By the spring of 1821, the Greek uprising in the Peloponnese had achieved its first successes. The Ottoman garrison in Tripoli — the regional capital — was effectively besieged, cut off from the countryside by Greek revolutionary forces. The garrison's commander, Kâhya Mustafa Bey, needed to break the Greek hold on the surrounding villages. He had recently suffered a defeat at the battle of Valtetsi.

His plan was direct: march a large force from Tripoli to the Greek camp at Vervena, where 2,500 armed Greeks had gathered. According to the historian Spyridon Trikoupis, the Ottomans believed that destroying the Vervena camp would seriously damage Greek morale and fracture the revolutionary coalition. The force Mustafa Bey assembled was substantial — six thousand men and two artillery pieces. They marched at night.

The route from Tripoli to Vervena ran through Doliana, where the Tsakonas ravine offered the kind of terrain that could make a small defensive force dangerous to a much larger one moving through. Nikitaras understood this. He positioned his men — roughly two hundred, according to the account attributed to General Kolokotronis — using the stone houses of the village itself as fortifications, transforming the settlement into a series of improvised strongpoints.

When the Ottoman column reached Doliana in the early hours, it encountered resistance it had not anticipated. Nikitaras' men held their positions in the stone houses, firing from windows and doorways. The Ottomans, unable to bring their superior numbers to bear effectively in the confined terrain of the village, panicked. The force at the front of the column was pinned. Meanwhile, a portion of the Ottoman army that had continued toward Vervena found the Greek camp prepared and waiting — the revolutionaries had been warned of the attack and had taken flanking positions. Mustafa Bey's force had nowhere productive to go.

The Ottomans withdrew. Ottoman casualties in the engagement were significant — sources record around 300 Ottoman soldiers dead — and the retreating column abandoned both its cannons and its supplies on the field. The Greeks pursued the withdrawing force back toward Tripoli — a reversal that turned a defensive action into something more like a rout.

The significance was both military and symbolic. Nikitaras had been, until that day, a figure operating in the shadow of the great revolutionary commander Kolokotronis. The battle at Doliana changed his standing. A nickname attached itself to him afterward: Tourkophagos — "the Turk-eater." It was the kind of name that a legend generates, and the legend of the sword stuck to his palm was part of the same tradition: a man so consumed by the fight that the weapon became part of him. Nikitaras himself did not choose the name, but he carried it for the rest of his life.

Mustafa Bey's failed sally was the last time the Ottoman garrison in Tripoli would attempt to break out of the city. After Doliana, the siege tightened. The Greek revolutionaries were emboldened. The battle had demonstrated that small, well-positioned forces could stop large Ottoman columns — a lesson that shaped the guerrilla tactics of the revolution's early campaigns.

Tripoli fell to Greek forces that autumn. The liberation of the regional capital consolidated independence in the Peloponnese and proved that the uprising was more than a local revolt. The line between that outcome and the skirmish at Doliana is direct, though history rarely offers such clear causation. The Tsakonas ravine where the hardest fighting occurred now has a bust of Nikitaras at its entrance. The Historical and Ethnographical Museum in the village is housed in the building where he and his fighters took shelter during the battle — a stone house that became, for one day in May 1821, a fortification.