6: Military Service

6 Military Service

1897–1913

In Athens and throughout the Greek kingdom the shock of defeat ran deep, and would last for years. Compared to later defeats to be suffered in the 1920s and the 1940s, the actual damage done in 1897 was very limited. But a whole set of assumptions, built up over half a century at least, had been suddenly called into question. Everybody was looking for scapegoats. Even the king and the royal family came in for the kind of vilification that had last been heard during the final years of King Otto’s reign. Might King George and his sons go the same way? Every aspect of the Greek state and all of its institutions were on the rack. Communal soul-searching and self-loathing reached depths they never had before. Only one actor in the drama was exempt from blame. It ‘was the state’, as one apologist for the war put it shortly afterwards, ‘that had been defeated and not the nation.’¹

The nation floated free. The more threatened, or unreachable, this extra-territorial entity came to seem, the more exalted it became in the imagination of those still smarting from defeat. This new attitude found a passionate and articulate spokesman in a young diplomat, activist, writer, diarist, society figure and future victim of political assassination, whose career had been just beginning in 1897. Ion Dragoumis likened the relationship between state and nation to that between a garment and its wearer. The Greek nation had clothed itself in the garb of many different political systems in its three-thousand-year history. The present kingdom was just the latest of these. All were transitory and ultimately expendable. What mattered was the nation.²

State and nation had never been so far apart, or seemed so hard to reconcile, as they did at the turn of the twentieth century: the state too weak to expand, the nation too physically dispersed and politically inchoate ever to coalesce into the unitary state that for more than half a century had been the goal of the Grand Idea. What nobody could have predicted was the deadly tussle between these two concepts of what it meant to be Greek, or the series of conflicts that would eventually bring very nearly the entire Greek nation within the borders of a Greek state that had greatly expanded in the meantime.

DOLDRUMS AT HOME

Athens in 1900 was a place of extreme contrasts. The city’s population had increased tenfold since it first became the capital in 1834, from about twelve thousand to a little over a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. It had not yet joined up with the port of Piraeus, which had grown in the same period from almost nothing to some fifty thousand. Even so, the combined population of Athens and Piraeus stood at less than one-fifth of that of Constantinople, and a quarter of that of Smyrna. In the city centre the wide boulevard that runs past the grand neoclassical-style buildings of the Academy, the University and the National Library, and today carries six lanes of congested traffic, was an elegant open space. Gentlemen and ladies wearing the latest fashions from the West could stroll along the boulevard or sit outside in cafés described by an American visitor as ‘like those in Paris’, while horse-drawn omnibuses rumbled slowly past. Photographs of the time, and paintings in the impressionist style by the Paris-trained painter Paul Mathiopoulos, convey a sense of ‘grace, gentility, and contentment’.³

But only a few hundred metres away, on the west side of the city, were suburbs where hundreds of mostly single young men had migrated from the country in search of work. Since the 1880s, violent crime in Athens had far outstripped that of other European capitals. It has been estimated that the murder rate was more than fifty times greater in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Athens and Piraeus than it was in London, Paris, Berlin or Amsterdam.⁴ Violence even reached to the very top. In 1898 the king himself narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Diligiannis was not to be so lucky. Forced to resign after the debacle of 1897, Diligiannis was once again serving as prime minister in 1905 when he was fatally stabbed on the steps of parliament. His assassin was a professional gambler, aggrieved by measures that had been announced against gambling houses. The fact that such measures had had to be taken was another symptom of the corrosive malaise of the time.

In districts such as Psyrri, in the shadow of the ancient temple known as the Theseion, and in the port of Piraeus, there flourished a whole underworld of hashish dens, brothels and petty criminality. Traditional codes of social behaviour, which had developed over centuries in small communities in the mountains and islands, became adapted to the deprived environment of a new urban underclass. Male heroism was still a matter of display and based on shared ideas of honour. But the ‘hero’ was now the mangas, the spiv or ‘wide boy’, who lived by his wits and had nothing but contempt for the better-off or the obedient wage slave. The mangas was expected to cock a snook at authority, to be quick with a knife and ruthless in avenging insult. He had to be capable of consuming prodigious quantities of hashish and alcohol, while all the time exercising the rigorous self-control prized by his rural forebears. His dealings with women would be casual, often violent, exploitative, and designed to show off his callousness and sexual prowess. This underworld generated its own special language, partly as a code to escape detection but also as a form of group solidarity.

