Rigas Feraios ( , sometimes Rhegas Pheraeos; ) or Velestinlis (Βελεστινλής , also transliterated Velestinles); 1757 – 24 June 1798), born as Antonios Rigas Velestinlis (), was a Greek writer, political thinker and revolutionary, active in the Modern Greek Enlightenment. A victim of the Balkan uprising against the Ottoman Empire and a pioneer of the Greek War of Independence, Rigas Feraios is today remembered as a national hero in Greece. Early life Rigas Feraios was born in 1757 as Antonios Rigas Velestinlis into a wealthy family in the village of Velestino in the Sanjak of Tirhala, Ottoman Empire (modern Thessaly, Greece). He later was at some point nicknamed Pheraeos or Feraios, by scholars, after the nearby ancient Greek city of Pherae, but he does not seem ever to have used this name himself; he is also sometimes known as Konstantinos or Constantine Rhigas (). He is often described as being of Aromanian ancestry, with his native village of Velestino being Aromanian. Rigas' family had its roots in Perivoli, another Aromanian-inhabited village, but it usually overwintered in Velestino. Conflicting views exist however, with some historians stating that there is no evidence of such ancestry, and that Rigas was simply Greek. The author of the best documented biographical work on Rigas, Leandros Vranoussis, assumes that he originated from a Greek family which were long-time residents of Velestino. According to his compatriot Christoforos Perraivos, Rigas was educated at the school of Ampelakia, Larissa. Later he became a teacher in the village of Kissos, and he fought the local Ottoman presence. At the age of twenty he killed an important Ottoman figure, and fled to the uplands of Mount Olympus, where he enlisted in a band of soldiers led by Spiros Zeras. He later went to the monastic community of Mount Athos, where he was received by Cosmas, hegumen of the Vatopedi monastery; from there to Constantinople (Istanbul), where he became a secretary to the Phanariote Alexander Ypsilantis (1725-1805). Arriving in Bucharest, the capital of Wallachia, Rigas returned to school, learned several languages and eventually became a clerk for the Wallachian Prince Nicholas Mavrogenes. When the Russo-Turkish War (1787-1792) broke out, he was charged with the inspection of the troops in the city of Craiova. Here he entered into friendly relations with an Ottoman officer named Osman Pazvantoğlu, afterwards the rebellious Pasha of Vidin, whose life he saved from the vengeance of Mavrogenes. He