Rigas Feraios was born in 1757 as Antonios Rigas Velestinlis He later was at some point nicknamed
Pheraeos or
Feraios, by scholars, after the nearby ancient Greek city of
Pherae, but he does not seem ever to have used this name himself; he is also sometimes known as
Konstantinos or
Constantine Rhigas (). He is often described as being of
Aromanian ancestry, with his native village of Velestino being predominantly Aromanian. Although his family usually overwintered in Velestino, it had its roots in
Perivoli, another Aromanian-inhabited village. Rigas' grandfather Konstantinos Kyriazis or Kyratzis relocated with his family to Velestino which had been transformed into a Perivoli parish. Some historians state that Rigas was a
Greek, as Leandros Vranoussis, who assumes that his Greek family was long-time residing in Velestino. According to his compatriot
Christoforos Perraivos, Rigas was educated at the school of
Ampelakia, Larissa. Perhaps Rigas took lower education there, because it is historically documented that Rigas was educated at the upper school "Ellinomouseion" in the
village of Zagora on the mountain
Pelion, where the old building of this school still exists and is widely known in the region as the "School of Riga". Later he became a teacher in the village of
Kissos, near to Zamora, and he fought the local Ottoman presence. At the age of twenty he killed an important Ottoman figure, and fled to the uplands of
Mount Olympus, where he enlisted in a band of soldiers led by
Spiros Zeras. He later went to the monastic community of
Mount Athos, where he was received by Cosmas,
hegumen of the
Vatopedi monastery; from there to
Constantinople (
Istanbul), where he became a secretary to the
Phanariote Alexander Ypsilantis (1725–1805). Arriving in
Bucharest, the capital of
Wallachia, Rigas returned to school, learned several languages and eventually became a clerk for the Wallachian
Prince Nicholas Mavrogenes. When the
Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792) broke out, he was charged with the inspection of the troops in the city of
Craiova. Here he entered into friendly relations with an Ottoman officer named
Osman Pazvantoğlu, afterwards the rebellious
Pasha of
Vidin, whose life he saved from the vengeance of Mavrogenes. He learned about the
French Revolution, and came to believe something similar could occur in the
Balkans, resulting in
self-determination for the Christian subjects of the Ottomans; he developed support for an uprising by meeting Greek Orthodox
bishops and
guerrilla leaders. After the death of his patron Rigas returned to Bucharest to serve for some time as
dragoman at the
French consulate. At this time he wrote his famous
Greek version of
La Marseillaise, the anthem of
French revolutionaries, a version familiar through
Lord Byron's paraphrase as "sons of the Greeks, arise". ==In Vienna==