5: Ideals and Sorrows of Youth

5 Ideals and Sorrows of Youth

1862–1897

At the end of 1862 no one could have told who would next sit upon the vacant throne of Greece. Greek public opinion had fixed upon the person of Prince Alfred, the second son of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. An election to choose a new sovereign was called by the Provisional Government that had ousted Otto, and carried out during December. From almost a quarter of a million votes cast, 95 per cent were for Alfred. It was a choice that at the time took observers by surprise. The reasons for this sudden enthusiasm are still not entirely clear. A British-born monarch might perhaps have been expected to rule with more respect for parliament and the constitution than Otto had done. There was also the question of the Ionian islands. Agitation had been gathering pace, during the previous decade, for an end to the British protectorate and for union of the islands with Greece. It was beginning to be rumoured that after almost fifty years the British were ready to give them up. Perhaps the election of a monarch from the British royal family would encourage the government led by Lord Palmerston to cede the islands to Greece? If this was the thinking, it worked – though not in a way that anyone could quite have foreseen.

In hindsight, the most remarkable aspect of this election is that only ninety-three individuals, a negligible percentage, wanted to see the monarchy replaced by a republic. However low Otto’s stock had fallen latterly, and despite the unhappy precedent set by his reign, two principles had become deeply embedded in an electorate that had been enfranchised only twenty years before. One was the monarchy as an institution. The other, that the head of state should be an outsider, above and beyond the intense rivalries of Greek political life. The time would come when both principles would be fiercely contested, but not until the next century.

The polls had not yet closed when news reached Greece that the three guarantor powers had ‘signed an engagement, declaring that no member of the imperial and royal families reigning in France, Great Britain, and Russia could accept the crown of Greece’.¹ Queen Victoria in any case let it be known that no son of hers was going to risk sharing the fate of the luckless Otto. By the time the election result was announced in February 1863, it was already a dead letter. The Greeks were not to be allowed to have the candidate they had voted for. But the vote for Prince Alfred gave the British government the leverage it needed, in effect to choose the next sovereign for Greece. The choice would then have to be ratified by the Greek National Assembly. This had been a mere formality in 1832, but no longer. The sweetener that would persuade the Assembly to accept Great Britain’s choice would be the Ionian islands.

That left only one problem: to find a suitable candidate. Christian William Ferdinand Adolphus George Glücksburg was (like Hamlet) prince of Denmark, and probably even younger, at seventeen. His sister, Alexandra, was about to marry Edward, Prince of Wales, and would become a future Queen of the United Kingdom. William (as he was generally known) was the same age as Otto had been when he had been nominated for the Greek throne. His name had been on the list of candidates for election back in December, and had garnered precisely six votes. The offer to the Danish royal family came not from Greece, but from the British government. In Athens it was evident to the members of the National Assembly which way the wind was blowing. Less than two months after the announcement of the result of the election, and even before Prince William had formally accepted the offer of the throne, the Assembly elected him unanimously as king. Of the prince’s five given names only the last could be readily assimilated into Greek, being also the name of a much venerated saint in the Orthodox calendar. Probably for this reason, when the Danish prince duly entered into his kingdom on 30 October 1863, it was under the royal name of George I.

With the arrival of King George, Greek governments at once achieved a degree of self-determination that had been denied them ever since the later stages of the Revolution. The constitution ratified in 1864 was the work of a Greek assembly. Twenty years before, Otto had dictated changes to its predecessor. Subsequently he had found ways of manipulating it to his advantage. This time the National Assembly determined that the monarch would have no rights over the constitution itself. King George bound himself to accept the new state of affairs in a public speech delivered on his very first day in office. Sovereignty, this time, rested ultimately with the people. The Constitution of 1864 went further than its predecessor to give the vote to almost all adult males (women would have to wait until 1952). At the time, it established one of the most democratic political systems in the world. Once again, Greece was a pioneer.

Another innovation was the royal title. This, too, was the work of the National Assembly. Otto had been crowned ‘King of Greece’ (Hellas). His successor, even before his identity had become known, was to be ‘King of the Hellenes’. Just so far had the Grand Idea advanced in little short of twenty years. The significance of the change is barely perceptible in French, the international diplomatic language of the time, any more than it is in English today. Only the Ottoman ambassador to London, ironically enough himself a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian, realized the implications and saw fit to challenge it. But the new title was nodded through with a minor tweak that affected only the official translation.² Unwittingly, the Great Powers had invested the new king with a title to rule over the entire Greek nation.

And indeed, during the reign of King George, the kingdom would expand. In its first year, the British made good on their promise and the Ionian islands became part of Greece, in June 1864. For Great Britain, having ruled what was nominally a ‘protectorate’ for half a century through the Colonial Office, this act marked a first rehearsal for the era of decolonization that would come a century later. For Greece, a half-century of expanding the frontiers of the state had begun.

That half-century coincides almost exactly with the reign of the new king.

THE POLITICS OF EXPANSION

For someone who presided for so long over the fortunes of his country, and did so without any of the ruptures that would mark the reign of every other Greek monarch, before or after him, George I has attracted remarkably little attention from historians. Only one biography of him exists, and it is more than a hundred years old. His personality is hard to gauge, perhaps a little colourless, if one may judge by the few private letters that have found their way into print.³ But King George was neither an empty figurehead nor an autocrat. From the beginning he accepted constitutional limits to his power that Otto would never have countenanced. But he retained the right to appoint governments and prime ministers. Not always obviously or directly, King George seems to have kept a hand on the helm of the ship of state throughout his reign. His marriage in 1867 to Grand Duchess Olga, the niece of the Tsar, ensured that the queen and their future heirs would share the same Orthodox religion as their subjects. This removed at a stroke a grievance that had dogged the reign of his predecessor. From then on, the King of the Hellenes would be linked dynastically to the ruling families of two of his kingdom’s three guarantor powers – an enviable prospect for stability compared to Otto’s always tetchy relations with those same powers. If Greece’s second monarch never attained the popularity of the leading politicians who brought their decrees to him to sign, he was never as divisive either, or as his own royal successors would prove to be. So it is hard to tell to what extent the successes and failures of half a century may have been due to the only public figure who oversaw all of them.

