Steve Wisbey OAM

For 300 years the Ottoman Turks were stealing Christian kids from their mothers. This was the most brutal thing humanity ever witnessed. They were waiting for women to birth, raise their kids, and then at the age of 8 were collecting them. The devsirme known as "collection of children" or "blood tax" or in Greek as "paidomazoma", was a systematic practice by the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century until the mid-17th century, that forced the recruitment of young Christian boys, typically aged 8–18, from Balkan provinces as a form of tribute. The Turkish envoy would appear in the villages and demand that all fathers present themselves before him with their sons. From these, he selected the best-built and strongest to become Janissaries. Initially, the Turks took children aged 6-7 years, and only one child per family. Later, however, recruitment extended to ages 8-10, and gradually the number of children per family increased, until it was possible for all male children to be taken. Christians went so far as to marry off their boys at a young age or convert to the faith voluntarily to avoid the child levy. But even this was not always helpful, since the Turks paid little attention to such details. The child levy was perhaps the greatest wound for Christians during Turkish rule. These boys were taken from their families, converted to Islam, and rigorously trained to serve in the empire's military, administrative, and bureaucratic roles. This created a loyal class of elite soldiers and officials who were dependent on the sultan rather than on hereditary Turkish aristocracy. They were separated according to ability and could rise in rank based on merit. The most promising boys known as "inner boys", received elite education in Constantinople's Enderun School, covering warfare, administration, sciences, and Islamic theology. Many became Janissaries, the empire's elite infantry corps, or rose to high positions like grand viziers, provincial governors, admirals, or financial bureaucrats. We estimate the total number of Christian boys taken across the entire Ottoman Empire (primarily Eastern Europe aka Balkans) around 300.000 kids. From those kids at least 180.000 were Greek kids (over 300 years 1362-1648). It means more than the half of the total kids that were stolen were only Greek. For example in 1540, a levy in the regions of Thessaly & Macedonia took 1.000 Greek boys in one season and in Chios (Greek island) 200 boys taken in 1567 alone. The peak was 5.000 kids/annual from Greece. A generational trauma, with thousands of Greek families losing sons every few years for centuries. The system began under Sultan Murad I (1362–1389) and largely ended by 1648. Greeks, as a major Christian population in the Ottoman Balkans, were heavily affected by the devsirme. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman control extended over most Greek lands, making Greek Orthodox families prime targets for recruitment. On 28 February 1395, Archbishop Isidore Glabas of Thessaloniki denounced it in a speech as "paidomazoma" (child-gathering), describing the anguish of parents: "mothers scratching their cheeks in grief and fathers beating their breasts and the violent Islamization of children and their hard training in the use of dogs and falcons." A 1550 Greek poem by Ioannes Axayiolis, appealed to Charles V of Germany to liberate the Christians from the Turks (for liberation from this "sorrow"). The text is found in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus of 1624. In another account, the Roman Catholic bishop of Chios in 1646 writes to the director of the Catholic Greek Gymnasion of Rome asking the latter to accept Pavlos Omeros (lol my name literaly Pavlos Homeros too), a 12-year-old boy from Chios, to save him from the devshirme. Once taken, boys were circumcised, renamed with Muslim names, and forbidden from contact with their families. They were raised as Muslims, effectively erasing their Greek cultural and religious identity to foster loyalty to the sultan. Historical records show Greek-origin devşirme boys rising to prominence, such as Mimar Sinan (chief architect of the Ottomans, possibly Greek) and several grand viziers like Ibrahim Edhem Pasha (from Chios). The devshirme was the greatest wound inflicted on Hellenism during the period of Turkish tyranny. The children who were seized were considered definitively lost. In Epirus, in fact, on the first Sunday after the abduction, their parents would go to church dressed in black, where a funeral service was chanted. In this service, the names of the children were read aloud as if they were dead. Now, I think you understand who the real ancestors of the Muslim Turks are and why they are afraid of DNA tests. Keep in mind that whole villages and cities in Anatolia were wholly Islamized, and they became Ottomans and Muslim Turks (from Christian Greeks, Armenians, etc.) in "one night." This is one of the many reasons Turkey is a paper nation, a sandcastle, a pseudo-nation without historical and genetic continuity. If you want to support me in the effort I’m making, please consider becoming a subscriber to my X account for only $2. I write about the ancient, medieval, and modern history of Greece and what Christians went through because of Islam. Always with primary sources and historical facts. Thanks for reading me and for all the support. - Homer Pavlos

The testimony of the German Johann W.A. Streit, a young technician, about the massacres of Greeks in Constantinople in 1822 by the Muslim Turks is horrifying. He writes that as soon as a wool factory finished its shift, the Turkish workers seized the prisons of Katrosan and dragged out 186 Greeks who had been arrested in the preceding days. Many of them they killed on the spot, while they dragged the others through the cobblestone streets until they met a gruesome death: "They tied the Greeks’ feet and hands with ropes and pulled them in all directions, dismembering them. They cut off their heads, impaled them on the tips of their swords, and paraded them triumphantly through the streets. Even though a fire had broken out that evening in one of the outlying districts, a fire that could have destroyed the entire city, no one was bothered by it. Everyone continued with the slaughter and the looting" The next morning, Streit saw many Greeks, both men and women, hanging upside down from their windows. "The victims were writhing and screaming. Knives and swords had been nailed into the buttocks of many. From time to time, they would cut off another piece of flesh". That morning, Streit counted approximately 4,000 corpses of both sexes. He recounts the incident in which a mob broke into the house of a Greek jeweler. One of his daughters jumped out of the window and was killed. "They brought the rest of the family down to the square. There they stripped the other daughter and the maid naked, and first cut off their breasts and then their noses. The son, a robust 24-year-old young man, rushed at a Turk, punched him in the temple, seized the bloodied yataghan from his hand, and with one blow from top to bottom cut off his nose so that it remained hanging from his lips. Within a minute, a hundred swords had hacked him to pieces". Later, the impaling of many Greeks is described: "Around midnight, they brought more Greeks, men and women, among them three small children. They impaled them with their swords and threw them alive into the fire". Streit adds: "I did not see a single Turk whose face showed any compassion. Even six-year-old children vented their hatred on the dead. They stabbed the slain Greeks with knives". Wherever and however they could, the Greek population resisted the barbarity: "A Greek merchant, as soon as the Turks broke into his shop and house, took refuge with his family in the upper floor. He had with him two barrels of gunpowder. And while forty bloodthirsty Turks were climbing the stairs, he set it on fire. The house blew up into the air. A pharmacist killed 200 Turks who were besieging his house. He poisoned all the wine barrels in his cellar with arsenic and then committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. The Turks drank, were poisoned, and died curled up like worms in front of the house". All of this is described in detail in his book "Constantinople in the Year 1821", which was published in Leipzig in 1822. The Greek title is "Jahann Wilhem August Streit. Η Κωνσταντινούπολη κατά το έτος 1821", and in German "Constantinople im Jahre 1821". If you want to support me in the effort I’m making, please consider becoming a subscriber to my X account for only $2. I write about the ancient, medieval, and modern history of Greece and what Christians went through because of Islam. Always with primary sources and historical facts. Thanks for reading me and for all the support. - Homer Pavlos