On 6 March 1910, a crowd of around a thousand koligoi (landless farmers or serfs) boarded a train at Greece’s Kileler bound for Larissa 28 kilometres away to attend a protest meeting demanding agrarian reform. As an additional form of protest, they declined to pay for their tickets. Also on board was the military, and there was a considerable police presence at the railway stations to keep order.

During the fracas that broke out over the non-payment of the tickets, the protesters were ordered to disembark. Once off, the crowd began throwing stones at the leaving train. To regain control, the officer in charge ordered the troops to fire in the air; this having no effect, they eventually began shooting at the peasants.

Further down the track, trouble had broken out at nearby Tsoular (modern Melia), where the train did not stop to pick up more protesters. When word got to Larissa, there was disruption there too. In the end two protesters were killed at both Kileler and Tsoular—four in total—and numerous unarmed agrarian workers were injured.

Several more of the protesters were arrested, and 62 eventually stood trial. As the government felt it prudent to try and diffuse the situation, they were all found innocent.

The violence associated with the Kileler Uprising was the result of tensions that had been growing for some time between the peasantry of Thessaly and the local landowners. Although not premeditated, it was perhaps the inevitable outcome of the huge inequalities that had led to repeated pleading and protests for land reform.

Dissatisfaction arose over the persistence in the region of the outdated Chiflik (or Chiftlik) system of the Ottoman Empire, begun in the sixteenth century. Under this system land ownership became hereditary and the peasantry were reduced to serfdom. Some rulers within the Empire, such as Ali Pasha of Ioannina (1740–1822), who made a failed attempt to carve out his own state within a state, owned extensive holdings of land—in his case much of Western Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia.

When Greece achieved its freedom from Ottoman rule the government decided to partition the land among those who worked it. This reform, carried out in 1871, only applied to the land liberated after the Greek War of Independence as recognised in 1832. When Thessaly and part of Epirus were later incorporated into the modern Greek State in 1881, control of the land was instead transferred to new owners, namely diaspora Greeks, some still living abroad—a move by the government to encourage the diaspora to invest in the newly enlarged state. As a result, the government of the time delayed any significant reforms.

Government in Greece had become increasingly ineffective, beset by competing factions, civil unrest, economic malaise (exacerbated by precarious international economic conditions), and failure to achieve its aims in territorial expansion by reclaiming ‘Greek’ lands from its neighbours. The result was that the conditions of those working the land remained static, leading to continued exploitation, frustration, and poor conditions.

For the landowners, on the other hand, the Ottoman tithe tax (a tenth of the proceeds from land) was removed in 1880 and replaced it by a tax on animals used for ploughing payable by the agrarian workers. In 1896, the Greek Parliament discussed five separate bills for the resolution of the agrarian problem, but none was passed. The following year Greece went bankrupt, and by 1909, after years in the doldrums, the military took over. But as the situation failed to improve, agrarian protests were staged in Karditsa, Trikala, Tyrnavos, and Farsala.

Next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marios Antypas from Kefalonia. Antypas, a lawyer and journalist, became a pivotal figure in the struggle for the farmers’ rights. His ideology has been linked to that of the French socialist Jean Jaurès (1859-1914), co-founder of the newspaper L’Humanité, and Rigas Feraios (1757-1798), the revolutionary of the Greek Enlightenment who came from Thessaly, leading to Antypas being dubbed ‘the Feraios of the workers’.

In 1898 Antypas founded the newspaper Anastasis (‘Resurrection’), and took up the cause of the Thessalian farmers, demanding limited working hours, a living wage, and pensions for the sick, injured, and elderly. He came to Thessaly in 1906 to work on the land of his uncle George Skiadaresis, a 300,000 acre holding known as Ktima Skiadaresi, believed to have been bought by Skiadaresis at the request of his nephew. It was this involvement with the land that led Antypas to engage directly with the plight of the koligoi, organising them in protest.

His activities led to a famous confrontation with a wealthy local landowner, Agamemnon Schliemann, son of the famous archaeologist, during which Antypas slapped him in the face. Schliemann was at the time a Member of Parliament for the area and later became the Greek Ambassador to the United States. The powerful landowners of Thessaly could not forgive such defiance, and were even prepared to plot Antypas’ murder.

The landowners hired a paid assassin, John Kyriakos, and Antypas was duly shot and killed in 1907. This cowardly act was the catalyst to the formation of a pan-Thessalian agrarian movement, and eventually the Kileler uprising. As he was dying Antypas was heard to whisper ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’, the rallying cry of the French Revolution as espoused by Maximilien Robespierre in 1790. Ktima Skiadaresi was sold soon after.

The incident at Kileler helped to swing public opinion in favour of the farmers, and in 1910, elections were held that brought the Liberal politician Eleftherios Venizelos to power on a reforming manifesto. In 1917 a law was passed to redistribute land, but it was not until after the refugee crisis caused by the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922, with the influx of more than one and a half million people from Turkey, that land reform took place in earnest. Despite this, unrest still broke out in Trikala in 1925. Between 1923 and 1932, more than 1,500 chifliks where confiscated and given to landless farmers.

The landless farmers of Kileler had hardly more rights than medieval serfs, and a parallel could be drawn with the struggle of the Diggers in England, a group of agrarian socialists active during the English Civil War. The Diggers, who called themselves the True Levellers, believed in a form of common ownership of the land, and their attempts to farm on common land were grounded in the belief that ‘the common People ought to dig, plow [sic], plant and dwell upon the Commons with-out hiring them, or paying Rent to any’ (Letter to Lord Fairfax from Gerrad Winstanley, 9 June 1649).

The name Kileler is Turkish, meaning marshland, but between 1919 and 1985 the village was known as Kypseli to emphasise its Greek identity. Since then pride in its role in achieving change has meant a return to its previous name. The uprising is commemorated annually on the first Sunday in March, and a wreath-laying ceremony takes place to honour the dead.

The population of around 500 are still farmers, growing cotton, wheat, corn, oats, lentils, chickpeas, and tomatoes, and keeping sheep and cattle. Located in the vicinity of Neolithic settlements and an important Mycaenean tomb, Kileler is noted for its eco-tourism initiative. The village holds a cotton festival every September and a thriving Museum of Folk Culture tells the story of its people.