In makeshift hashish dens, drinking houses and oriental-style cafés, known as café-aman, the men of this underworld would give expression to their own distinctive version of pride and melancholy in songs accompanied by a local variant of the Turkish long-necked lute, or saz, known in Greek as a bouzouki. This was the beginning of a culture of music and song that would later come to be known by the enigmatic term rebetika. Admired both in Greece and abroad, from the 1970s onwards, as the Greek equivalent of American Blues, this tradition and the urban underworld that gave it birth would come to be equally detested by nationalists and by the left for its alleged introversion and defeatism. At the time, these earliest known songs of the rebetika tradition were a symptom and a particular manifestation of a wider climate of violence, criminality and despair, whether real or imagined, that permeated the Greek capital around the turn of the century.

In these conditions an alternative for many was to leave the country altogether. Since the 1890s a new destination had opened up for young Greek men in search of work. Many had already sought better chances than could be offered by the subsistence economy of their home villages or the elusive promises held out by Athens and Piraeus or even, latterly, the great Ottoman cities of Constantinople, Smyrna and Salonica. Now, they began to establish Greek-speaking communities all over the world. The greatest number went to the United States – where among other things they brought with them the songs of the Greek underworld. It was in New York and Chicago that the foundations would be laid for the commercial success of rebetika through the fast-developing industry of sound recording. Emigration peaked in 1907, when thirty-six thousand individuals left – almost all of them single men in their twenties and thirties.⁵

At the opposite end of the social spectrum the climate of those years found more intellectual and aesthetic outlets. At a time when old certainties were so widely felt to have failed, young people, in particular, were casting around for something to replace them. This was the background to the first appearance of a women’s movement, in a society that had always rigidly separated the male sphere, outside the home, from the female one, within it. The Ladies’ Magazine had been founded in Athens as far back as 1887 and would run for twenty years. Its editors, its contributors and its intended readers were all women. The magazine’s founding editor, Callirhoe Parren, is recognized as Greece’s first feminist, and the country’s first woman writer to be published in her lifetime. Many of the magazine’s editorials called for political change to give rights, such as the vote, to women – something that would not happen for another half-century. The war of 1897 and its aftermath gave a new impetus to the movement, with so many women mobilized as nurses or in charitable organizations.⁶

After 1900, other, newer ideas arrived from France. Among them were French translations of German philosophy, particularly extracts from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Socialism made its first appearance in print in Greek. There was not yet a political party, but a Socialist Movement was founded in 1902 and an extended manifesto published in 1907.⁷ In France itself the period known as the ‘fin de siècle’ had given rise to the movements known as ‘décadence’ and ‘aestheticism’. Their adherents placed the highest value on art and personal pleasure, while affecting boredom or disgust with the everyday world. These attitudes chimed readily with the mood of some among the educated young of Athens in the years after the defeat of 1897. In 1906 a twenty-two-year-old student at Athens University seemed to glorify them in a novel, published under the pseudonym of Karma Nirvami. Serpent and Lily tells the story of a young couple who prefer to commit suicide rather than consummate their love, and suffocate in the voluptuous aroma of exotic flowers. Hard on the heels of the novel came a polemical essay by the same hand. Here the cause of the fictional hero’s trouble was diagnosed in a phrase translated from the French of an earlier era, ‘The sickness of the century’. Much later, after the Second World War, the author of this work would achieve international fame under his own name, as the creator of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. Such was the precocious literary debut of Nikos Kazantzakis.

Life seemed to imitate art. The ‘sickness’ took hold. The very public suicide of two young lovers in the Athens First Cemetery, a few years later, seized the newspaper headlines and has been credited with ‘heralding the beginning of an epidemic of suicides in Greece’.⁸ Superficially, this might be compared to the soaring suicide rates reported in the country since the financial crisis that broke out in 2010. But those who took their own lives over a hundred years ago seem to have been driven by an urge to assert their individuality – in some ways not unlike the antisocial behaviour of the mangas in his own sphere. Whether in fiction or in reality, self-destruction needed to be staged, as an aesthetic act.

In another high-profile incident, art and life came together in a manner at once bizarre and tragic. Pericles Giannopoulos was a newspaper columnist and essayist, forty years old in April 1910. Dressed in a white flannel suit with matching gloves, Giannopoulos commandeered a horse and rode it into the sea at a gallop. Far out from the shore, he raised a pistol, held it to his temple and pulled the trigger. His body was recovered two weeks later. Not long before his suicide, Giannopoulos had published a manifesto, full of heavy bold type and block capitals, in which he celebrated the ‘Hellenic Spirit’ or ‘GREEKNESS’. To be Greek, according to Giannopoulos, was to be human. But only the Greek, it seems, possesses this quality fully, because:

the DESTINY of the Greek in this World, was and is in every age, TODAY and TOMORROW:

