Evangelos Zappas was a war hero of the 1821 Greek Revolution who went on to become one of the most consequential benefac...

Evangelos Zappas was a war hero of the 1821 Greek Revolution who went on to become one of the most consequential benefactors in modern Greek history. Born in 1800 in Lampsovo, Northern Epirus (in present-day Albania), he joined the bodyguard of Ali Pasha at age 13 and by his early twenties had become the top lieutenant of legendary Souliote commander Markos Botsaris. He fought in the defense of Souli and retreated to Missolonghi after its fall in 1822. After Greek independence, Zappas turned down land and military rank offered by Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias, unable to stomach living alongside Ottoman administrators in Macedonia. By 1831 he had relocated to Bucharest, where he started out practicing basic medicine and leasing monastery lands, eventually buying them outright and applying modern agricultural methods that multiplied their value dramatically. By the early 1850s, working closely with his cousin Konstantinos Zappas, he had built a fortune that was, by any measure, enormous. In 1856, Zappas wrote to King Otto of Greece offering shares in his steamship company to fund annual industrial and commercial exhibitions in Athens, which he called the "Olympia." His proposal included plans for reviving the Olympic Games and building a venue to host them. The royal decree came in 1858, and the first modern Olympia were held in Athens on November 15, 1859, in what is now Kotzia Square. Zappas never set foot in Athens. He died on June 19, 1865, at age 65, and was buried in Romania. His will left his entire fortune to the Olympic Committee, with instructions for his cousin to build an exhibition hall in Athens. That building, the Zappeion, still stands in the National Garden today. His skull was interred there per his wishes. The estate sparked a diplomatic crisis between Greece and Romania that severed relations between the two countries until the Treaty of Bucharest ended the Second Balkan War in 1913. #Greece #GreekHistory #Olympics