THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

FIEST GREEK VICTORY 51
The war was, from the beginning, conducted without
organisation or plan. All the open country was
speedily in the hands of the insurgents; the Turks
found themselves surrounded in the towns by fierce
hordes of peasants and hillsmen;
and, as no preparations
either of arms or provisions had been made, their
reduction was, in most cases, but a question of days.
Kalamata, besieged by Petrobey and his Mainotes, had
fallen even before the arrival of Kolokotrones. Of
the Ottoman inhabitants, the men were massacred,
and on the banks
the women and children enslaved;
of the wild mountain torrent that rushed past the
town twenty-four gorgeously vested priests, surrounded
by an army of five thousand warriors, sang a solemn
Te Deum, in celebration of the first victory of the
war.
The career of Kolokotrones opened less auspiciously.
His great reputation had gathered about him
a force of some six thousand men, with which he proceeded
to lay siege to Karytsena. The appearance of
five hundred Turkish cavalry was, however, sufficient
to raise the siege, and put his untried levies to rout.
The check was only a temporary one;
for Kolokotrones,
encouraged by a vision of the Virgin, soon
gathered another army; and, before long, nearly every
town of the Morea had fallen into the hands of the in-