The man who had broken Missolonghi was Reşid Mehmed Pasha, the Ottoman commander-in-chief, known by the nickname Kütahı. Fresh from that victory, he marched on Athens, and the siege opened on 25 August 1826. He used the methods that had worked in the west: a tight blockade ringing the hill, steady bombardment, and a patient willingness to wait out the defenders. The Greeks inside answered the way besieged Greeks had learned to - frequent night sorties down the slopes and military mining beneath the lines, the latter directed by Konstantinos Chormivitis, an engineer who had already proven himself in the tunnels of Missolonghi.

A fortress can hold only as long as it is fed. The garrison survived because the main Greek field army kept threading small detachments through the Ottoman lines, slipping in men and supplies under cover of dark. That army was commanded by Georgios Karaiskakis, the hard-bitten klepht-turned-general remembered as the 'old man of the mountains,' and it operated from Eleusis, Piraeus, and Phaleron, south and west of the city. Rather than batter straight at the siege works, Karaiskakis struck at the Ottoman rear and supply routes. The strategy paid off spectacularly at the Battle of Arachova in November 1826, where his forces destroyed a large Ottoman-Albanian column in the snowbound mountains.

Success bred a fateful shift. The campaign turned away from harassing the enemy's flanks and toward direct, open battle - a choice that produced the costly Battle of Kamatero in February 1827. As the relief effort drew in foreign volunteers and competing leaders, command of the whole Greek expedition passed in April from Karaiskakis to the British general Richard Church, a soldier the Greeks trusted from earlier campaigns. The plan now was a frontal push to break the siege from the coast at Phaleron and march to the trapped garrison's rescue. Everything would turn on that single attempt.

It went wrong before it truly began. On 22 April 1827, Karaiskakis was mortally wounded by a musket ball to the stomach in fighting near Phaleron, and he died the next day - 23 April, his name day - as the main Ottoman victory at Phaleron, also called Analatos, unfolded on 24 April (Julian calendar). The loss of the beloved general shattered Greek morale at the worst possible moment. With the relief force broken and its greatest captain dead, the Acropolis garrison had no hope left. The defenders surrendered roughly a month later. Athens passed back into Ottoman hands - and would stay there until the war's larger forces, and Europe's navies, finally decided Greece's fate elsewhere.