in 1826 of Missolonghi, where the poet Lord Byron had died in 1824. Many artists and intellectuals like Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Alexander Pushkin, Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz or Eugène Delacroix (in his paintings Scenes massacres of Scio in 1824, and Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi in 1826), amplified the current of sympathy for the Greek cause in the public opinion. By the Treaty of London of July 1827, France, Russia and the United Kingdom recognised the autonomy of Greece, which remained a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. The three powers agreed to a limited intervention in order to convince the Porte to accept the terms of the convention. A plan to send a naval expedition as a demonstration of force was proposed and adopted; subsequently a fleet of 27 warships of the allied navies of United Kingdom, France and Russia was sent to exert diplomatic pressure against Constantinople. It included twelve British ships (for 456 guns), seven French ships (352 guns) and eight Russian ships (490 guns), for a total firepower of nearly 1,300 guns. The Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827) resulted in the total destruction of the combined Ottoman–Egyptian fleet (around 60 warships destroyed). An obelisk-shaped memorial dedicated to the victory of the Allied fleets and their three admirals, the British Edward Codrington, the French Henri de Rigny and the Russian Lodewijk van Heiden was later erected on the central square of Pylos. The monument was the work of the sculptor Thomas Thomopoulos (1873–1937) and its unveiling took place in 1930, although it was completed in 1933. The liberation of Pylos (6 October 1828) and the construction of the modern city On 6 October 1828, Pylos was definitively liberated from the Ottoman–Egyptian troops of Ibrahim Pasha by the French troops of the Morea expedition commanded by Marshal Nicolas-Joseph Maison. The mission of this expeditionary corps of 15,000 men, sent by king Charles X of France to the Peloponnese between 1828 and 1833, was to implement the Treaty London of 1827, an agreement under which the Greeks would have the right to an independent state. The French troops liberated the cities of Navarino (Pylos), Modon (Methoni), Coron (Koroni) and Patras in October 1828. The current city of Pylos was built starting in the spring of 1829, outside the walls of Neokastro, on the model of the bastides of Southwest France and the cities of the Ionian Islands