Between 1864 and 1882 Greece had no fewer than thirty-three different administrations, several of them ‘unity’ governments that were effectively leaderless. It was not until 1875 that the principle became accepted that the task of forming a government must be given to the leader who enjoyed the ‘declared confidence’ of the Chamber, that is to say, a parliamentary majority. And even after that, it was not always applied in practice. Parties were loose groupings of patronage networks dominated by charismatic individuals – no great change there, from the time of the Revolution. In the 1870s there were four of these, then five. Something for the first time resembling a two-party system would emerge only after 1880. But that had less to do with party organization than with the personal qualities of the two arch-rivals who between them would dominate and divide the political landscape of Greece throughout the last two decades of the century, very much as Gladstone and Disraeli had done in Britain before them.

In many ways, these two men were the inheritors and perpetuators of the old fault line that had opened up within the leadership of the Revolution in the 1820s. On one side of this fault line lay outward-looking engagement with the West, on the other the traditional ideal of defiant self-sufficiency, coupled with yearning for expansion towards the East. In their case, it was not only a matter of political choice, it was also dynastic.

Charilaos Trikoupis was the nephew by marriage of Alexandros Mavrokordatos, the modernizing leader who had done more than anyone to engage the European powers in the Greek struggle during the 1820s. His father, Spyridon, had been a loyal supporter of Mavrokordatos during the Revolution and afterwards throughout a long career in public service that included more than a decade as his country’s ambassador in London. The elder Trikoupis is still remembered as the author of the most authoritative history of the Revolution in Greek, written and published in London at the time of the Crimean War. Charilaos, much like his uncle Mavrokordatos before him, gained political and diplomatic experience while employed as the secretary of his father’s embassy. Nepotism was nothing unusual at this time. Nor were those who benefited always undeserving.

Theodoros Diligiannis also had a famous and influential uncle. Kanellos Deligiannis had been a wealthy landowner in the Peloponnese. He, too, had distinguished himself during the Revolution – as one of the chief supporters of Kolokotronis, against Mavrokordatos and the modernizers during the civil wars of the 1820s. The slight change of surname between generations is revealing: ‘Dili-’ is meant to sound more like ancient Greek than ‘Deli-’, a frequent prefix in Greek surnames, which comes from Turkish. Historians in recent years have devoted far greater attention to the career and ideas of Trikoupis than of his rival. Diligiannis had a gift for the popular touch, as Kolettis had once done. He could easily rouse the enthusiasm of audiences, in a way that did not come naturally to the more intellectual Trikoupis, any more than to Mavrokordatos before him.

In the rhetoric and the political careers of these two men the shadow of the old fault line can be traced through the latter years of the nineteenth century. But this time the tremors would be contained within the parliamentary system. There was no fracture of the wider community, as there had been before and would be again. The parties led by the parliamentary rivals were not consistently aligned with ideological positions, or deeply rooted in opposing popular attitudes. Trikoupis is often described as ‘progressive’ and Diligiannis as ‘conservative’. But neither man was above changing his policies according to circumstances, nor were their followers any less averse to switching their allegiance. Diligiannis’s often-quoted remark that he was against everything that his rival was for reveals the limits of the party system in Greece at this time.

And so for the time being the fault line remained active only on the surface. One reason for this may have been to do with the personality of the king and the way he exercised his constitutional role. But whatever the causes, this was a time of rare unanimity about the nature and purposes of the Greek nation state. The combined edifice of the Grand Idea and the new historical narrative, which had been rounded off with the publication of the fifth volume of Paparrigopoulos’s History in 1874, had made sure of that. Throughout the reign of King George there was only ever the one policy on offer: to expand the state and bring as much as possible of the Greek nation within its borders. This goal shines through the policy statements of Trikoupis, often represented as the champion of moderation and restraint, just as it does through the more belligerent tones of Diligiannis. At an early stage of his career, during the ‘Eastern Crisis’ of 1876, Trikoupis is on record as saying, ‘The national idea of Hellenism is the liberation of Greek land and the establishment of a unitary Greek state that includes the entire Greek nation.’⁴

Today, Trikoupis is chiefly remembered for his far-sighted investments in infrastructure – roads, railways, harbours, the Corinth Canal – and for introducing a measure of industrialization into an economy that had always been primarily agricultural. The most visible present-day homage to this legacy is the three-kilometre-long Charilaos Trikoupis Suspension Bridge that elegantly spans the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth and links the Peloponnese with the road networks of northwest Greece, opened in 2004. But what is easily forgotten in the twenty-first century is that, at the time, the purpose of all this expansion at home was to create the springboard for expansion abroad. This was the driving force behind almost all Greek policy decisions during this period.

After the peaceful absorption of the Ionian islands in 1864, opportunities to make further territorial gains would arise on no fewer than four occasions before the end of the century. Historians tend to play up the failures of Greek politicians at these testing times. But the difficulties they faced were formidable, and also more interesting, in the insights they can offer into the changing dynamics of the international stage at the time, and the ways in which successive Greek administrations learned (or failed) to adapt.

Some of these difficulties were already familiar. The guarantee by the Great Powers, which protected the state’s integrity, at the same time prevented it from encroaching on that of any other. A national army that had been created for the purpose of restoring internal order, and had now deposed a sovereign, had never been designed to wage an aggressive war. The state was poor in resources. Even after the enforced restructuring of the late 1850s it was still heavily in debt. The ‘sick man of Europe’, the Ottoman Empire, was perhaps not so sick after all, and very much larger and more powerful, hemming in the little kingdom on three sides.

But perhaps the greatest difficulty of all was new. It came from an entirely unexpected quarter. What had been achieved in Greece since 1830 was now being emulated all over the continent. Nationalism along ethnic lines was now sweeping the board. Although politicians still paid lip service to the ‘Concert of Europe’ that had been established at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the new and shifting reality was better represented by the phrase that came to be heard more often in the second half of the century: the ‘balance of power’. The ‘unifications’ of Italy and Germany during the 1860s had changed the map of Europe for good. The new German Reich, built out of Prussian military defeats inflicted on Austria and France, came into existence in 1871 as already another Great Power. Anything was possible. And the claims of ambitious new nation states could no longer be denied or ignored, after the Prussians had entered Paris, in January of that year.

