ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

- CONTENT--
The Lebanon Campaign was an episode of the Greek War of Liberation (1821-1829).
Given the fact that the campaign took place in a critical for the fate of the uprising and “nightmare for the (Greek) government” in 1826, this overseas campaign, at least, puzzles Greek historians, while Apostolos Vacalópoulos refers to the campaign as an adventurous operation of the Greeks in Lebanon, and Emmanuel Protopsaltis arbitrarily raided by the Greeks against Lebanon.

Ideological prerequisites for the campaign to Lebanon
At the end of the eighteenth century, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, Rigas Fereos, a Greek poet and leader of a revolutionary organization, planned a joint uprising of the peoples enslaved by the Ottomans.
In his War Hymn, Rigas urged:
East and West, South and North,
For the Fatherland, all are united in heart n
In his faith let everyone live free.
Let us all strive for military glory together.
Bulgarians and Arnauts, Armenians and Romans,
Arapes and whites, in a fit of one
For Freedom, Sword-Girded
Rigas' plans were interrupted when he and his comrades were extradited by the Austrian authorities to the Turks and killed in Belgrade.
Following the ideas of Rigas, all subsequent Greek revolutionary organizations, in the plans of the Greek uprisings, envisaged the uprisings of other enslaved peoples.
The revolutionary organization of Filiki Eteria, which prepared the Greek War of Liberation (1821-1829), did not confine itself to preparing an uprising in the Greek lands.
Its decision to launch military operations in the semi-autonomous Danube principalities was not least driven by plans to fight as far as the Aegean, raising uprisings of the Balkan peoples. These plans were interrupted by the defeat of the heterists in the Danube principalities, after which neither Serbia, on which the heterists pinned special hopes, nor other enslaved peoples of the Ottoman Empire, joined the uprising.

However, the defeat of the heterists did not interrupt the uprising of the Greeks, affecting the Greek lands from Crete in the south to Macedonia in the north, leaving Cyprus, Asia Minor and Pontus out of hostilities for objective reasons.

But the insurgent Greece still harbored hopes for the uprisings of other peoples of the empire, and this hope fits into the attempt to create a “Greek-Syrian-Lebanese alliance against the Turks,” as the twentieth-century historian Spiros Lukatos calls it.

Background to Lebanon
On October 25, 1824, the Macedonian Eustratios (Hadzistatis) Resis appeared before the Greek provisional government, who, being a merchant in Lebanon, had great acquaintance with the business and religious circles of Lebanon and Syria.
Resis claimed to be the representative of the Lebanese Emir Bashir and presented (orally) proposals for an alliance between Lebanon and the rebellious Greece, with the ultimate goal of liberating Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman yoke.
However, he could not confirm what was said by documents, saying that he lost the messages during his journey.
According to Resis, immediately after receiving Greek support from the sea, Bashir intended to oppose the Turks in Lebanon