Otranto, 28 July 1480: The Ottoman army composed of approximately 20,000 men,
led by General Ahmet Pasha, violently broke into the city slaughtering eight hundred men because they refused to convert to Islam.
The women and children, refugees in the Cathedral, they were enslaved and taken to nearby Vlora.
With them, the wooden statue of the Madonna delle Grazie was stolen protector of the city. A year later, Anna, an Otrantine slave detained in Vlora by the Turkish officer Selim Osman, against the wishes of his master,
he returns the statue to the people of Otranto by placing it on a small boat which will be carried by the waves of the sea, and by an unshakable faith.
Today the statue is still there, in the niche of the Holy Martyrs of the Cathedral of Otranto.

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