How many of the millions who each year visit the Louvre and file past Eugène Delacroix’s enormous painting Scenes from the Massacres of Chios have any idea that it depicts not an episode from mythology or literature but an actual incident, one of the bloodiest slaughters in modern history? The label, printed in French only, is of little help: Scènes des massacres de Scio. Few know that Scio was the Italian name for the Aegean island of Chios, less than four miles from the Turkish coast – in recent years the location of a grim refugee camp for asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East. Before falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1566 it had been Italian for more than two centuries. A Genoese merchant colony ruled by members of the prominent Giustiniani family, it boasted a cultured society and a highly developed economy that was allowed to continue and even flourish under Ottoman domination.
That society was annihilated by a catastrophe that struck its defenceless population 200 years ago this Easter, in April 1822. Delacroix’s note published in the catalogue of the 1824 Paris Salon, where the painting was first exhibited, is more explicit: “Greek families await death or slavery etc.” The atrocities – Delacroix’s coy “etc” is usually interpreted to mean mass rape – were reported in graphic detail in the French press. These accounts encouraged Philhellenes throughout western Europe, almost certainly including Lord Byron, to redouble their efforts to help free Greece from Ottoman rule.