture of Tripolitsa, the Ottoman administrative capital of the Morea, which sat on the central plateau and controlled the road network of the whole peninsula. Many chieftains preferred raiding; he insisted on siege.

His judgment was vindicated in May 1821 at Valtetsi, a village southwest of Tripolitsa, where Greek forces under his direction repelled a strong Ottoman sortie and won the revolution's first significant pitched battle ^[4]. The victory sealed the blockade of the capital. After months of encirclement, starvation, and negotiation, Tripolitsa fell on 23 September 1821. The sack that followed was ferocious, with thousands of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants killed, an atrocity that stained the triumph but also handed the revolutionaries the interior of the Peloponnese and vast stores of arms ^[5].

The supreme test came the following summer. In July 1822 Mahmud Dramali Pasha marched an army of roughly 25,000 men into the Peloponnese to crush the rebellion, the largest Ottoman force yet committed to the war. Panic gripped the Greek government. Kolokotronis, given emergency command, refused open battle, stripped the countryside of food, and waited until Dramali, short of supplies, tried to withdraw from the Argive plain. On 26 and 28 July 1822 the Greeks ambushed the retreating columns in the narrow pass of Dervenakia and destroyed the army ^[4]. Dervenakia was the decisive land engagement of the war's early phase, and it made Kolokotronis, briefly, the most powerful man in free Greece. Nafplio, the fortress port that Dramali had come to relieve, surrendered to the Greeks in December 1822 ^[5].

Victory brought division. The revolution's leadership split between the military chieftains of the Peloponnese, whom Kolokotronis headed, and a coalition of island shipowners, Roumeliot captains, and westernizing politicians who controlled the elected government. Two rounds of civil war followed in 1824 and 1825, fought while the Ottoman threat still loomed. Kolokotronis backed the losing side. His eldest son Panos was killed in the fighting, and early in 1825 the government arrested the old general and imprisoned him in a monastery on the island of Hydra ^[2].

He did not stay confined for long, because the revolution nearly collapsed without him. In February 1825 Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt landed a disciplined, French-trained army in the southern Peloponnese and began methodically reconquering the peninsula. The desperate government released Kolokotronis and restored his command ^[4]. He could not defeat Ibrahim's regulars in the field, so he returned to the methods of his youth: guerrilla harassment, scorched earth, and the stubborn denial of submission. His campaign against the so-called proskynima, the movement of villages formally submitting to Ibrahim, was harsh, but it kept resistance alive in the Morea through the darkest years of 1826 and 1827 ^[5].

Outside intervention finally settled the war. The destruction of the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets by British, French, and Russian squadrons at Navarino in October 1827, followed by a French expeditionary landing, forced Ibrahim's withdrawal and led to the recognition of an independent Greek state ^[4].

Kolokotronis gave firm support to Ioannis Kapodistrias, the former Russian foreign minister who arrived in 1828 as the first governor of Greece. He admired the governor's centralizing energy and served him loyally until Kapodistrias was assassinated at Nafplio in 1831, a killing that plunged the young state back into anarchy ^[2]. When the European powers installed the Bavarian prince Otto as King of Greece in 1833, Kolokotronis initially accepted the settlement, but he soon fell foul of the regency council that ruled during Otto's minority.

The Bavarian regents distrusted the old chieftains and suspected Kolokotronis of intriguing with Russia. In 1833 he was arrested, and in May 1834 a court at Nafplio convicted him of treason and sentenced him to death, together with his ally Dimitrios Plapoutas. Two of the three judges, Anastasios Polyzoidis and Georgios Tertsetis, refused to sign the verdict, an act of judicial courage still honored in Greece ^[1]. The sentence was commuted to twenty years, and Kolokotronis was held in the fortress of Palamidi above Nafplio. When Otto came of age in 1835 he pardoned the general, restored his rank, and made him a councillor of state ^[2].

His final years were peaceful and, in one respect, immensely productive. In 1836 the old commander, who could barely write, dictated his memoirs to the young scholar Georgios Tertsetis, the same man who had refused to condemn him. Published in 1846 as a narrative of the Greek revolution, the memoirs preserve his voice: blunt, proverb-laden, shrewd, and free of literary polish ^[6]. Kolokotronis died in Athens on 4 February 1843, hours after attending a celebration at the royal palace, and was buried with national honors ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Theodoros Kolokotronis will find that modern Greece answers with statues, banknotes, street names, and schoolbook chapters. The equestrian monument outside the Old Parliament in Athens, cast by Lazaros Sochos, is among the most recognizable public sculptures in the country, and his portrait appeared on the 5,000 drachma note before the euro ^[7]. His distinctive plumed helmet, a relic of his British Ionian service, is displayed at the National Historical Museum in Athens ^[7].

Historians assessing Theodoros Kolokotronis achievements point first to strategy. He grasped, earlier and more clearly than his rivals, that the revolution would be won by controlling the Peloponnesian interior and by refusing battle except on ground of his own choosing. Valtetsi, Tripolitsa, and above all Dervenakia followed from that insight ^[4]. His record was not spotless. The massacre at Tripolitsa, his part in the civil wars, and his severity toward villages that submitted to Ibrahim all complicate the heroic portrait, and serious scholarship engages with these episodes rather than ignoring them ^[5].

Any balanced Theodoros Kolokotronis biography must also reckon with his afterlife as a symbol. The memoirs he dictated to Tertsetis, along with a famous 1838 speech to students in Athens urging the young to pursue the education he never had, turned the unlettered klepht into a moral teacher of the nation ^[6]. Among the enduring Theodoros Kolokotronis facts is the nickname his soldiers gave him, O Geros tou Moria, the Old Man of the Morea, a title that Greeks still use as shorthand for stubborn, resourceful endurance ^[1].