A French academic who traveled to Constantinople left behind one of the most disturbing eyewitness accounts of what Otto...

A French academic who traveled to Constantinople left behind one of the most disturbing eyewitness accounts of what Ottoman authorities did to Christian Greeks under their rule. Homer Pavlos, writing on X yesterday, drew on the testimony of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a French botanist and physician who documented the execution method firsthand. According to Pavlos quoting Tournefort's account, a victim would be laid face down with hands bound behind his back, held in place by the executioner's assistants, while a wooden stake was driven through his body. The stake was then raised upright and planted in the ground. Tournefort recorded that as the victim suffered, onlookers mocked him and called on him to convert to Islam. Pavlos also quotes the French diplomat Pouqueville on the fate of Thymios Vlachavas, a Greek leader from Thessaly who rose up against Ottoman rule in 1808. Vlachavas was executed at Ali Pasha's court in Ioannina, and Pouqueville recorded that he endured the executioner's blows without groaning or complaining. The accounts don't stop there. Pavlos cites the historian Kandyloros on events in Kalamata in 1805, when Kehaya-Bey landed and, according to that source, impaled around six hundred Greeks. These testimonies come from French observers with no particular stake in Greek affairs, making them notable as outside witnesses to conditions under Ottoman rule in the years before the Greek War of Independence began in 1821. #GreekHistory #OttomanOccupation #Greece