Cheta (armed group)

A cheta, in plural chetas, were irregular armed bands present throughout the 19th-century and very early 20th-century Ottoman Empire, particularly in Anatolia and the Balkans.

Context & Terminology

In the late Ottoman Empire, armed rebellions became common occurrences. These rebellions often saw irregular armed bands of rebels, known as chetas, take on the Ottoman Army. Cheta is a Serbian word meaning 'troop', with a proto-Slavic origin; cognate words exist in most Slavic languages.
The leader of Slavic chetas were generally referred to as a voivoda. Leaders of Greek chetas referred to them as the kapetan or kapetanios. The members of chetas were generally called 'chetniks', though members of Bulgarian chetas were known as Komitadjis, while members of Greek chetas have been referred to as Armatoles, Klepht, Andartes, or Makedonomachoi

Notable occurances

During the Macedonian Struggle of 1893 to 1912 chetas of Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Aromanians and Albanians fought against each other and against the Ottoman Army, vying for ideological and ethnic dominance in the territory. This was during a time when increasingly harsh Ottoman crackdowns indicated that reform and reconciliation of the Ottoman state with the various nationalist groups seemed increasingly less likely.
Muslim chetas were active in Asia Minor after World War I. They were notorious for their assaults on Christian Orthodox Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians during the late Ottoman genocides of to. The term was also used as a synonym for members of the Ottoman Empire's Special Organization.