THE HUMANIZATION OF THE UNIVERSE[.]⁹

Giannopoulos differed from his contemporary Dragoumis in many things. But both men were reacting to the extreme contrasts of Athenian life as they experienced them in the first years of the century. In particular, they were infected by the climate of defeatism that had begun in 1897, which seemed to blight their whole generation. Desperate for solutions, however extreme, they were drawn, like moths to a flame, towards new ideas about nationalism, art and aesthetics. Giannopoulos revered the spirit of ancient Greece, Dragoumis a more elusive ‘national soul’. But the ideas themselves, and in the case of Giannopoulos the actions too, came from a western Europe that both men distrusted profoundly. Their understanding of the Greek nation derives not from Greek antiquity but from the contemporary mystical nationalism of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès in France. This is the origin of Dragoumis’s assertion, in 1913, that ‘the Nation is the new religion’.¹⁰ The style of Giannopoulos’s death comes straight from the heart of literary and intellectual Paris. The ideas and the actions are of a piece with the cafés, boulevards and omnibuses of Athens, and their misty evocation in the impressionist oil paintings of ‘Paul’ (not Pavlos) Mathiopoulos.

Public life during the first years of the century was marked by more conventional signs of disaffection. Until 1906, short-lived governments came and went, much as they had done in the early years of King George’s reign, before the rise of Trikoupis and Diligiannis. Opposition deputies filibustered. Newspaper editorials thundered that the plight of the nation was going unaddressed.

Organized political protests in 1901 and 1903 turned violent and left several people dead on the streets of Athens. It was, of all things, the question of the Greek language that brought demonstrators out onto the streets. The linguist Giannis Psycharis, back in 1888, had come out stridently as the champion of the spoken, or ‘demotic’, variety of Greek as the proper written language for the nation. Psycharis had also been the first to claim that the language question was a political one. Now, it was. Supporters of his radical ideas had begun to serialize a translation of the Christian Gospels into a form of everyday colloquial Greek, offending both traditional religious and traditional nationalist sensibilities. Other factors were involved too. But the publication of the translation in the newspaper Acropolis was provocation enough for a mob of university students to ransack the paper’s offices and wreck the printing presses. Two years later, a translation of an ancient Greek tragedy set off more violence, though on a smaller scale. On both occasions, it was conservative-minded students who took to the streets, aided and abetted by some of their professors. In the new, febrile atmosphere, anything that threatened the idealized integrity of the nation was enough to provoke a frenzy. Now, more than ever, the choice of which variety of Greek to use in public was a profession of faith in the nation. If you were a demoticist, as proponents of the spoken language were called, you revered the everyday spoken form of Greek as the living repository of the nation’s very ‘soul’. If you belonged to the opposite camp, you saw any slackening of the hold of ancient Greek over the modern language as a betrayal of your birthright as a Hellene.

It was not all bad news during those first years of the century. The economy recovered strongly during most of the fifteen years after 1897. Fiscal discipline had been imposed by the International Financial Commission. Its early forecasts even had to be revised upwards – in marked contrast to what has happened since 2010. It has been suggested that, by 1912, Greeks were in general better off than their parents’ generation had been. In education, the expansion sponsored by Trikoupis during the previous two decades was beginning to pay off. By 1907 just over 40 per cent of the population over the age of eight could read and write – double the percentage of thirty years before. Allowing for the very limited opportunities available for girls, this probably means that more than half of adult males in the Greek kingdom were literate by the first decade of the twentieth century.¹¹

But it was not in Greece, it was beyond its borders, that forces were at work whose effects would soon change the face of the entire region for ever.

ACTION ABROAD

To the south, in Crete, the Christian majority was as determined as ever to pursue union with Greece. Never mind how much the self-confidence of the Greek state had been dented at home, no such misgivings seem to have reached across the Cretan Sea. The island’s Christians were just about the only people anywhere to have gained by the war of 1897. Nominally the ‘Cretan State’ was still part of the Ottoman Empire. But the last Ottoman troops had been withdrawn in 1898 on the insistence of the guarantor powers. A multinational force, gathered from Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy, had been keeping the peace between the Christian and Muslim communities in the meantime. In these circumstances, no government in Athens, with memories of defeat still fresh, could risk accepting Cretan demands for Enosis, however much it might wish to.

