Dear colleagues,
This year marks 202 years since the anniversary of the National Regression of 1821, the most important moment in modern Greek history. After almost four centuries of slavery, the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the serious internal problems faced by the declining Ottoman Empire, the activity of the Society of Friends and the Greek scholars of the diaspora, but above all the mass popular mobilization and the synergy of Hellenism as a whole cultivated the fertile conditions for the incubation of the epic of the 21st century, with a single slogan: "Freedom or Death!"
In these glorious pages of Greek history, small Cyprus left its own imprint of heroism and self-sacrifice. In spite of the initial opposition of the Great Powers to the uprising and the unequal struggle with an enemy that was powerful, but also brutal and barbaric, from the Danubian Dominions in the Peloponnese, Sterea, the Aegean, Crete, Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, Cyprus and Asia Minor, Hellenism fought with self-denial and magnanimity. The Greek Revolution of 1821 stirred up waves of philhellenism and, when and if the international circumstances, with the turn of the Great Powers, allowed it, in 1830 the first independent national state of the Balkans was founded under the name "Hellas".
Dear Colleagues,
In the difficult circumstances that our country and the whole of Hellenism is going through today, due to the ever-increasing Turkish provocativeness, the Greek Revolution remains a sacred legacy for us, the younger ones, but also an indication of the real power that a nation acquires in unity, providing lessons for all of us.
I now call upon you to observe a one-minute silence in memory of the heroic martyrs of the National Uprising of '21.
(The text as sent by the House of Representatives)
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