The Turkish president on Friday marked the anniversary of the Tripolitsa massacre committed by the Greeks during the Greek revolt that started in the Peloponnese in 1821, the year Greece separated from the Ottoman Empire.

In a Twitter post, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Türkiye has not forgotten and will never forget the Tripolice Massacre, which took place on Sept. 23, 1821, "in which thousands of Muslim Turks, our Albanian brothers and Jews were brutally and barbarically murdered."

On Sept. 23, 1821, tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews were massacred by the Greeks in Tripolitsa, a strategic city in the southern Peloponnese region of today’s Greece.

Turks in Peloponnese faced not only death but also starvation and captivity. The Ottoman Jews living in the region also faced Greek atrocities and lost their lives due to famine, misery and plunder.

Türkiye still criticizes Greece for its unwelcoming stance toward its Muslim population. For instance, up until recently, Athens was known as the only European capital without a mosque, even though there are an estimated 300,000 Muslims in the greater Athens area. Back in November 2020, for the first time since the 19th century, Athens witnessed the inauguration of an official mosque, as years of efforts by the Muslim community finally paid off.

Greece was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, until 1829 when the Greek population succeeded in gaining independence from the empire. At the time, there were many mosques and other Ottoman architecture all over Greece. However, the riots and independence triggered a wave during which all such architecture was damaged or removed, eventually leaving Athens without any mosque. In fact, Athens' lack of mosques is a norm for the majority of the Greek cities as the only officially sanctioned mosques in the country are in the northern border region with Turkey where up to 150,000 members of the Turkish minority live.

Türkiye has long decried Greek violations of the rights of its Muslim and Turkish minority, from closing down mosques and letting historic mosques fall into disrepair, to refusing to recognize Muslims' election of their own muftis. These measures violate the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne as well as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) verdicts, making Greece a state that flouts the law, Turkish officials say.

Similarly, the election of muftis, or Islamic clerics, by Muslims in Greece has become yet another point of contention that caused trouble for the Muslims in the country. Even though it is regulated by the 1913 Treaty of Athens, a Greek-Ottoman Empire pact that was implemented by Athens in 1920, that the community will be able to elect their own muftis, in 1991, in violation of international law, Greece annulled the treaty and unlawfully started to appoint the muftis itself. The muftis appointed by the Greek state have since usurped local Muslims' right of jurisdiction on family and inheritance matters. The majority of Muslim Turks in Western Thrace do not recognize muftis appointed by the Greek state and instead elect their own.