Nicholas Alexios Alexis

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Nicholas Alexios Alexis (1761-1818) was a Crete resistance figure during Ottoman rule. He was born in Marmaketo, Lassithi Plateau, in 1761, the son of Alexios Alexis and grandson of the noble Misser Alexis. His early teachers were his parents and the monks at Krustallenias Monastery, since there were no local schools.

In 1780, Ali Chanialis, a wealthy Ottoman official, became the mukataa collector and tried to make Lassithi a hereditary fief. He forced farmers to pay larger sums in produce and made Nicholas his secretary and manager of these illegal taxes. Chanialis also wanted Nicholas to supervise his mansion in Magoulas, where people knew of Chanialis’s abuses. Nicholas wanted to free himself from this, so he married and was ordained as a priest in 1786. He served as the priest of Magoulas and had fourteen children.

Nicholas looked for a peaceful way to stop Chanialis’s wrongdoings. He joined a committee that went to Constantinople to ask the Ottoman government to end Chanialis’s abuses. The government issued a firman (decree) ordering Chanialis’s death. Chanialis was strangled at the Koules Fortress in Heraklion on December 26, 1815.

In 1817, Nicholas’s eldest son Giorgis, then 29, and two companions killed another harsh janissary, Tsoulis. The Ottomans punished Nicholas’s family for this act. Giorgis escaped to Cefalonia and changed his name to Moses; two other children, Alexander and Manolis, were killed. Several others moved to different villages to hide.

Three more of Nicholas’s young boys were captured in 1823 and sold as slaves. Nicholas Alexis died in the plague of 1818 at age 57, along with his wife and their youngest child, who was four. They were buried together in Saint Spyridon church in Magoulas, with the mother holding the child. The remaining ten children were scattered across nearby villages; some hid, emigrated, or changed their surnames to avoid arrest and conversion to Islam. Three more boys—Emmanouil, Antonios, and Andreas—were captured and sold abroad in 1823. The Alexis family of Magoulas therefore included fourteen children, all born in Magoulas.