It was not just in the West that this was happening. In the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, populations that had won a degree of autonomy, short of independent statehood, were more and more coming to resemble nation states in the way they defined and governed themselves. This had been the case with Serbia since 1829. Then in 1859, in the wake of the Crimean War, the Danubian principalities also became autonomous, and adopted the name ‘Romania’. The largest group of all were the Slavic speakers of the Balkan mountain range and the hinterland of the Black Sea, who now began to press for recognition and self-government as Bulgarians.

In the 1860s, Greece was still the only fully independent state in southeast Europe. But others were looking to copy its example. The national rivalries that today are almost synonymous with the name that the region would acquire in the twentieth century were just beginning. The ‘balkanization’ of the Balkans goes back no further than the middle of the nineteenth century.⁵

The first victim of this development was the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. The spiritual and cultural unity of the Orthodox Christian world had been severely shaken by the Revolution of 1821 and the Ottoman reprisals of the same year. Since 1833 it had been divided by the unilateral action of the Greek state in establishing a national Church. Now came demands, first heard in 1860, for the Bulgarian-speaking community in Constantinople to have a Church of its own, too. This might have seemed a minor matter of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Its magnitude became apparent a decade later, when in March 1870 the Ottoman government formally recognized a separate communion to be known as the ‘Bulgarian Exarchate’. In retaliation, two years later, the Ecumenical Patriarchate excommunicated the followers of the rival Church. A new and bitter antagonism had come into play.

The Bulgarians were not the only ones. At the same time, the newly established principality of Romania was building its identity on the Wallachian language, from this time onwards known as Romanian. What remained of the eighteenth-century Greek-educated elite that had ruled over Wallachia and Moldavia for a century was now cast as the oppressor, resented even more than the Ottomans, because closer to home. If there had ever been a possibility of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ coming together into a political force that might have played its part in determining the future of the whole region, as Rigas Velestinlis and others had once envisaged, it was during the 1860s that it vanished for good.

The other issue that was changing was the attitude of Russia. Defeat in the Crimean War had given a new ethnic edge to the way in which Russian elites saw themselves and their place in the world. Leo Tolstoy’s great epic of the Napoleonic Wars, War and Peace, was written and published in serial form during the 1860s, and anachronistically projects the changing attitudes of his own day onto the earlier period. Russian state policy, and so far as one can tell public sympathies too, were moving away from supporting the Orthodox populations of eastern Europe in favour of those that shared a Slavic language. In this way ‘pan-Slavism’ was born. At the same time and for much the same reason, the influential strand in Greek public opinion and political life that had maintained a ‘Russian’ party in existence for more than thirty years quickly tailed off. Russia was now supporting Greece’s rivals. And the fact of these new rivalries had yet to be faced. The Ottoman Empire was no longer the only enemy. From the 1860s onwards, just when the citizens and the political leadership of the Greek state had come together in the determination to realize their Grand Idea, the rules of the game had morphed into something more like three-dimensional chess.

The first opportunity came in 1866. In September of that year a ‘General Assembly of Cretans’ unilaterally declared the union of Crete with Greece. Of all the Ottoman provinces in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, Crete was always the most unstable. The island’s Orthodox majority had all but succeeded in bringing about union in the first years of the 1821 Revolution. They had rebelled again in 1841 and most recently in 1858. Unlike almost every other revolutionary movement in modern times, what the Cretan revolutionaries fought for, no fewer than seven times during the nineteenth century, was not autonomy, or self-determination, but Enosis – union – with Greece. The repeated demands coming from Crete would have placed any Greek government in a difficult position. This one, remembering what had happened during the Crimean War, maintained a fig leaf of official neutrality. At the same time, for the next three years Greek ships ran the Ottoman blockade to transport volunteers and arms into Crete and refugees, made homeless by the fighting, out.

This was one of many occasions in the century when Greek irregulars went into action beyond the frontiers. Some of these men were subjects of the kingdom, others of the Ottoman state. It was clandestine, it was against the ‘rules’ of warfare. It was controversial within Greece too. More often than not it would lead to an upsurge of brigandage at home, demonstrating the uncomfortable truth that Greek governments still did not have a monopoly on the use of force within their own territory. This lesson was hideously brought home when a group of aristocratic British travellers was captured and several of its members murdered by brigands only a few miles from Athens, a year after the end of the revolt in Crete, in 1870. On the other hand, it had been irregular guerrilla warfare that had won the initial battles of the Revolution. Greek governments and public attitudes would remain ambivalent about irregular warfare until beyond the end of the century.

During the Cretan revolt, the Great Powers became involved, as they always did. Russia was still on the cusp of its shift towards the later policy of pan-Slavism and so, for a time, encouraged the insurgents and appeared to back the hopes of the Greek kingdom. For the first and only time during the nineteenth century a Greek government made serious attempts to build alliances with its not yet fully independent Balkan neighbours. The only concrete result was a secret treaty with Serbia whereby each country would support the regional claims of the other against the Ottoman Empire. The treaty would prove short-lived and of no help in solving what was now becoming known as the ‘Cretan Question’. But the very possibility that such alliances could be contemplated shows awareness of how the political world of southeast Europe was changing. For the first time the Greek state was obliged to recognize the existence of others in its own likeness. International relations were no longer only a matter of treating with the Great Powers. Mutual self-interest and mutual help could be negotiated among emerging states in their own backyard. It was a possibility that would not be fully exploited until almost half a century later, and even then, not for long.

The longest and bloodiest of all the Cretan revolts would drag on until the beginning of 1869. By that time, the Ottomans had regained the upper hand. Once again a conference of the Great Powers brought a resolution – just in time to prevent open war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Humiliatingly, the Greek government was excluded from the conference, and had no choice but to accept the terms handed down from Paris. It was scarcely a better outcome than in 1841 or 1854.

When the second opportunity arose, almost a decade later, the political complexities were even more challenging. The first signs of a new ‘Eastern Crisis’ came in 1875. That summer, local rebellions broke out at the opposite end of the Balkans from Greece, in Herzegovina and Bosnia. In May the following year, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the Bulgarian provinces rose in revolt. The first round of hostilities was won by the Ottomans. Reprisals against their Bulgarian subjects provoked the high-profile campaign by the British Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, against ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ – meaning violence against Christians. In Greece, opinion was deeply divided. Were these Bulgarians, who had dared to create their own Church in defiance of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, fellow Christians to be supported in their bid for freedom from the traditional enemy? Or were they in their own way as great a threat to Greece and Greek interests as the Turks?

