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The Ottoman Province of “Yunanistan”
Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On March 25, 1830 AD, as per the London Protocol, signed after years of a European-backed rebellion, the Ottoman Province of “Yunanistan” was forcibly taken away from centuries of Turkish rule by the combined armies of Britain, France, and Russia, which backed the Greek-speaking Christians of the Peloponnese Peninsula, and renamed “Greece”.
It should be noted that the ancient land of Greece that was among the cradles of civilizations and was made up of city-states, was part of the Iranian Achaemenian Empire for over a century-and-a-half, until its emergence under Alexander of Macedonia as a powerful empire itself. For almost two centuries Greece controlled parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, until it ceased to exist as an independent political entity on the world map in 146 BC with its conquest by the Roman Empire.
Some five centuries later, it became seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, and after Christianization was called Byzantium as part of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. Since the 13th century, it gradually came under the rule of the Muslim Turks of Anatolia and was incorporated in the rising power of the Ottoman Muslim Empire, which ended the existence of Byzantine in 1453 AD.
In 1821, with the weakening of Turkish rule, the Christian powers of Europe, started sedition among the Greek-speaking population of the Peloponnese Peninsula, and although the Ottomans were successful in crushing the rebels, the defeat of the Turkish-Egyptian fleet nine years later by the combined British-French-Russian navies, strengthened the rebels, and on this day, Greece was reborn as an independent country after two thousand years.
On March 26, 1881 AH, the large Ottoman vilayet of Thessaly was seized by the breakaway province of “Yunanistan” or what the West called Greece, by the powerful European Christian powers, such as Britain, France, Austria and Russia. All vestiges of almost five centuries of Muslim rule were erased, mosques were destroyed or turned into churches, the Turkish language was eradicated and Muslims forcibly expelled.
Unfortunately, the Greek Christians immediately launched a general massacre and expulsion of Greek Muslims and also destroyed mosques or converted them into churches, in order to remove all influence of Turkish rule. Today, Greece, which is grappling with an acute financial, economic and political crisis, is among the weakest states of Europe. It covers an area of 132,000 square km and shares borders with Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania, and Macedonia.
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