The Song of Daskalogiannis - Story of a Cretan Crucifixion. The Secrets of Crete, #5

Sfakia, 1770. The mountains of Crete have never bowed to the Sultan. One man believes they never will have to again. Ioannis Vlachos - known across the White Mountains as Daskalogiannis, the Teacher - is the richest shipowner of Sfakia, a man who has seen the free ports of Europe and returned home with a dangerous idea. When Russian emissaries promise that the Tsarina's fleet will support a Greek uprising, he raises the flag of revolt over his mountain villages, mints coins in a cave, and stakes everything - his ships, his family, his people - on a promise carried across the sea.
But the Russian fleet never comes. As Ibrahim Pasha's army closes in on Sfakia and the revolt collapses into a war of caves and gorges, Daskalogiannis faces the choice that will turn him into a legend: to fight to the end, or to walk down from the mountains alone and pay the price for all of them. Based on the true story of the 1770 Cretan revolt and its terrible aftermath in the square of Heraklion - a story kept alive for two and a half centuries by the epic song that gives this novel its name - this is a book about promises, betrayal, and the cost of being first.
Part of The Secrets of Crete, a series of standalone novels spanning four thousand years of Cretan history. Each book can be read independently.