How the Muslims Impaled the Christian Greeks

 In Constantinople, the French academic doctor Pitton de Tournefort (18th century), witnessed the impalement of the Christian Greeks from the Muslims: "They lay the victim face down, after tying his hands behind his back, place a donkey saddle on his back, and two of the executioner's assistants sit on it to completely immobilize him. Another one holds his head pressed to the ground with both hands. A fourth assistant tears open the back of the victim's trousers with scissors. Then the executioner drives the stake, a wooden spit, as deep as possible. Next, he takes a wooden hammer and strikes the stake until the sharp end emerges at the chest. They then lift the stake upright and plant it in the ground. And as the poor wretch suffers, the Turks mock him, ridicule him, and call on him to convert to Islam and embrace the Muslim faith."    

Pouqueville also recounts the tragic end of the Greek Thymios Vlachavas from Thessaly, following the uprising of 1808. He saw him in Ioannina, bound to a pole in Ali Pasha's courtyard: "calmer than the tyrant who was enjoying his torment, he looked at me with a serene gaze, as if wanting to make me a witness to the triumph of his supreme hour. He endured the executioner's blows without groaning or complaining. And the limbs dragged through the streets of Ioannina showed the terrified Greeks the remains of the last captain of Thessaly."    

Kandyloros reports that the Muslim Kehaya-Bey "disembarked in Kalamata in 1805 carrying twenty thousand stakes for the impalement of the Greeks. He advanced inland, captured and impaled about six hundred of them."    

Another form of torture was "the hooks." They consist of a scaffold erected at the entrance of cities. The executioner hoists the condemned man high on a pole using a pulley. Below the pole are fixed hooks. Then he suddenly releases the rope, and the condemned man falls with all his weight onto the hooks, impaling himself sometimes in the chest, sometimes in the armpits, or elsewhere on the body. And they leave him there to die. Often death comes after three days.    

All these were inflicted on the Greeks who refused to embrace Islam and Muhammadanism.