For roughly 300 years, Christian families across the Balkans lived under a practice called the devshirme, an Ottoman sys...

For roughly 300 years, Christian families across the Balkans lived under a practice called the devshirme, an Ottoman system that allowed the empire's agents to arrive in any village and walk away with their sons. According to historian Homer Pavlos, at least 180,000 of the estimated 300,000 boys taken across the empire were Greek, making this one of the largest forced removals of children in recorded history. The system began under Sultan Murad I between 1362 and 1389 and largely ended by 1648. Turkish envoys would enter villages and order all fathers to present their sons, then select the best-built and strongest boys, typically aged 8 to 18, for what the Ottomans called the devshirme, meaning "collection of children." Greeks called it the paidomazoma, the blood tax. Once taken, the boys were converted to Islam, circumcised, renamed, and cut off from any contact with their families. The most promising among them, known as the "inner boys," were educated at the Enderun School in Constantinople in warfare, administration, sciences and Islamic theology. Many went on to become Janissaries. Others rose to become grand viziers, provincial governors, admirals and senior officials of the very empire that had taken them as children. The scale was immense. Pavlos notes that a single levy in Thessaly and Macedonia in 1540 swept up 1,000 Greek boys in one season. Two hundred were taken from Chios alone in 1567. At its peak, the devshirme was removing 5,000 boys a year from Greece. Families tried everything to escape it. Some married their sons off young. Others converted. It was not always enough. On 28 February 1395, Archbishop Isidore Glabas of Thessaloniki denounced the practice in a public speech, describing mothers scratching their cheeks in grief and fathers beating their breasts. In Epirus, the Sunday after each abduction became an unofficial day of mourning. Parents dressed in black and went to church, where a funeral service was chanted and the names of the taken boys were read aloud, as if they had died. #GreekHistory #Devshirme #Paidomazoma