The independence of Greece was a European affair. The fact is well known: the keen interest of the Enlightenment in Antiquity had given pride of place to Greece since the 18th century. In search of the roots of European civilization, travelers had succeeded in the Ottoman Empire, in search of its remains, medals or columns, and even of its inhabitants, enjoying seeing their descendants in the Christian subjects of the sultan, debased by centuries of captivity or slavery.
The regeneration of Greece had become a recurring theme since the French Revolution and the Empire, sufficiently shared by elites from all walks of life to survive these regimes; the Hellenic uprising of 1821 was therefore greeted with enthusiasm as much by the representatives of the liberal current as by much more conservative circles.
We are also well aware of the international emotion aroused by the Ottoman repression, in the aftermath of the massacres in Chios in 1822, by the siege and the fall of Missolonghi in 1826 and the devastation of the Peloponnese by the Egyptian troops of Ibrahim Pasha who came as reinforcements.
The wave of Philhellene sympathy, carried by all the media of the time, press, theater, concerts, literature, painting, posters, furniture, painted plates, tapestries, clothing, penetrated all recent homes and highlighted the transnational character of this great European emotion at the origin of the departures of volunteers ready, like Byron, to fight and die in Hellenes to defend the sacred cause of civilization against barbarism
