Notice sur l’insurrection des Grecs contre l’empire Ottoman : a Russian view of the Greek War of Independence
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Abstract
Sergey Ivanovich Turgenev, brother to Andrey the poet, Aleksandr the
littérateur, and Nikolay the absentee Decembrist, was in 1821-22 Secretary in the Imperial Russian Mission in Constantinople. An eye-witness perforce of anti-Christian riots, more especially during the spring of 1821 and in the days preceding the hanging of the Greek Patriarch Gregorios, he also watched and waited as, each week, relations between Russia (represented in the country by the
irritable Stroganov) and the Porte grew more strained and tense. War having for several days seemed inescapable, and physical assault upon the Mission possible, Turgenev was among the many Russians who, through a quick whim of the Porte, escaped the Turkish capital aboard a Russian warship. On his return to St. Petersburg, he composed the paper on the origins of the Greek War of Independence—as it was named postfacto—with a view to publication.
The paper was dispatched, by A. I. Turgenev, to V. A. Zhukovsky; publication was delayed indefinitely, however, by the events of December 14, 1825, and the paper was then placed among the poet’s manuscripts—and so found its way into the Imperial Public Library (now the Leningrad Public Library). Turgenev’s paper is, in general terms, a most competent and interesting survey of the
Greco-Turkish situation as it stood in 1822, throwing light not only on the early, bloody phases of the rising in three different parts of Greece, but also on contemporary Russian attitudes towards the Greeks («co-religionaries»), the Ottomans, the English, and the French—insofar as the latter two had interests in the area.
littérateur, and Nikolay the absentee Decembrist, was in 1821-22 Secretary in the Imperial Russian Mission in Constantinople. An eye-witness perforce of anti-Christian riots, more especially during the spring of 1821 and in the days preceding the hanging of the Greek Patriarch Gregorios, he also watched and waited as, each week, relations between Russia (represented in the country by the
irritable Stroganov) and the Porte grew more strained and tense. War having for several days seemed inescapable, and physical assault upon the Mission possible, Turgenev was among the many Russians who, through a quick whim of the Porte, escaped the Turkish capital aboard a Russian warship. On his return to St. Petersburg, he composed the paper on the origins of the Greek War of Independence—as it was named postfacto—with a view to publication.
The paper was dispatched, by A. I. Turgenev, to V. A. Zhukovsky; publication was delayed indefinitely, however, by the events of December 14, 1825, and the paper was then placed among the poet’s manuscripts—and so found its way into the Imperial Public Library (now the Leningrad Public Library). Turgenev’s paper is, in general terms, a most competent and interesting survey of the
Greco-Turkish situation as it stood in 1822, throwing light not only on the early, bloody phases of the rising in three different parts of Greece, but also on contemporary Russian attitudes towards the Greeks («co-religionaries»), the Ottomans, the English, and the French—insofar as the latter two had interests in the area.
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