So it was left to the Christians of Crete themselves to make the running. By 1905, Prince George, the island’s governor, had alienated their political leadership to such an extent that a number of them blockaded themselves and their armed supporters in the village of Therisos in the foothills of the White Mountains and threatened all comers. The revolt of Therisos ended without bloodshed, but it cost the prince his job. Its leader was a forty-year-old lawyer from Chania who had first come to prominence during the revolt of 1897. This drastic act marked the first step along a path that would lead to the eventual union of Crete with Greece. It would also launch the political career of the most famous, as well as the most controversial, Greek statesman of the twentieth century: Eleftherios Venizelos.

Macedonia, in the opposite direction, was a slowly erupting volcano. Here, the Ottomans were still in charge – though not always in full control. Intercommunal violence between Greek speakers and Slavic speakers had only worsened since the 1880s. By now, Greece was in competition with both Serbia and Bulgaria to claim the ‘national consciousness’ of local communities throughout the region. A movement had even emerged among some Slavic speakers for an independent Macedonia. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) had been founded in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. Its programme was more Bulgarian than its name suggests, but its methods were revolutionary enough. In April 1903 a splinter group of the organization set off a series of massive bombs in Salonica. Despite several days of panic, and a heavy-handed crackdown by the police, the bombers failed to spark the more widespread reprisals that might have fuelled a more general revolt.

Then on the night of 2 August, after concerted preparations, the main body of the organization orchestrated an uprising in villages across the region of Monastir. The movement was ruthlessly put down and its leaders were executed by the Ottoman authorities – aided by Greek irregulars and the Greek Orthodox bishop of Kastoria. The event has been known ever since as the Ilinden Uprising, from the Bulgarian for St Elijah’s Day, when it happened. It is today commemorated as the national day of the Former Yugoslav Republic whose claim to the name of Macedonia has been contested by Greece since 1992.

As these details suggest, it was not the fate of fellow Orthodox Christians that aroused the indignation of Greeks in the region and in Athens. Ilinden was read as a warning signal: without equally determined action on their own part, the whole region might soon come to be dominated by the Bulgarian Church (the Exarchate), by the Bulgarian language, and ultimately by the principality – not yet an independent state – of Bulgaria itself. The Athens government no more had the resources or the diplomatic leverage abroad to risk open intervention in Macedonia than it did in Crete. It had little stomach for a fight anyway. But under pressure from the press and prominent individuals, a Macedonian Committee was formed in Athens, early in 1904.

Under cover of the consulate in Salonica, serving Greek army officers were sent into the country as agents. Bands of irregulars, led by these officers, confronted the komitadjis, as their rivals, recruited and controlled by IMRO, were known. The commanders were answerable to the Macedonian Committee in Athens. Successive governments were always able to deny any control over them, when challenged by the Ottomans and the Great Powers: all this armed activity by Greeks in Macedonia was merely self-defence by the local population. And such was the extent of violence in the countryside that the claim, even though manifestly far from being the whole truth, proved durable over several years.

Today the building near the seafront in Salonica that used to house the Greek consulate is home to the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. This is the name by which the conflict has ever since been known in Greek. It was an unofficial, undeclared, clandestine war. It had no defined beginning or end. Conventionally it is dated by the acute phase that began with the establishment of the Macedonian Committee in Athens in 1904 and ended in 1908. But smaller-scale hostilities had been going on for a decade before that, and would continue until the map of the entire region was changed irrevocably in 1912. The campaign was fought against adversaries who used exactly the same methods of intimidation, extortion, torture, assassination of rivals and tactical denunciations to the Ottoman authorities. Its objectives were limited. There could be no question, as there was in Crete, of Enosis, or annexing territory to Greece. Rather the aim of the insurgents was ‘to conquer the territory of the souls’ – meaning to instil so far as possible Greek ‘national consciousness’ among the local peasants, who persisted in identifying themselves by their religion, not language or nationality.¹²

Since no other methods were feasible, the Macedonian Struggle was also a vindication of the old guerrilla tactics that had been used to such devastating effect during the Revolution of the 1820s, and sporadically in conflicts beyond the borders ever since. In a deliberate evocation of that resonant past, many of the volunteers dressed in the kilts, zouave jackets and crossed bandoliers, shepherd’s cloaks and heavy shoes, called tsarouchia, favoured by the mountaineers on the other side of the Pindos range – the ‘national’ costume that had become synonymous with the heroic deeds of the klefts and armed militias of old. This time the distinction was clearer, if never openly acknowledged, between the volunteer bandsman and the professional brigand. The first would still be drawing his Greek army pay. The second would be every bit as voracious for booty and cash retainers as his predecessors had been in the 1820s. Ever-present danger forced the two types of combatant to work closely together. The volunteers had grudgingly to learn from the local brigands the basics of survival in conditions that were often extreme. And the brigands resented having to take orders, especially when these involved being exposed to enemy fire – a hazard traditionally shunned in this type of warfare.¹³

