On April 13, 1822, Ottoman forces massacred 409 Greeks in Naousa and enslaved more than 400 others. Among the victims we...

On April 13, 1822, Ottoman forces massacred 409 Greeks in Naousa and enslaved more than 400 others. Among the victims were two Greek Christian women who refused to renounce their faith under torture. The wife of captain Zafeirakis was smeared with honey and left exposed to wasp stings before being built into a wall up to her neck inside the church of Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki. For five days, a mob gathered to curse her and strike her protruding head with sticks. She prayed continuously and never broke. A woman eventually ended her suffering by throwing a large stone at her head. The second woman, Maria, was sealed inside a sack with deadly snakes after refusing to convert to Islam. The order came from a local Ottoman official named Ebub Lubut. Historian Eustathios Stougiannakis recorded that the venom killed her slowly, and that she spent her final moments praying for her executioners. Both women's bodies were thrown into the sea. French historian François Pouqueville witnessed scenes from the massacre firsthand and wrote that many women were placed naked up to their necks in sacks filled with cats, snakes, and mice. His account was among the first to bring these events to the attention of Western Europe. The Naousa massacre took place as Ottoman forces crushed a Greek revolutionary uprising in Macedonia. The town of Naousa had risen in support of the Greek War of Independence, which had begun the previous year. The destruction of the town and the killing and enslavement of its population were part of a broader Ottoman campaign to suppress the revolt in northern Greece. The two women have been venerated in Greek Orthodox tradition as martyrs. Their story remains one of the documented accounts of Greek civilians who died rather than abandon their faith during the 1821 revolution. #Greece #GreekHistory #Naousa1822