On April 13, 1822, during the Ottoman suppression of the Greek uprising at Naousa, two Greek Christian women were captur...

On April 13, 1822, during the Ottoman suppression of the Greek uprising at Naousa, two Greek Christian women were captured and tortured for refusing to convert to Islam. Their stories were recorded by eyewitnesses and historians and stand among the darkest documented accounts of that period. The first woman, the wife of captain Zafeirakis, was built into a wall up to her neck inside the church of Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki. She was left there for five days while crowds cursed her and struck her head with sticks. She prayed throughout and never renounced her faith. A woman eventually ended her ordeal by throwing a large stone at her head. Her body was thrown into the sea. Before being walled in, both women had been smeared with honey and left exposed to wasps and passersby. The second woman, Maria, was placed alive into a sack filled with snakes after she also refused to convert. Historian Eustathios Stougiannakis recorded that the venom killed her slowly as she prayed for her executioners. French traveler Pouqueville, who witnessed scenes from the massacre firsthand, wrote that many women were placed up to the neck in sacks filled with cats, snakes, and mice. The Naousa massacre killed 409 men and enslaved more than 400 women and children. The town itself was razed. These two women were among the thousands who paid the highest price during the Greek War of Independence, which began in 1821 and formally ended with Greek independence in 1830. Today, 204 years after these events, their names remain largely unknown outside of historical records. The wife of Zafeirakis was never publicly named in the surviving sources. #Naousa #GreekHistory #GreekWarOfIndependence