The most famous of all the volunteers was also one of the shortest-lived in the field. Pavlos Melas was the son of a politician and was married to the sister of Ion Dragoumis, who was himself engaged in the ‘Struggle’ as a senior consular official in Macedonia. A dashing figure, and like his brother-in-law feted in Athenian society, Melas was placed in command of the first Greek band to enter western Macedonia, in February 1904. Eight months later, he was dead, ambushed by an Ottoman patrol that had mistaken his men for a group of Bulgarians they were hunting down. A photograph of the handsome captain in his guerrilla outfit, taken shortly before his death, became the subject of a much-reproduced oil painting. Orally composed, anonymous folk songs lamented his death in the style traditional for a hero. Ever since, in Greece, the name of Pavlos Melas has served as an emblem for the Macedonian Struggle. At the time both name and image helped draw new recruits to the cause. Today, his memory is perpetuated in the name of the municipality of present-day Salonica that for many decades housed an army camp named after him, and of the village where he died – Statista, near Kastoria, now called Melas.

Over the next few years, in Athens, hatred of Bulgarians and all things Bulgarian reached fever pitch. ‘Monsters spewed up by the Volga and out of hell’ is just one description preserved by the parliamentary record, from 1904. Newspapers had a field day: Bulgarians were ‘deceitful, savage, uncivilized, immoral, untamed by religion, like wild animals, ravening for blood’. Setting a tone that would soon become respectable in high literature too, one editorial in 1903 held that ‘The nation once described by Byzantine historians as polluted and hateful to God has remained just the same, down to our own times.’¹⁴ The best-known, and enduring, example of the trend in literature is the novel for children In the Time of the Bulgar-Slayer, by Penelope Delta. Published in 1911, this story takes its readers back almost a thousand years, to the victorious campaigns of the Byzantine emperor Basil II, who died in 1025 after having subdued much of the Balkans, earning in the process the sobriquet that gives the book its title. The ‘Bulgar-Slayer’ had already been recreated as an epic hero in verse by the great poet of the age, Kostis Palamas, in a poem written while the Macedonian Struggle was at its height.

By the time these literary works had brought the thousand-year-old ‘Bulgar-Slayer’ back to public consciousness in Athens, the most important event of the decade had already begun to transform the geopolitics of the entire region. This, too, took place in Macedonia. But it had nothing to do with the ethnic struggle going on there. It was in Monastir and Salonica that the revolution of the ‘Young Turks’ was first publicly proclaimed on 23 July 1908. Disaffected elements within the Ottoman army demanded the restoration of the abortive Constitution of 1876. Sultan Abdul Hamid quickly made the necessary tactical concession and by the next day the rejoicing had spread from Macedonia to the capital and throughout the empire.

In Salonica, Olympos Square on the waterfront by the harbour, with its open views across the Thermaic Gulf towards the home of the ancient gods, after which it had been named, overnight became Plateia Eleftherias, or Liberty Square. Although much changed in appearance, the square still bears this name today, even if few among the crowds that daily pass through it probably make the association with the liberty promised by the Young Turks in 1908. It was there, a few days after the revolution, that Enver Pasha, one of the leaders, addressed a delirious crowd with these astonishing words, if a contemporary French eyewitness is to be believed:

Citizens! Today the arbitrary ruler is gone, bad government no longer exists. We are all brothers. There are no longer Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Jews, Muslims – under the same blue sky we are all equal, we are all proud to be Ottomans!¹⁵

Elections were announced throughout the empire, and duly took place a few months later. Once again Ottoman Greeks took their places in an elected parliament in Constantinople. Even in strife-torn Macedonia the rival Bulgarian and Greek committees suspended hostilities. In Salonica, representatives of the two communities were seen side by side. No longer the ‘sick man of Europe’, the Ottoman Empire from now on was going to be different. The leaders of the ‘Young Turks’, men such as Enver Pasha, were indeed young – but the name of the movement in Turkish means actually not ‘young’ but ‘new’. The official name for the movement was ‘Committee for Union and Progress’. It was all about modernization.

It is worth pausing at this point to look at some of the ways that Greeks reacted at the time, both Ottoman and Greek subjects. Because of what happened later, most of these reactions have been relegated to footnotes in history, if not forgotten altogether. But for at least a few months in late 1908 and 1909, it really must have looked as though the entire political dynamics of the region had been reset.