In April 1877, Russia went to war with the Ottoman Empire, championing the rights of a Slavic population as it had never quite done for the Greeks. Once again secret societies and open committees sprang up in Athens. Greek consuls in many Ottoman provinces began stockpiling arms and supplying them to local Christian armed bands. Once again volunteers and brigands (the distinction between them often unclear) crossed over Greece’s northern frontier to strike at the Ottomans’ rear while they engaged the Russians. By the beginning of 1878 even the normally cautious King George had taken personal charge of preparations for war, and was supported by cheering crowds in Athens. For the first time in Greece, conscription was introduced. The purpose of all this activity was not to aid fellow Christians, whether the Russians or the Bulgarians. It was to stake a claim to as much Ottoman territory as possible, before the fighting stopped and the inevitable peace conference apportioned the spoils.

At the beginning of February 1878, a Greek army more than twenty-five thousand strong crossed the frontier into Thessaly – only to discover that the war was already over. The Russians had once again come close to Constantinople, and the Ottomans sued for peace. The Greek army had hastily to be recalled, without firing a shot. Elsewhere – in Thessaly, Macedonia, and once again in Crete – fighting by Greek volunteers and irregulars continued for several months, aided and abetted by unofficial committees in Athens.

The peace that followed was almost as messy as the war. The Treaty of San Stefano (the name given by Europeans to a suburb of Constantinople) created a large new principality of Bulgaria, but gave nothing to either Greece or Serbia. It was time for the new Great Power of the decade, Germany, to take a hand. The Kaiser’s foreign minister, Otto von Bismarck, convened a conference in the German capital. The treaty that emerged from the Congress of Berlin, in July 1878, would determine the political contours of southeast Europe for a generation. Bulgaria was reduced in size and split into the separate principalities of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, neither of them fully independent. In recognition of what had by this time become a reality in all but name, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania were all granted independent statehood. Greece was promised territory to the north of its original frontier. Two by-products of the negotiations, which would have repercussions later, were the right given by the treaty to Austria to occupy and administer the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a separate bilateral agreement with the Ottoman Empire that gave Great Britain similar rights in the island of Cyprus.

The territorial gains promised to Greece would not materialize for another three years. When they did, they would prove less than had been promised. It would take a further round of negotiations in Berlin, and a second general mobilization of troops in Greece – ordered by King George with the backing of his prime minister, the supposedly anti-war Trikoupis – before the Ottomans would agree terms. By a settlement of 2 July 1881, Greece gained some 213,000 square kilometres in Thessaly and the southern part of Epiros. For the first time, the Greek state took on responsibility for a sizeable Muslim population, a first foretaste of things to come. The acquisition of Thessaly was the second and last territorial gain for the Greek kingdom in the nineteenth century. First the Ionian islands and now this new northern province had been secured by diplomatic means, not war. This time, though, it had been a close-run thing.

The young kingdom was learning, as well as growing. By the early 1880s it had acquired new territory – but also new enemies. Chief among them were the recently created Bulgarian principalities. And behind Bulgaria stood the might of Russia. All at once the policy of the Great Powers, of keeping the ‘sick man of Europe’ on his feet, began to seem not so perverse after all. What would become of the Orthodox Greek speakers of the Ottoman Empire, if the empire were to collapse and a rival Orthodox nation was in a stronger position to take over? The question would have been incomprehensible before 1860. Now, two decades later, it was urgent.

It was the Bulgarians who opened the way for Greece’s third opportunity. A revolution in Plovdiv in September 1885 unilaterally brought the separate principalities of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia together under the control of the government in Sofia. Both Serbia and Greece saw this as a threat. But Greece at this time had no common frontier with Bulgaria – Ottoman Macedonia lay in between. It was the Serbs, a fellow Slav nation, that went into action, only to be roundly defeated by the Bulgarians. In Greece, as it happened, Diligiannis had recently come to power and now found himself trapped by his own warmongering rhetoric. As hostilities wound down, and the principalities of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia became a unified nation state in all but name, Diligiannis tried to wrest territorial gains from the Ottomans in compensation. Unable to back down, and with an army mobilized on the frontier, the Diligiannis government found itself forced into the same position as King Otto’s during the Crimean War. The navies of two old Great Powers, Britain and Austria, and two new ones, Germany and Italy, blockaded Greece for thirty days in May and June 1886. There were to be no gains this time. Diligiannis was obliged to hand over the reins to his arch-rival Trikoupis.

By the time the final opportunity of the century presented itself, in 1897, Trikoupis’s ambitious programme of expanding both infrastructure and the armed forces would have led the country into bankruptcy. Before we come to the rollercoaster of triumph and disaster that would be Greece’s fin de siècle, we need to look beyond the boundaries of the state and explore the wider horizons of the nation – as so many in Greece itself were beginning to do at this time.

THE NATION AND ITS LIMITS

Nowhere else was local agitation for union with Greece so strong as it was in Crete. ‘Union or death’ had been inscribed on the revolutionary banners of 1866, a variation on the war cry of 1821, ‘Liberty or death’. ‘Union’, or Enosis, had already proved a potent recruiting agent in the Ionian islands. At the time and ever since, the Cretan struggle has been presented as a two-way fight between a patriotic people and its foreign oppressor. In reality, somewhere between 25 and 40 per cent of the Cretan population were Muslims. These people had their own patriotism. Descended from native Cretans who had converted to Islam since the seventeenth century, they were proud of their local, Cretan traditions. Most spoke the Cretan dialect of Greek as their first language, and seem to have had little knowledge of Turkish.

According to Paparrigopoulos’s definition, the Turcocretans, as they were known, ought to have been part of the ‘Hellenic nation’. But in Crete throughout the nineteenth century the cleavage ran between religious communities, not language groups. The Turcocretans, as Muslims, looked to the Ottoman Empire for protection and were loyal to its institutions. Union with a state that had killed or expelled all its Muslim population was hardly an option for them. So the Turcocretans, despite their Greek speech, were as much the enemies of the insurgent Cretans as the officials and the military sent from Constantinople. The Cretan revolutions of the nineteenth century were in reality a prolonged intercommunal struggle.

