Psara was small, treeless, and poor in everything but the sea. Its people lived by fishing and by shipping, and by the early nineteenth century they had built the third largest merchant fleet in revolutionary Greece, behind only Hydra and Spetses. When the Greek revolt broke out in 1821, Psara joined within weeks. Its captains, among them Konstantinos Kanaris, became famous for steering fire ships into the heart of the far larger Ottoman navy and burning its warships at anchor. The island had made itself a thorn the empire could not ignore. After Greek crews destroyed an Ottoman flagship and killed its admiral, retaliation was only a matter of time.

By 1824 the island held far more than its own roughly seven and a half thousand people. Survivors of the Chios massacre two years earlier had crossed the water to Psara, along with families displaced from Thessaly, Macedonia, and the towns of the Anatolian coast. Estimates of the total swell to as many as thirty thousand souls packed onto a few square kilometers of rock. These were not combatants steeling themselves for glory. They were parents and children and the old, people who had already lost one home and were hoping not to lose another. When the assault came, there was almost nowhere for them to go.

The defenders made their last stand at Palaiokastro, the old hilltop fort the islanders called Mavri Rachi, the Black Ridge. Soldiers crowded in alongside women and children, and raised a white banner reading Freedom or Death. As Ottoman troops broke into the fort, a Psariot named Antonios Vratsanos set a fuse to the gunpowder stores. The explosion killed those inside along with the attackers. A French officer who saw it from a distance said it looked like Vesuvius erupting. By most estimates more than seventeen thousand people were killed or carried off into slavery in the days that followed. The island was left empty.

Some escaped by sea and were scattered across what is now southern Greece. A priest and scholar named Theophilos Kairis gathered many of the orphaned children and built a school to raise them. Psara itself stayed in Ottoman hands until the Greek navy recovered it in 1912, and the island never again held more than a fraction of its old population. What endured most powerfully was a memory. The young national poet Dionysios Solomos wrote a six-line epigram in 1825, imagining Glory walking alone across the all-black ridge, weaving a crown from the few blades of grass left on the desolate earth. The painter Nikolaos Gyzis later returned to the scene again and again. Through them, a small island of drowned fishermen and lost families became something a whole nation refused to forget.