The Woman Who Started the War Early

Laskarina Bouboulina was born in an Ottoman prison in 1771. Her mother had gone to visit her dying father, imprisoned for his role in a failed revolution, and gave birth on the cell floor. By forty, Bouboulina was twice widowed, mother of seven, and one of the wealthiest shipowners on the island of Spetses.

She used the money to build a warship.

The Agamemnon was a thirty-three-metre corvette armed with eighteen cannons — larger than Ottoman regulations permitted. When the Ottomans sent an admiral to inspect it, she bribed him. He signed a report certifying it was a long-range merchant vessel. The first warship of modern Greece was, on paper, a trading ship.

On 13 March 1821, she raised a revolutionary flag on its mast — modelled on the banner of the Byzantine emperors. The Greek War of Independence would not be officially declared for another twelve days. She started it on her own schedule. She then spent nearly her entire fortune supplying weapons, paying sailors, and feeding their families. At the siege of Tripolitsa, she intervened to save the lives of captive women from the Ottoman governor's household.

By the time she died in 1825, she was almost broke.

A hundred and twenty years later, her great-granddaughter Lela Karagianni founded a resistance cell to fight the Nazi occupation of Greece — forging documents, smuggling Allied soldiers to safety, passing intelligence to the British.

She named it Bouboulina.