Moving eastwards from Crete, distant Cyprus presented something of a special case. Here the Greek-speaking Orthodox population made up a larger proportion of the total than in Crete, around 80 per cent. The minority Muslims spoke Turkish among themselves, though Greek was used throughout the island. The advent of British rule in 1878 was generally welcomed at first. But here, too, the first calls for Enosis would be heard before the end of the century, although the movement would not gain momentum until well into the next.

In the Greek-speaking enclaves of Anatolia – Pontos and Cappadocia – there could never have been much prospect of union with Greece. Greek schools were founded for the better-off, who in this way learned to think of themselves as Hellenes. For the rest, ‘Greek and Turkish peasants alike were socialized through their respective faith and measured their status against a dominant local Muslim governing hierarchy.’⁶ Not much room for change there. In Cappadocia, and also in Constantinople, there were sizeable communities of Orthodox Christians who used the Greek alphabet – but the language they spoke and wrote was Turkish. Attempts during the second half of the century to persuade the Karamanlides, as these people were known, that they were ‘really’ Greek seem to have made little headway. It is still unclear exactly how members of these communities thought of themselves in the nineteenth century.

Moving to the western seaboard of Anatolia, another kind of evidence comes from population growth and settlement patterns. In the vilayet (administrative division) of Aydin, the region that includes the city of Smyrna, the Greek Orthodox population was growing exponentially. This affected not just the city, where the Greeks had become the largest group by the turn of the century, but the rural areas too – particularly along the expanding network of railways. Most of these settlers came from the Greek kingdom, particularly from the Aegean islands. Other emigrants were setting out at the same time from Greece for America. For many of the poorest in Greece, as the state’s population grew, the national economy could not offer the opportunities, or sometimes even the means of subsistence, that were to be found beyond its borders. It seems that the ‘land of opportunity’ for Greeks of the kingdom, in the late nineteenth century, was as likely to be found in the Ottoman East as westward across the Atlantic.

This particularly applied to the wealthy business community of Alexandria and a smaller one in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. Greeks had begun moving there in significant numbers early in the century. The American Civil War of the 1860s led to a boom in the international market for cotton grown in Egypt. Many Greek fortunes were made in those years, including that of the Benakis family, who would later provide a prominent mayor of Athens and whose private art collection would become the origin of the Benaki Museum. After the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 by the British Mediterranean Fleet, Egypt passed under direct British control. The Greek community continued to thrive, often strengthening its ties with expatriate Greeks in London, Liverpool and Manchester, until new political conditions in the late 1950s and early 1960s caused most of their descendants to leave for Greece.

Another magnet that drew incomers was the ‘city of the world’s desire’ – Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. Here, many Greek families claimed ancestry going back to Byzantine times. After the Ottoman conquest of 1453 the city had been deliberately repopulated with Orthodox Christians. In the second half of the nineteenth century, out of a total of just over one million, approximately a quarter of its inhabitants were Greeks.⁷ These were the people most immediately affected by the series of reforms to the Ottoman system, known as Tanzimat, that had begun in 1839 and had been given a new impetus, partly in response to pressure from the empire’s European allies, in the wake of the Crimean War in 1856.

In April 1861 a group of prominent citizens met in a fashionable house in Pera (today’s Beyoğlu, then the ‘European’ quarter of the city) to create a literary society. The Greek word for ‘society’ (etairia) was still capable of causing jitters, forty years after the Friendly Society (Philiki Etairia) had lit the fuse for the Greek Revolution. So a different, less subversive-sounding, Greek word had to be found instead: syllogos, or ‘association’. In this way the Hellenic Educational Association of Constantinople was born.⁸ It would prove to be the longest-lasting and the most influential of dozens of such ventures in the Ottoman Empire over the next half-century. By establishing, funding and organizing schools, the syllogos movement would become one of the most influential channels for disseminating secular and progressive ideas among the Greek-speaking communities of the empire. It was in large part thanks to the Educational Association that ideas of ‘national regeneration’ and ‘national duty’ came to be disseminated wherever educated Greeks were to be found within the empire.

These syllogoi usually had close and friendly links with like-minded individuals in the Greek state. But they did not function as the state’s agents. It would have been impossible for them to do so openly in any case. Occasionally they did arouse the suspicion or hostility of the Ottoman authorities. But these suspicions seem to have been largely unfounded. Children whose parents had been brought up to think of themselves as Romioi in Greek, and in official Ottoman terminology as Rum, went to schools where they learnt that they were Hellenes and heirs of two great past civilizations. But in all civic respects they remained Rum (meaning Christian Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman state). Leading members of the syllogoi were often themselves highly placed stakeholders in the Ottoman system and in Ottoman society. And they were not the only ones.

The roll call of senior Ottoman officials in the second half of the nineteenth century who were Orthodox Greeks is a long and distinguished one. These were men of talent and distinction, no less than the Phanariots of the previous century had been. For obvious reasons they have been largely elbowed out of later national histories, both in Greece and in Turkey. Politically, they had no heirs beyond the early 1920s. If any of them committed their intimate thoughts to paper, these have yet to come to light. They include Alexandros Karatheodoris (or Karateodori Pasha), whose father had been personal physician to the Sultan and first president of the Educational Association. His mother was a distant relative of Alexandros Mavrokordatos. Karatheodoris served on two occasions as the empire’s foreign minister, and established himself throughout a long career as one of its most trusted and successful ambassadors. As chief Ottoman representative at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, he is credited with the revisions of the Treaty of San Stefano that were most favourable to the empire.

Surprising though it might seem, a succession of Ottoman ambassadors to Athens were themselves Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians. The careers of these men show no sign of divided loyalties. It had been Konstantinos Mousouros (or Musurus Pasha), the long-serving Ottoman ambassador to London, who had taken exception to the new royal title that was proposed for King George, before his accession, and succeeded in having its official translation into French altered. His translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy into Byzantine Greek verse were published in London in the 1880s. No friend to the Greek kingdom, Musurus Pasha must have been nonetheless one of the most able and learned Greeks of his day.

Other spheres in which Greeks came to occupy positions of power and influence in the empire were the traditional one of commerce and the new one of banking. The chief banking institutions in Constantinople had been founded, and were largely run, by Greeks. Even the Sultan’s court banked with Greek firms. This was the cutting edge of modernization. The activities of these individuals and institutions financed the industrialization of the Ottoman Empire. They also aided projects nearer home, such as the syllogoi and the schools that they founded. Some of them invested in the Greek kingdom, too. Much of the ‘foreign’ investment that made possible Trikoupis’s infrastructure projects actually came from wealthy Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. It is hard to tell how far these actions may have been motivated by national solidarity and how much by hard-headed speculation.

Best known among the bankers was Andreas Syngros, who married into the Mavrokordatos family, making him a distant relative by marriage of Karateodori Pasha. After making his fortune as one of the leading financiers in Constantinople, Syngros moved to Athens in the 1870s. There he would become a prolific benefactor and philanthropist, remembered not least in the wide avenue named after him that leads from the centre of Athens to the sea at Phaliro. But Syngros was the exception. Most of these men retained their Ottoman citizenship. They might travel the world or settle in places such as London or Alexandria. But they saw no reason to become subjects of the King of the Hellenes.

Certainly, no one in the Ottoman capital was talking of Enosis, meaning union with Greece. This was the view of one Greek banker in Constantinople, vouchsafed in French to a visiting archaeologist in 1861:

The Hellenes (as the inhabitants of the independent kingdom are known throughout the east) are like great children. Just because they put something in their mouth, they’re persuaded it’s easy, then that it’s already come to pass … Let them say what they like, we wouldn’t for anything want them here in Constantinople. At least the Turks don’t get in the way.⁹

Such offhand candour is rare. But it does seem that most educated Constantinopolitan Greeks tacitly distanced themselves from the Grand Idea emanating from the Greek state. For them the future lay not with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, but rather with the continuation and deepening of the reform process that had begun in 1839. In this way, given time, the empire would be reconstituted as a modern European state. As that happened, progressively, Greek talent and Greek wealth would have ever more to give and also to gain.

When Sultan Abdul Hamid unveiled a new constitution in 1876, nineteen Greek deputies (among a total of 130) attended the first session of a short-lived Ottoman parliament. In a document addressed to the British Foreign Secretary some of these new parliamentarians expressed themselves in favour of a ‘unitary Helleno-Orthodox nation’, a strong and united eastern state including Christians and Muslims, which would be sufficient to counterbalance the power of the West and especially the expansion of the Slavs.¹⁰ It had never before seemed more possible to be those seemingly contradictory things, Hellenic and Ottoman, at once. Hellenism (as defined by Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos) and Ottomanism (as defined by the Tanzimat reform programme) could yet learn to co-exist.

These ideas survived even the dissolution of parliament and suspension of the constitution in the face of the empire’s defeat by Russia in 1878. For the next thirty years the Ottoman state would return to its old autocratic ways. Even so, at least until 1912, many Greek individuals and institutions would keep faith with their Ottoman identity – Rum in the official terminology of the state, but Hellenes at home and among themselves.

That left one area of the Ottoman Empire where no room for compromise existed. All that remained of ‘Turkey in Europe’ after the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 was the swathe of territory that stretches westwards from Constantinople along the northern shore of the Aegean and across the southern Balkan peninsula to the Adriatic. In Greek, as in European languages, these regions were known by their ancient names: Thrace, Macedonia, Epiros, Albania.

It is hard to find evidence from these regions for the kind of passionate devotion to the idea of Enosis, among local Greek speakers, that undoubtedly existed at different times in the islands. And if Greek was widely spoken, and probably even more widely written, in all these areas, it was as one of a number of languages that had co-existed for hundreds of years. For a great many people living in these regions, it was enough that they were Orthodox Christians. Pressure to declare themselves as Greeks, or Serbs, or Bulgarians, Romanians or Albanians, almost invariably came from outside, and during the late nineteenth century was on the increase.

For this reason, evidence collected and published at the time by national governments and pressure groups has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Particularly in Macedonia, widely differing statistics were circulated by all the interested parties.¹¹ From the 1870s onwards, Greek and Bulgarian organizations mobilized local armed gangs to intimidate villagers in favour of one side or the other. Churches that celebrated the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic and whose priests were appointed by the Bulgarian Exarchate were targeted by Greeks. Those that kept the Greek liturgy and remained loyal to the Patriarch were attacked by supporters of the Exarchate. In communities where most people were bilingual, these tactics were often effective. Whole villages would change allegiance for the sake of peace – and then change back again, when a different group of armed men rode in. This became a territory riven by terrible choices for individuals, families and communities – choices over which, more often than not, they themselves had little control.

For all the claims and counter-claims, the contest for Macedonia that was about to begin would be not so much about hearts and minds as about language and education. If people could be persuaded, or if necessary induced by threats, to worship in Greek and to learn to read and write in that language, then they could be brought within the fold of the Greek nation. ‘National expansion’ began to acquire a whole new dimension. What individuals caught up in this process thought about the matter at the time hardly ever made it onto the record. Those in a position to write down their thoughts for posterity had already taken sides – the moment you put pen to paper you were identified as either ‘Greek’ or ‘Bulgarian’ by your choice of language.

In the towns and in Salonica, the largest city of the region, educated Greeks did express their opinions. Educational and cultural associations sprang up here too. Like their counterparts in Constantinople, these had to be politically neutral as far as the Ottoman state was concerned. But they could be as vicious as they liked about rival Orthodox ethnic groups. Syllogoi in these regions were much more politically active than in the Ottoman capital. For example, at Raidestos (today’s Tekirdağ) on the Sea of Marmara, a newly formed Educational Association set out its programme in 1871: ‘The Greek muses would within a short time transform the numerous Slavs, who live here, from enemies to genuine children of the Church and of Hellenism, if we act expeditiously within the short time we have at our disposal.’ The aim was to ‘hellenise’ wherever possible, as quickly as possible, in the face of a Slavic threat that had ‘become all the more aggressive because of the lethargic intellectual state of the people’¹² – a telling admission that the patriotic enthusiasm of the Association’s founders had shallower roots in the community than they might have wished.

