The first besiegers were locals: roughly 600 Athenians under Meletios Vasileiou, a force too small to storm anything. Word of the uprising spread through the islands, and volunteers arrived by sea from Aegina, Hydra, Cephallonia, and Kea until the Greek camp swelled to around 3,000. Even then the siege stayed loose, a watchful blockade rather than a stranglehold. The Acropolis is a defender's dream - cliffs on three sides, a single climbable approach, ancient cisterns holding water. Men who knew they could not simply rush the walls settled in to wait, while inside, soldiers, families, and hostages rationed what they had and watched the plain below for any sign of rescue.

A handful of Ottoman soldiers slipped through the Greek lines and rode to Karystos in Euboea, begging help from the local governor, Omar Bey, and the experienced general Omer Vrioni. The two joined forces and swept down into Attica. The Greek irregulars, never a disciplined army, scattered before them, and Ottoman troops marched back into Athens on 20 July 1821. But relief armies cannot stay forever. Omar of Karystos went home; Vrioni lingered to hunt the rebels, then he too withdrew. The moment he was gone, the Greeks closed the ring again. The garrison's brief reprieve had only deepened its isolation.

By the spring of 1822 the rebels had something they had lacked: artillery, and men who knew how to use it. French Philhellenes - foreign volunteers drawn to the Greek cause - arrived under Olivier Voutier and turned proper cannon on the fortress. Bombardment is patient, grinding work, and the defenders had nowhere left to turn. After nearly a year under siege, the Ottoman garrison surrendered on 9 June 1822 (Old Style calendar). The terms were generous on paper: troops and civilians would be given safe passage to Asia Minor aboard neutral ships, and any who wished to remain in Athens could do so unharmed.

The surrender held only as long as honor did, and here it did not hold. Greek irregulars in Athens killed nearly half of the Ottomans who had laid down their arms, and further violence fell on Albanian civilians in the city. These were people who had surrendered under a promise of safety - soldiers who had stopped fighting, families who had nothing left to defend. It is among the harder truths of the war for Greek independence: a struggle for freedom that, in this place and this hour, betrayed its own word. The siege had been a feat of endurance. Its ending was a massacre, and the dead deserve to be counted as the people they were.