Writing only three weeks after the Young Turk revolution, the Greek ambassador to Constantinople gave a cautious welcome to what he called ‘the cooperation of the two nations [i.e. Greeks and Turks], in freedom – that is to say, true equality of citizenship and respect for acquired rights and privileges’. But he also warned that the new spirit of ‘blood brotherhood’ might be a pretence, or only skin-deep. Real change – meaning presumably real benefit to the Greek community – would prove impossible if it turned out that the Young Turks were aiming to assimilate the Christian nationalities, ‘and especially Hellenism’, into a dominant ‘Turkism’.¹⁶

Not everyone was so guarded. From the most unlikely quarter came this, from Venizelos, writing in a Cretan newspaper in January 1909:

All of Hellenism … felt very deeply … that the success of the Young Turk movement has saved not only the Turkish State, but also Hellenism, from dismemberment and catastrophe … [T]he establishment of a constitutional regime in Turkey was, under a different form, the realization of the Great Idea.

No less passionate a nationalist than Venizelos, Dragoumis confided to his diary, at about the same time, ‘The Grand Idea is at an end.’ Dragoumis now saw the political future of Hellenism ‘in a state more restricted than Byzantium’. He went on:

The Turkish [Ottoman] state has the same capital city as Byzantium used to, and for as long as that state exists, the City [Constantinople] will be a Greek capital city also, especially now that Turkey has (or claims to have) a constitution.¹⁷

Dragoumis had served for two years in the embassy in Constantinople, from 1907 to 1909, and so had been there at the time of the revolution. Together with another veteran from the consular service in Macedonia, Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaïdis, during the next few years Dragoumis would support semi-official Greek efforts to find common ground with the Young Turk movement in a partnership against Bulgarian nationalism. The Constantinople Organization lasted from 1908 until 1912. During the same years, Greek deputies continued to participate actively in the newly reconstituted Ottoman parliament. Their aim, they said in a statement, was ‘to establish, along with other nationalities of our common fatherland [i.e. the Ottoman Empire], the Constitutional Ottoman State, participating in the same duties and rights and genuinely contributing to the strength and well-being of the State’.¹⁸ This new form of Ottomanism was particularly strong in Constantinople itself and in some nearby regions with large Greek Orthodox populations, such as the island of Lesbos, also known by the name of its capital, Mytilini. The lack of any apparent communal desire there for Enosis with Greece at this time is in marked contrast to other large islands farther south, such as Samos and Crete.¹⁹

As the century’s first decade moved towards its close, many Greeks must have been wondering whether the Grand Idea might not turn out to mean something quite different from what everyone had been supposing for more than half a century. It might not be necessary to fight at all. It was not just Greeks who thought this way. Foreign observers of Ottoman society in the early 1900s thought that, given ‘progress’ and the rule of law, the Christians of the empire already had the upper hand.²⁰ For the Greeks of the wider nation, beyond the Greek state, ‘Hellenic Ottomanism’ might yet turn out to be the answer. The state and the nation need not, after all, be collapsed into a single political entity. A Greek kingdom growing towards maturity, and a modernized, rejuvenated Ottoman Empire could live side by side. Was not this, in practice, what had mostly been going on ever since the start of the Tanzimat reforms in 1839?

From the perspective of today, it requires an effort of imagination to set aside all that we know of twentieth-century history and see those possible vistas as they must have appeared at the time. By the same token, it would have been hard for a contemporary observer to predict what the next few years would hold in store – for the Greek kingdom, for the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, or indeed for the empire itself.

CALLED TO ARMS

The first ominous signs appeared less than three months after the Young Turk revolution. On the empire’s fringes there were those ready to take advantage of the new regime. On 5 October 1908, Bulgaria declared full independence. Prince Ferdinand, from being nominally a vassal of the Sultan, became overnight ‘Tsar of all the Bulgarians’, a title clearly echoing that of George I of the Hellenes, and with much the same implications. Then the next day Austria announced the unilateral annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The two provinces had been under Austrian administration since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, while remaining formally part of the Ottoman Empire. These moves together provoked the first of a series of new ‘eastern crises’ that over the next few years would tear up that thirty-year-old treaty and pave the way for the First World War.

In Crete, the moment suddenly looked too good to miss. For Venizelos and the local Christian leadership, the Young Turks might be good for Greek interests in theory and somewhere else, but not on their own turf. The future of Crete lay with the Kingdom of Greece, they had never harboured any doubts about that. Within days of the Bulgarian declaration, the local administration in Crete once again declared Enosis with Greece. The capital, Chania, broke out in celebration. Modern assessments, and some made at the time, suggest that if the government in Athens had pressed the case it might have been able to annex Crete in 1908. But it was a hard calculation to make. The prime minister, Georgios Theotokis, of an old aristocratic family from Corfu, was cautious, and referred the matter to the guarantor powers. The status quo in Crete would last a few years longer.

