BFD_Zayl said:
losers? how could they write? they all died in the battle, unless you are referring to the persians, for whom it was only a phyrric victory.
The earliest records of this battle are from Greek writers/historians - that's the only place we find this reference to millions of Persian soldiers and 300 Greek ones, and in turn those who referenced these Greek writers. Persian accounts of the battle estimate their forces being between 250,000 - 800,000, and the Greek forces not much less in number. It's also not a terribly important battle in their history - but is remembered as a battle where Greeks had every topographic advantage. The whole Persian army was like a fish in a barrel from the Greek position, and even though they were being slaughtered they pressed on and defeated the Greeks - is their collective memory. They also focus much more on the tens of thousands of Greeks who joined the Persians to fight.
It's similar to the battle of Kosovo Polje in modern-day Kosovo. For Serbians, it was an epic loss - all the mythical majesty of fighting to the death against the Osmanli army and losing with honor. They don't bother to remember that there were Bosnian and Albanian soldiers there as well. They don't bother to remember the Osmanli leader was stabbed in the back. And they don't bother to realize the battle was of little or no importance to Turkish collective memory. It was just another they won on the way to Vienna.
And it's the same with Gorazde. Hero's City, it's called, in Bosnia because it was one of the only UN-protected "safe havens" to actually survive the genocide. Srebrenica, Zepa, etc... were all conquered and massacred. It's remembered as some epic outpost of Bosnian defiance and our will to survive and is today the only major, Muslim-populated city surviving in the whole Drina river valley. The truth is the city just went about it's day to day life. It was being shelled every day, thousands were dying, thousands more starved to death, and life was a big, miserable mess until the peace deals were signed and the war ended. There's no heroism or defiance, everyone there would've fled if they had been afforded an opportunity to do so.`
opcorn:
