Tzavelas grew up in exile in Corfu, the likely location of where he learned Greek, his mother tongue being the Souliotic dialect of Albanian.

[6] When Ibrahim Pasha invaded the Peloponnese in 1825, Tzavellas, together with Kitsos Botsaris and Georgios Karaiskakis were among the Greek leaders to advance in Messenia and succeeded to relieve the siege of Navarino.

[9] The fact that Tzavelas and the other Souliot leaders gradually integrated in the Greek national cause was noticed by, and perhaps amused, their contemporaries such as the embittered Ahmet Nepravistha, the dervenaga of Kravara, who in a letter of September 1828 replying to Tzavellas's request to surrender, took note of their mutation, and pointing out their shared Albanian origin sarcastically called into question Tzavellas' Greekness.

[12] After Independence, Tzavelas became a supporter of Kapodistrias and eventually a leader in the Russian Party which was the conservative and arch-Orthodox political faction in the period of King Otto.

In 1854, during the Crimean War, a number of Greek military officers of Souliote descent, under Kitsos Tzavelas, participated in a failed revolt in Epirus, demanding union with Greece.