“Little Malta”: Psara and the Peculiarities of naval warfare in the Greek Revolution

Abstract The tiny island of Psara, located in the northeastern Aegean Sea, constitutes a lieu de mémoire for the Greek War of Independence. Psara occupied a prominent place in Philhellenic discourse due to the spectacular achievements of the island’s fireships and due to the bloody reprisals after an attack in 1824 by the Ottoman navy. This chapter utilizes the case of Psara as a laboratory for examining various questions related to military history (such as the nature of naval operations, their resources, techniques, and command) in an Ottoman and Mediterranean framework (particularly involving the legacy of the Russian–Ottoman War of 1768–1774). It addresses the broader issues and debates concerning the immediate causes of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821 as well as the perceptions of events (e.g., the looting of Muslim settlements on the Anatolian coast by Psara’s warships). The study draws on a neglected corpus of sources, including the voluminous “Archive of Psara” (Academy of Athens, 1974) and naval diaries of Greek war ships.