Philhellenes

in the broad sense, the Europeans and Americans who sympathized with or aided the Greeks in their struggle for liberation from the Ottoman yoke in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; in the narrow sense, the foreign participants in the Greek War of Independence of 1821–29. Among the Philhellenes who went to Greece were Serbian, Bulgarian, and Montenegrin soldiers, Polish revolutionaries, Italian Carbonari, and such Russian volunteers as N. Raiko and A. Protopopov. Lord Byron, the English poet, also went to Greece to help in the liberation struggle.