In December 1803 the Souliotes, these unsubmissive mountaineers, are forced to evacuate their villages after signing a treaty with Ali Pasha. He has promised not to attack them, but he goes back on his word. His men arrive from Ioannina with their swords drawn. Some Souliotes manage to escape while others surrender. Women and children are trapped near a cliff's edge in Zalongo. In order to avoid capture, the women threw themselves and their children off the steep cliff, committing suicide. In 1961, approximately 150 years after this event, the sculptor George Zongolopoulos, a prominent representative of the so-called “Generation of the 1930s”, paid homage to these women. A copy of the sculpture, in metal, is in the garden of the Presidential Palace in Athens.