When Ottoman forces captured Naousa in April 1822, two Greek Christian women were taken prisoner and subjected to a brut...

When Ottoman forces captured Naousa in April 1822, two Greek Christian women were taken prisoner and subjected to a brutal attempt to break their faith. Their captors smeared their heads with honey and tied them exposed in public, leaving them to be stung by wasps and tormented by passersby. Neither woman renounced her Christian faith. The first of the two was the wife of captain Zafeirakis Theodosiou, the man who had led Naousa's uprising against Ottoman rule. Zafeirakis himself was killed in the fighting while defending the town's fortifications. His wife's refusal to convert came even after she had already lost everything. Naousa, in Macedonia, had risen against the Ottomans in February 1822, inspired by the Greek Revolution that had broken out to the south a year earlier. The town's leaders, Zafeirakis, Anastasios Karatasos, and Angelis Gatsos, fortified it and held out for months against a large Ottoman army under Mehmed Emin Pasha, the governor of Thessaloniki. When the town finally fell, Ottoman troops massacred much of the population and enslaved hundreds of women and children. The most remembered act of that destruction came at the Arapitsa river. To avoid capture, dishonour, and forced conversion, many women of Naousa threw themselves and their children into the waterfall near the town. They chose death over submission. Greece officially designated Naousa a "heroic town" in recognition of what its people endured and sacrificed in 1822. The women's act of defiance is still commemorated annually. The fall of Naousa remains one of the least-known tragedies of the Greek Revolution, largely because it happened in Macedonia, 90 years before that region was finally freed from Ottoman rule in 1912. #Greece #GreekHistory #Macedonia