This was a local initiative. But in all these regions the activities of local groups tended to be eclipsed, if they were not actually directed, by pressure groups based in Athens. By far the most influential was the Athens-based Society for the Dissemination of Hellenic Learning, established in 1869. Athenian newspapers throughout the 1880s published regular reports and comment under the heading ‘From Macedonia’. In one of these, the writer even proposed that in the worst case this ‘utterly Hellenic’ region would be better served by becoming independent, rather than be swallowed up by Slavs or Austrians. It was from Athens, not from the region, that the most strident calls for union with the Greek kingdom came.¹³

In Salonica itself, now at its heyday as one of the great cities of the Ottoman Empire, Greeks were outnumbered by both Muslims and Sephardic Jews, the latter group being the largest. The Jews still spoke a dialect of Spanish that their ancestors had brought with them from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Others had arrived as fugitives from more recent persecutions in Christian states. They can have had little desire to be absorbed into another one, especially if they recalled how the Jews of Tripolitsa had been massacred along with the Muslims in 1821. The first Greek newspaper in Salonica appeared in 1875. Subject, of course, to Ottoman censorship, its editorials promoted good relations with the city’s other communities and favoured the ‘Hellenic Ottomanism’ that was emerging in Constantinople, rather than the expansionist or anti-Bulgarian policies of Athens.¹⁴

No wonder, then, that when the revolution of the Young Turks came to be proclaimed in Salonica on 23 July 1908, and constitutional rights promised to all the subjects of the empire, the city’s Greeks would be as jubilant as everyone else. No wonder, either, that both before and after that event, Macedonia would become the crucible in which the future of the Greek state and the Greek nation would be forged for the twentieth century and beyond.

TRIUMPH AND DISASTER

On 25 July 1893 the Corinth Canal was formally opened. King George was present. So was Andreas Syngros, who had stepped in to rescue the project when the French company in charge of construction had gone bust. Steamships of the Royal Hellenic Navy fired salutes. It was a paler echo of the day in 1833 when Greece’s first king, Otto, had stepped ashore. Or so it appears in the oil painting by Munich-trained Konstantinos Volanakis shortly afterwards. For the first time it was possible to sail from the Aegean to the Ionian sea, from Piraeus to Patras, less than a hundred miles away, without having to go the long way round by Cape Matapan and the notoriously stormy waters off the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Almost ten years in the making, the Corinth Canal was the most spectacular of the many infrastructure projects initiated by Charilaos Trikoupis.

On that July day the prime minister who had dominated Greek public life for over a decade was out of office. The king had dismissed Trikoupis two months before, along with the government that he led, essentially for trying to borrow the country’s way out of debt. The 1880s had been a decade of frenetic borrowing and spending. A final restructuring of the debts that had been inherited from the time of the Revolution, in 1878, had given Greece access for the first time to international capital markets. Faced with the choice, early in his premiership, of investing in infrastructure or in the armed forces, Trikoupis had elected to do both. It was borrowed capital that made it possible. According to one contemporary commentator, the country had been effectively insolvent throughout this boom decade.¹⁵

Dismissing the architect of boom and bust had been a mistake, as the king soon found out. Foreign investors had even less confidence in the short-lived administration that took over. The crunch came that summer. The smoke of cannons had scarcely cleared from the mouth of the Corinth Canal when the price of Greece’s staple export, currants, plummeted. In November, Trikoupis was back as prime minister, to face the music. The words he is supposed to have spoken in parliament on 22 December 1893 may be apocryphal: ‘Unfortunately, we are bankrupt.’ But there was no denying their truth. Once again, Greece was an international pariah. Once again, control of the country’s finances was about to pass into the hands of foreign creditors.

Greece was down, but not out. At the same time that French and British bankers were squeezing what returns they could from a crippled national economy, another Frenchman was putting the finishing touches to a visionary idea. Baron Pierre de Coubertin was an educational reformer who held a passionate belief in the moral and physical benefits of sport. His idea, first put forward a year before Greece declared bankruptcy, was to recreate the ancient Olympic Games as a modern international athletic competition. In the summer of 1894 the first International Olympic Committee was formed. Thanks in large part to the energetic representations of Dimitrios Vikelas, a Greek businessman and writer who had lived for most of his adult life in London and Paris, Athens was chosen as the first venue for the Games.

Trikoupis, now in failing health and soon to depart office for good, tried to object. At the very least, he insisted, the Greek state would put no money into it. But Coubertin had good connections with the royal family and other prominent Greeks. The first modern Olympics went ahead. They began on the official anniversary of the start of the Revolution, 25 March 1896, which was 6 April in the Western calendar. It was Easter Monday. The symbolism was perfect.

The Games proved a resounding success. The climax, four days later, was the twenty-five-mile race from the Bay of Marathon to the newly rebuilt Panathenaic Stadium near the centre of Athens. Devised to recapture a glorious moment from the ancient wars between the Greeks and the Persians, this was the first ever ‘Marathon’. (No such race had existed in antiquity.) More than eighty thousand people crowded into the stadium to watch Spyridon Louis, a Greek former soldier, cross the finishing line as the world’s first Marathon winner. The two royal princes, Constantine and George, leapt from their father’s side to join Louis as he completed the final stretch. It was a moment of triumph for a kingdom that was not much older than its king. The following day, far away in the French Mediterranean resort of Cannes, Charilaos Trikoupis died.

In some ways, the triumph of the Athens Olympics was a throwback to the early years of the kingdom. The new-old cityscape of Athens, to which the rebuilt stadium itself was but the latest addition, was still being shaped according to plans that had been drawn up by German architects back in the 1830s. Foreign visitors could not fail to be impressed by the seamless superimposition of the very new upon the foundations of the very old. The revival of the Games and the revival of Hellas could be seen as all of a piece. It was the culmination of a process that had begun with the Revolution and the philhellenic blueprint for the kingdom that had come with the Bavarians.

But this late in the century, the reality had moved on. Greeks had lost nothing of their fierce pride in their ancient Hellenic heritage. But they no longer saw their country as its literal revival – any more than Coubertin and the first International Olympic Committee really believed that the modern festival they had devised was going to recreate the athletic contests of antiquity. Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos had filled in the missing centuries that separated the classical period from the modern. Byzantium had been rediscovered. There was more to the Greek nation, nowadays, than a willed act of revival – be that never so well intentioned or triumphantly carried through. Whatever the revival of the Olympics meant for the world of sport, for Greece it was the revival of a revival, the embodiment of a mindset whose heyday had been sixty years earlier.

