Athanasios Diakos, a klepht and later a rebel military commander, was captured after the Battle of Alamana (1821), near Thermopylae, and after refusing to convert to Islam and join the Ottoman army, he was impaled. Diakos became a martyr for a Greek independence and was later honored as a national hero. Non-combatant Greeks (elders, monks, women etc.) were impaled around Athens during the first year of the revolution (1821).