As 2021 marks the bicentennial anniversary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, several countries, where Greeks of the Diaspora are present, will participate in celebrations in honor of the Greek people and their struggle for freedom that led to the establishment of the Modern Greek state. Celebrated on the 25^th of March, a national holiday, the Greek Revolution constitutes an integral part of the Greek national identity and historical memory, while it forms a pivotal chapter in both the country’s and Europe’s history.

Starting in 1821 with sporadic revolts against the ruling Ottoman Empire in the Peloponnese, the clashes soon escalated into a full-scale, nation-wide independence struggle inspired by the ideology of the Enlightenment and the principles of Romanticism, as depicted in the 19th-century poems of Lord Byron and the monumental canvases of French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. After drawing in the Great Powers, Great Britain, France and Russia, whose intervention was decisive in the conflict’s outcome, the prolonged war finally came to an end in 1832 with Greece being recognized as an independent nation https://www.greece2021.gr/en/.

Image:Metropolitan Germanos of Patras blessing the flag of the Greek resistance at Agia Lavra Monastery (painting by Theodoros Vryzakis, 1865)