Even while the Olympics were going on, beyond the kingdom’s borders, to north and south, intercommunal violence was getting out of hand. In Macedonia, armed bands of Greek- and Bulgarian-speaking Christians clashed with one another and terrorized the populace into taking sides between them. In Crete, Greek-speaking Christians clashed with Greek-speaking Muslims. In both regions, intercommunal murders were becoming a daily occurrence. The country districts were becoming ungovernable. In Greece it was not humanitarian concern for the victims that drove the public mood, but fear that the nation’s long-term goals were being usurped by rivals. With every new settlement imposed on Crete by the Great Powers in concert with the Ottoman government, the more likely it seemed that the ‘Great Island’, which had so nearly become part of Greece in the 1820s, would slip finally from the country’s grasp. If the Bulgarians were to gain the upper hand in Macedonia, both the land and its people might be lost to the Greek nation for ever.

It was to forestall these perceived dangers that a group of young army officers, at the end of 1894, had set up yet another secret society, distantly modelled on the Friendly Society. It would not be long before the National Society, as this one was called, emerged from the barracks and from the shadows to become a highly vocal pressure group. Its leader was the far-from-military figure of Spyridon Lambros, Rector of the University of Athens, a prolific academic historian of Byzantium, tutor to the heir apparent and (briefly) a future prime minister. By October 1896, the National Society had come out into the open, fund-raising through the press to pay for irregular military operations, and even addressing a set of demands to the king. Other groups, more shadowy, were more extreme still. Within months of the ending of the Olympic Games, it really did begin to look as though the Grand Idea was about to be realized. The fourth and last opportunity of the century had well and truly arrived.

As it happened, Diligiannis was once again in power. But the popular mood that was gathering by the first months of 1897 was more than even this seasoned populist could control. With the sporting victory in the Marathon fresh in people’s memories, an appetite for winning carried all before it. Crete was relatively quiet, after the latest outburst of violence that had swept the island the previous spring and summer. Once again the Great Powers had intervened with the Ottoman government to cobble together a settlement. It was not working particularly well, but not necessarily worse than its predecessors. Then in February 1897, Greece took a step that no Greek government had openly authorized since the Revolution.

An armed flotilla under the command of Prince George, the king’s second son, sailed from Piraeus to Chania, at that time Crete’s capital. The prince spent less than twenty-four hours ashore. Three days later, a Greek expeditionary force landed troops. A proclamation by Colonel Timoleon Vassos, aide-de-camp to King George, announced the military occupation of Crete in the name of his sovereign. This was too much for the Great Powers. With the consent of the Sultan, control of Crete was parcelled out to the navies and marines of Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy. Crete was on the path, not to Enosis, but to autonomy.

Not even this modest setback was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of the National Society, an enthusiasm that now had the royal family, the press, the armed forces and an initially more cautious government firmly in its grip. Athens was convulsed by jubilant mass demonstrations. People of all classes came out on the streets to demand war. The scenes would be a foretaste of what would happen in many western European cities in 1914. During March 1897 forty-five thousand infantrymen and five hundred cavalry mustered in Thessaly and Epiros, along the Greek – Ottoman frontier. In overall command was the heir to the throne, Prince Constantine – he who less than a year before had sprinted alongside the Marathon victor towards the finishing line. Raids by Greek irregulars into Ottoman territory during April provoked the Sultan to declare war on 17 April.

The war of 1897 lasted barely over a month. The Greek army was outnumbered and outclassed by Ottoman forces that had recently benefited from German training and equipment. The leadership shown by the future Greek king and his staff officers came in for particularly harsh criticism. It was a rout. The victorious Ottoman armies pursued their attackers far inside Greek territory. The towns of Larisa and Tyrnavos, and the Greeks’ forward base at the port of Volos, were all taken. The whole of Thessaly was overrun. More than a hundred thousand refugees were displaced. Even Lamia, the first town inside the pre-1881 border, was abandoned by the Greek army, as it fled southwards to prepare for a last stand near the site of the ancient battle of Thermopylae.

It was once again intervention by the Great Powers that saved Prince Constantine and his troops from this ultimate test. In the course of negotiations that would last for the rest of the year, the Sultan was induced to relinquish almost all the gains his army had made at the expense of Greece, in return for payment of a huge indemnity and some minor adjustments to the frontier. A seventeen-year-old cadet at the Ottoman military high school in Monastir (today’s Bitola in the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’), thwarted from volunteering by the brevity of the campaign, is said to have learnt the bitter ‘lesson that the European great powers intervened when the Ottomans won, but failed to intervene when they were defeated’. The cadet’s name was Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, the father of the modern Turkish nation.¹⁶ It was not only the fortunes of Greece that would be determined by the outcome of that short-lived campaign.

But there was another lesson to be learned from the debacle of 1897. Almost seventy years after the treaty guaranteeing Greek independence had been signed, it was still proving its worth. The existence of the Greek state had never been a matter for Greeks alone, to defend by themselves. Now, as the century neared its end, all the world could see that Greece’s place was assured, on the map of Europe and among the nations that would forge the continent’s future. Whatever exactly ‘Europe’ might come to mean during the century ahead, Greece must be an integral part of it. However galling it might seem to a patriotic new generation of Ottoman officers, the achievement of the Greek Revolution and the decades that had followed it could not be reversed by force of arms.

Even so, the cost to Greece was high – as it had been before and would be again. Since the exchequer was bankrupt, it was the Great Powers themselves that had to pay the indemnity to the Sultan. To cover this, and other outstanding debts, the powers the next year established an International Financial Commission – a step that effectively took the national economy out of the control of the Greek government. It was the third time this had happened since independence. It would not be the last.

For Greece, the defeat of 1897, following hard on the heels of bankruptcy in 1893, was the greatest of the national humiliations of the nineteenth century. Of all the lessons learnt by the young kingdom the bitterest was the obvious one: that on its own it possessed neither the military nor the economic strength to take on a much larger enemy.

The disaster of 1897 has been called a posthumous vindication of Trikoupis’s policies.¹⁷ In itself, a disaster on this scale is a strange sort of vindication. The only advance for the Greek nation was that Crete the next year would be declared an autonomous principality, under Great Power protection and with Prince George of Greece as head of state. It is true that during the years that followed, many of the initiatives set in motion by Trikoupis would be given new impetus. The rewards to come, in 1912 and 1913, would be spectacular. But through the greater triumphs and the worse disasters of the next quarter-century, the bitter truth that had been learned in 1897 would remain as immutable as the laws of physics.