Turkish State Media Demands Greece Apologize for the 1821 Revolution
Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency has published an article demanding that Greece apologize for the 1821 Greek Revolution, calling it a campaign of "systematic massacres" and "genocide" against Ottoman Muslims in the Peloponnese.
The piece features three Turkish academics, including professor Ali Fuat Orenç, who claims that "tens of thousands of Turks were slaughtered mercilessly" in the Morea and that "all Turkish traces were erased from the Peloponnese." The article singles out the fall of Tripolitsa, labeling it a "rare example of atrocity" and claiming 40,000 Turks were killed while women and children were sold into slavery.
"The Aegean islands were unjustly given to Greece with European support" — professor Ali Fuat Orenç
Anadolu goes further, targeting Greece's national anthem. Orenç claims that the Hymn to Liberty, written by Dionysios Solomos and shared by both Greece and Cyprus, "glorifies the massacre of Turks at Tripolitsa." The poem is widely understood as a hymn to freedom and national liberation from Ottoman rule, not an incitement against any ethnic group.
The piece also accuses Greece of building its national identity around "Turkish hostility" and frames the Megali Idea exclusively as an expansionist project against Turkish territory. Orenç then pivots to the present, claiming that "the Aegean islands were unjustly given to Greece with European support" and that the current distribution of the Aegean "is extremely unjust."
That pivot is the most revealing part of the article. By connecting 1821 to current Aegean territorial claims, the piece transforms a historical argument into a geopolitical one, directly supporting Turkey's revisionist position on Greek sovereignty in the Aegean.
The article makes no mention of what Greek populations endured under Ottoman rule, the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, or the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Greeks from Asia Minor. The historical violence runs in one direction only, according to Anadolu.
