Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Mesolóngi and around
Mesolóngi
(Missolongi), for most visitors, is irrevocably associated with
Lord Byron
,
who died here to dramatic effect during the War of Independence (see box below).
Otherwise it's a fairly shabby and unromantic place: rainy from autumn to spring, and
comprised largely of drab, modern buildings between which locals enthusiastically
cycle along a flat grid plan. To be fair, the town has been spruced up, especially in the
centre, but if you come here on pilgrimage, it's still best to move on the same day, most
likely to Lefkádha island or the Peloponnese.
Gate of the Sortie
You enter the town from the northeast through the
Gate of the Sortie
,
named after the
April 12, 1826 break-out by nine thousand Greeks, ending the Ottomans' year-long
siege. In one desperate dash they quit Mesolóngi, leaving a group of defenders to
destroy it - and some three thousand civilians not capable of leaving - by firing the
powder magazines. But those fleeing were betrayed, ambushed on nearby Mount
Zygós; fewer than two thousand evaded massacre or capture and enslavement by an
Albanian mercenary force.
3
Garden of Heroes
Daily: summer 8am-9pm; winter 8am-6pm, but sometimes unaccountably closed • Free
Just inside this gate, on the right, partly bounded by the remaining fortifications, is
the
Kípos Iróön
, or “Garden of Heroes”
- signposted in English as “Heroes' Tombs”
- where a tumulus covers the bodies of the town's anonymous defenders. Beside
the tomb of Souliot commander Markos Botsaris is a
statue of Byron
, erected in
1881, under which - despite apocryphal traditions - is buried neither the poet's
heart nor lungs. Byron might conceivably have been offered the throne of an
independent Greece: thus the relief of his coat of arms with a royal crown above.
Among the palm trees and rusty cannon loom busts, obelisks and cenotaphs to an
astonishing range of American, German and French Philhellenes, those Romantics
who strove to free the Classical Greece of their ideals from the barbaric thrall of
the Ottomans.
BYRON IN MESOLÓNGI
Byron has been a Greek national
hero
ever since he became involved in the country's struggle
for independence. Almost every town in the country has a street - Výronos - named after him;
not a few men still answer to “Vyron” as a first name. He first passed through in 1809 when
tyrannical local ruler Ali Pasha was at the height of his power, and the poet's tales of intrigue
sent a shiver down romantic Western spines.
Later, in January 1824,
Byron made his way to
Mesolóngi
, a squalid, inhospitable
southwestern port amid lagoons - but also the western centre of
resistance
against the
Ottomans. The poet, who had by then contributed his personal fame and fortune to the war
effort, was enthusiastically greeted with a 21-gun salute, and made
commander
of the
five-thousand-strong garrison, a role as much political as military. The Greek forces were
divided into factions whose brigand-chieftains separately and persistently petitioned him
for money. Occasionally Byron despaired: “Here we sit in this realm of mud and discord”, read
one of his journal entries. But while other Philhellenes returned home, disillusioned by the
fractious, larcenous Greeks, or worn out by quasi-tropical Mesolóngi, he stayed.
On February 15 Byron caught a
fever
, possibly malaria, and two months later
died
;
ironically, he became more valuable to the Greek cause dead than alive. News of the poet's
demise, embellished to heroic proportions, reverberated across northern Europe; arguably it
changed the course of the war in Greece. When Mesolóngi fell again to the Ottomans in
spring 1826, there was outcry in the European press, and French and English forces were finally
galvanized into sending a naval force that unintentionally engaged an Egyptian fleet at
Navarino, striking a fatal blow against the Ottoman navy.