All of these developments were damaging to Ottoman prestige, at a time when the grip on power of the new rulers within the empire was still fragile. Just how fragile was demonstrated a few months later. In April 1909 a counter-coup in Constantinople not only briefly overturned the Young Turk regime, it restored the full powers of the Sultan and announced a return to pre-1839 Sharia law. This would have been a reversal of the entire programme of modernization that had been going on for more than half a century. Ten days of violent confrontations in the capital ended with the Committee of Union and Progress back in control. This time the Sultan was deposed and replaced by a puppet figure. The leaders of the Young Turk revolution had consolidated their hold over the empire. But the events of April 1909 in Constantinople had shown for the first time the depth and breadth of opinion among the empire’s majority Muslim subjects, especially Turkish speakers. These were the people ‘left behind’ (in today’s parlance), and largely left out, by a process of reform that had always been driven by a desire to placate and ‘catch up’ with European ideas and European powers.

Over the weeks and months that followed, the Young Turk movement adapted its outlook to become more and more the champion of this dominant group. In less than two years the regime would become almost as authoritarian as its predecessors had been. At the same time it developed a new hard line in its dealings with the large Christian populations living both within and beyond its borders. ‘Ottomanism’ had not yet given way to the Turkish nationalism that would emerge a decade later. But, whether or not this had been the intention from the beginning, the misgivings of the Greek ambassador at the time of the 1908 revolution would soon prove justified. The ‘Ottomanism’ of the Young Turks was becoming increasingly identified with Islam and the Turkish language. It was a vicious circle: the more the Christian populations, inside and outside the empire, insisted on their own national rights and claims, the more the leaders of the Turkish-speaking Muslim majority reacted by pushing their own. And the more Turcophone and Islamist the governing party became, the more it was bound to alienate those of other languages and faiths, entrenching their nationalist, separatist identities still further.

In the meantime, voices in Greece were calling for their own version of renewal. In a series of editorials from October 1908 onwards, the outspoken editor of the Athens daily Acropolis, Vlasis Gavriilidis, called for what he called a ‘peaceful revolution’. It may have been as early as that same month that a group of junior army officers began meeting in secret in Athens, to hatch a conspiracy of their own, on the example of the Young Turks.²¹ Dissatisfaction with the failure to secure Crete gave impetus to these plans during the months that followed. Economic woes would turn out to be short-term, but were strongly felt at the time. Protesters were taking to the streets.

Responses at the highest level of government were curiously demoralized. Prime Minister Theotokis did his best to evade his responsibilities by offering to resign at the end of March 1909, and finally succeeded in doing so in July. By this time a new Cretan crisis was brewing. The last detachments of the international peacekeeping force were due to leave the island at the end of the month – with no real plan in place for how peace was to be maintained thereafter. A new attempt to declare Enosis was on the cards. And this time the recently restored government of the Young Turks would be unlikely to take it lying down. The leader of the opposition, Dimitrios Rallis, took several days to accept the king’s mandate to form a minority government, and then did so only on conditions. Even King George himself, quite uncharacteristically, seemed ready to give up. His popularity had not recovered after the defeat of 1897. His sons, who held prominent positions in the army, were being openly criticized. Feeling himself poorly served by his ministers, and despairing of support from the powers over Crete, the king confided to the British Minister in Athens his thoughts of abdicating – that he might take all his family and ‘just go and never come back’.²² In August, rumours of similar conversations within the palace were leaked to the press. By now the conspiracy in the army was an open secret. Not coincidentally, British warships once again appeared off the port of Piraeus. It was beginning to look like a re-run of the last days of King Otto. Nobody in Athens, it seemed, wanted to take responsibility. All that anyone could agree on was that things were in a mess.

Into this vacuum, in August 1909, stepped the junior officers of the Athens garrison. Their conspiracy had only really got going in July. Known as the Military League, it quickly emerged from the shadows, thanks to smart liaison work with the like-minded editor of a daily newspaper. The League’s demands for reform within the armed forces and the civil service were widely publicized, although its membership remained secret. It is doubtful whether the government, without a majority in parliament, could have carried through these reforms even if it had been willing to bow to pressure – which it was not.

The conspirators took advantage of a public holiday, the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin, to act. In the early hours of 28 August (or 15 August according to the calendar in use in Greece at the time), the greater part of the garrisons stationed in Athens marched out of the city and took up a position on a low hilltop among the foothills of Mount Hymettos, called Goudi. Today the area is home to several military hospitals and the Medical Faculty of the University of Athens. Then, it was a strategic spot, overlooking one of the main routes out of Athens towards the north and east. At Goudi the League set up an armed camp, in a show of strength some three thousand strong, including officers and men. Soon they were joined by a cavalry detachment from Kiphisia to the north. Before dawn, the League had delivered its ultimatum to the government.

