Rigas Feraios

Rigas was born around 1757 in Velestino, a village in Thessaly on the site of ancient Pherae, into a prosperous family. He always signed himself Ρήγας Βελεστινλής Θετταλός, Rigas of Velestino the Thessalian; the learned surname Feraios, 'of Pherae', was given to him by later scholars. He received a good education in the schools of Pelion and as a young man left Ottoman Thessaly for Constantinople, where he entered the service of the Phanariot Greek families who governed the Danubian principalities.

That connection took him to Bucharest. There he worked as a secretary in the household of Nikolaos Mavrogenis, prince of Wallachia, and absorbed the French books and ideas circulating among the Greek and Romanian elite. In 1790 he travelled to Vienna and printed his first two books. He returned to Wallachia, and in 1796 came back to Vienna with a far more ambitious plan: to print, at the press of the Markides Pouliou brothers, the maps, translations and revolutionary texts that would prepare an uprising of all the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire.

In December 1797 he left Vienna for Trieste on his way to Greece, carrying crates of printed sheets. A Greek merchant denounced him to the Austrian police, and he was arrested on arrival. Austria, allied with the Sultan, handed Rigas and seven companions over to the Ottomans as Ottoman subjects. They were taken down the Danube to Belgrade, held in the Nebojša tower, and strangled there one night in June 1798; their bodies were thrown into the river.

His first books, both printed in Vienna in 1790, show the two sides of his mind. Σχολείον των ντελικάτων εραστών (School for Delicate Lovers) is a free Greek version of French sentimental stories by Rétif de la Bretonne, among the first fiction in modern Greek prose. Φυσικής απάνθισμα (Anthology of Physics) is a popular science primer whose preface carries his motto: «Όποιος ελεύθερα συλλογάται, συλλογάται καλά», whoever thinks freely, thinks well.

The Vienna printings of 1796–97 are his monument. The Χάρτα της Ελλάδος (Map of Greece) is a wall map on twelve sheets, more than two metres each way, showing the Balkans and Asia Minor with ancient and modern place names side by side, plans of cities and drawings of ancient coins: a visual argument that the Greek world was one country waiting to exist. The Νέα Πολιτική Διοίκησις (New Political Constitution) is modelled on the French constitution of 1793 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; it proclaims a Hellenic Republic in which Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians and Turks would be equal citizens, regardless of language or religion.

Printed with it was the Θούριος (Thourios, 1797), a war hymn of 126 verses in the metre of folk song. It opens «Ως πότε, παλικάρια, να ζούμε στα στενά» (how long, brave lads, shall we live in the narrows), calls Christians and Muslims alike to rise together, and contains the line about one hour of freedom. In the same years he also published the Ηθικός Τρίπους (Moral Tripod), translations from Metastasio and Marmontel.

Rigas is the forerunner of 1821 in every Greek schoolbook, and the Θούριος is the first poem of modern Greek history pupils learn; listen to the version Nikos Xylouris recorded in the 1970s to hear it as a song. His bronze statue by Ioannis Kossos has stood in front of the University of Athens since 1871, and he appeared on the 200-drachma banknote in the 1990s. Almost every Greek town has a street named Ρήγα Φεραίου, and the municipality around Velestino is called Δήμος Ρήγα Φεραίου. In Belgrade the Nebojša tower by the Danube, where he was killed, is now a museum with a memorial to him, and a nearby street bears his name. The line «Καλύτερα μιας ώρας ελεύθερη ζωή» is still quoted at demonstrations and on 25 March, and his reported last words, that he had sown a seed that his nation would one day reap, are carved on monuments.

• He never used the name Feraios; it was coined later from ancient Pherae, the site of his native Velestino, and he signed himself Rigas Velestinlis.
• The Χάρτα της Ελλάδος of 1797 is one of the largest maps ever printed in Greek: twelve sheets forming a wall more than two metres high.
• His constitution of 1797 gave the vote to every citizen of the planned republic, Christian or Muslim, and promised schooling for girls as well as boys.
• Austria did not try him for his ideas: it simply handed him to the Ottomans as a foreign subject, and the Sultan's men strangled him and seven companions in Belgrade in June 1798.