On the twelfth night of the siege, with two days of ammunition left, the defenders of Kastania decided to break out. They would leave at midnight, when the moon was dark, with men holding the front and rear and the women and children moving through the middle. An old man chose differently. Panagiotaros Venetsakis the elder — over eighty years old, a klepht chieftain of some renown in his younger days — told his family he would stay behind, that he would wait in his tower until the enemy filled it, and then detonate the gunpowder he had stored on the upper floor. He wanted to take as many with him as he could. What followed that night, in the highlands of the Mani in July 1780, cost the defenders most of what they had — and sent a boy named Theodoros Kolokotronis running into the dark.
After the failed Orlov Revolt of 1770, the Maniots occupied an awkward position: technically obligated to pay annual tribute to the Ottomans and to accept a bey of their own choosing, but in practice still raiding Ottoman territory with pirate ships and conducting incursions into Laconia. Among the most active were Konstantinos Kolokotronis and Panagiotaros Venetsakis, operating from their tower-houses in Kastania, a mountain village in the eastern Mani. The damage they caused was real enough that the Ottoman pasha of the Peloponnese, Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, made eliminating the Kastania threat a precondition for his planned invasion of the Mani. When his fleet anchored at Gytheio, he dispatched his second in command, Ali Bey, with 10,000 soldiers to deal with it. Kolokotronis and Panagiotaros, learning that a relief force under Tzanetos Grigorakis could not reach them in time, understood they would have to hold alone. They gathered ammunition and food for perhaps a dozen days. The women and children of Kastania refused to evacuate. They stayed.
Ali Bey opened the siege by sending a negotiator with an offer: call off the attack in exchange for one child from Kolokotronis and one from Panagiotaros. The defenders refused. The Ottomans then discovered that Kastania's tower-houses were harder to bombard than expected — well-built, reinforced before the siege began, and positioned to give the defenders cover while leaving the attackers exposed. For ten days the siege ground on without the towers falling. On the night of the tenth day, the three senior defenders — Kolokotronis, Panagiotaros, and the elder Venetsakis — met to take stock. Ammunition would last two more days at most. The elder Venetsakis said what he intended to do: stay behind with his wife and one attendant, wait, and blow up the tower when it was full. The others agreed to the breakout plan: move at midnight on the twelfth night, cover the rear and front with fighters, keep the women and children inside the column.
The Ottomans heard the movement. They attacked before the column could reach the forest. What followed was close fighting in the dark. Konstantinos Kolokotronis died fighting — he fell against seven Ottoman soldiers, sword and pistol in hand. His head was cut off and put on a spear. His wife escaped with their young son, Theodoros. Panagiotaros Venetsakis died protecting his family. Only roughly one hundred people reached safety. The elder Venetsakis was betrayed by his attendant; the Ottomans took him alive, cut off both his feet and one of his hands, and hung him from the mast of one of their ships. It was the kind of death that takes from people their dignity as well as their life, and it was intended to. The heads of Kolokotronis and Panagiotaros were sent to the sultan in Constantinople. Panagiotaros's children were captured and raised with an Ottoman education; they became officers in the Ottoman army. Most of Kolokotronis's children were captured but later ransomed. Theodoros was not captured.
The Ottoman victory at Kastania was not complete. The combined Maniot forces under Tzanetos and Exarchos Grigorakis, arriving after the siege, routed the victorious Ottoman army — though Exarchos was later captured treacherously and hanged. The Maniots sacked the Ottoman castle of Passavas in retaliation. The wider resistance continued. And the boy Theodoros Kolokotronis, who escaped from Kastania in the dark with his mother, grew up to become the preeminent military commander of the Greek War of Independence, leading the forces that achieved what his father's generation could only contest. The siege of Kastania in 1780 was a defeat measured in lives and heads sent to a sultan. It was also, in the small figure of a child running through the forest, the beginning of something else entirely.
Kastania sits near 36.842°N, 22.400°E in the highlands of the eastern Mani, above the Gulf of Laconia. Kalamata International Airport (LGKL) lies approximately 35 km to the northwest. The approach from Kalamata crosses the broad plain of Messenia before the terrain rises steeply into the Taygetus foothills; at 4,000 to 6,000 feet, the mountain village terrain of the eastern Mani is visible as a series of ridges dropping toward the narrow coastal plain. Tower-houses are a characteristic feature of Mani villages at this scale, visible in clustered stone silhouettes on the hilltops. The Gulf of Laconia is visible to the east on clear days.