Rigas Fereos
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Rigas Velestinlis Fereos, (1757-1798) was born in Velestino of Thessaly, Greece. He left Thessaly probably because he offended a Turk. He went to study in Constantinople and later in Wallachia. Rigas, who had served a number of Phanariote hospodars in the Danubian principalities, spent part of the 1790s in Vienna. There he had come under the influence of the French Revolution ideas, as is manifesto in a number of revolutionary tracts he had printed ("Declaration of the Rights of Man" and a "New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean, and the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia"). He intended to distribute them in an effort to stimulate a Pan-Balkan uprising against the Ottomans. But Rigas' ambitious schemes ended prematurely. A fellow Greek betrayed him to the Austrian authorities that promptly handed him and a small group of "co-conspirators" over to the Ottoman authorities. They were strangulated by Ottomans in Belgrade in the summer of 1798. Rigas' death couldn't end his influence on Greeks and a lot of holdovers finally led the Greeks into revolution, beginning the Greek War of Independence in 1821.