Vasos Bragiotis-Montenegro (1797–1847), a refugee from Brda (Highlands) of Montenegro, a herdsman of the powerful Aydin landlord Karaosmanoglu, a bandit in the province of Aydin, a porter in the port of Smyrna, imprisoned in the prisons of Athens, and subsequently a banner-bearer of the Ottoman body in the operations of the Sublime Porte against the "defector" Ali Pasha Tepelena of Ioannina, joined the service of the Greek Revolution in August 1821 and evolved into one of the most significant military figures of the War for Greek Independence.
With the establishment of the Greek Kingdom, he remained in the army and reached the rank of major general and the position of royal aide-de-camp. Taking command of the Border Guard of Phthiotis and subsequently the general command of the Body of the Border Guard that constituted the strongest military unit of the Greek armed forces, he became – according to the French ambassador Piscalotori – the "strongest man in Eastern Sterea".
At the same time, without holding any formal political position, he played a leading role in the political affairs of Eastern Sterea, as a member of the French party but also as an ardent Ottomanist, as well as the head of a complex patronage system that covered most of Eastern Sterea in which a large number of political, military, and administrative figures from the wider area participated.
He married one of the distinguished women of the time, the Elengos Ioanniti, a beautiful, educated, and cultured descendant of a wealthy commercial family from Kea, whom he abducted voluntarily while she was married to the local notary Michail Pangalos and pregnant. They had four sons, of whom two survived: Alexandros, a major general, royal aide-de-camp, and Member of Parliament for Megara, and the more well-known Timoleon Vassos, a lieutenant general, commander of the "Landing Corps of Crete" in the 1897 war, and royal aide-de-camp.
This illiterate Slavic chieftain serves as a typical example of a group of traditional armed individuals that emerged from the Greek War of Independence. Vasos, after offering his services to the Sublime Porte and subsequently to the "Temporary Administrations" of the revolutionary period, managed to establish himself as one of the most significant military figures of the Struggle and, furthermore, to integrate and thrive in the newly established Greek Kingdom due to his ability to adapt to the modernizing post-revolutionary reality, always serving faithfully the state and the throne.
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