Within hours, the Rallis government resigned and a new administration was sworn in, promising to address the demands of the military. It was not the first time in Greece that the army had forced a change of government, and it would not be the last. But Goudi was the first occasion when the military acted alone. It was a bloodless coup, and in its execution entirely successful. In these respects, it was similar to the Young Turk revolution. Its supporters would invariably dignify this one, too, with the name of a ‘revolution’. But the Military League had much shallower roots than the Committee for Union and Progress. Its demands were parochial by comparison. Most were about procedural matters within the armed forces. Those that touched on wider issues were so bland as to mean little.²³ By itself, the League achieved nothing more than the overthrow of a government whose democratic legitimacy was questionable and its replacement by another whose legitimacy was even less. It established a precedent that would be followed all too often throughout the decades that followed. Within a few months the movement had run out of steam. But not before it had engineered the one event that would prove to be its lasting legacy. It was at the invitation of the Military League that a new figure, and a whole new style of government, came to dominate the political life of the Greek kingdom.

Even today, the name and legacy of Eleftherios Venizelos are capable of arousing deep divisions in Greece. No Greek politician ever gained so much respect among the leaders of the Great Powers of his day. None, with the possible exception of Kapodistrias, ever divided opinions and loyalties so much among his own people. Love him or loathe him, Venizelos did more than anyone else to change the physical map of Greece for ever. But it was not just the map that was changed: minds and whole ways of thinking would never be the same again either. The consequences of those changes have still not fully bedded down, a century later. As a person, Venizelos remains inscrutable. He left hardly any diaries or private papers to give a clue to his thoughts and motivation as they developed. As a politician, he combined the diplomatic skills and patience of a Mavrokordatos with the popular appeal of a Kolettis or a Diligiannis. What his opponents have condemned as reckless, unprincipled opportunism, to others appears as the pragmatism of the consummate tactician. Then there is the hagiography: with almost religious devotion, Venizelos has been hailed as the messianic visionary, the redeemer of the nation whose deep-laid plans would have triumphed on every side, but for the envy of smaller-minded spirits. However one evaluates his contribution today, it is a fact that, for at least a generation, Greek society would become polarized between ‘Venizelists’ and ‘anti-Venizelists’.

One reason for this may be that, like Mavrokordatos and Kapodistrias before him, Venizelos was at once a Greek and an outsider. With the arrival of Venizelos from Crete, the wider, distant nation had taken over the running of the state. And not everyone liked it.

Even with the backing of the Military League and the reluctant acquiescence of King George, there was something crablike about Venizelos’s rise to power. A first visit to Athens to confer with officers of the League and politicians was supposed to be a private one, out of the public eye. In an interview published in The Times of London, Venizelos flatly denied what was in fact the truth: that he had been invited to Athens by the Military League to be canvassed as a future prime minister.²⁴ On that occasion, he stayed in Athens for only three weeks. But while he was there the next steps were all mapped out – and seemingly on his initiative. The only way to resolve the impasse that had led to the coup was by a thorough revision of the constitution. Until a new Constituent Assembly could be elected, a caretaker government would be formed. The Military League would disband in the meantime.

All this duly happened, but in slow motion. The elections to the Constituent Assembly, which would replace parliament for the duration, were delayed until August 1910. Venizelos stayed away – first in Crete, then on holiday in Switzerland. But his name had been included in the ballot for the district that included the capital, and in the event he topped the poll. The new assembly met for the first time on 14 September. Four days later, Venizelos disembarked from a specially chartered steamer at Piraeus. From there, he went straight to the centre of Athens to address a throng of some ten thousand people in Syntagma Square. The subject of this first public speech in Greece was the rather abstruse one of the precise terms of reference for the new assembly. Such was the power of his oratory and his personality that Venizelos easily carried the day. A month later, the new arrival from Crete was sworn in as prime minister of Greece.

It was a moot point whether the new premier could command a majority in an assembly that was divided fairly evenly between those who supported him and those who did not. A week after his appointment, Venizelos persuaded the king to grant him a dissolution. A new election was called, for what was now to be a ‘Revisionist National Assembly’, on 11 December. During the weeks before the election, two remarkable things happened: Venizelos established his own political party, and the three existing parties that among them had returned more than 50 per cent of the previous assembly decided to boycott the contest.

The result was a foregone conclusion. It has been termed a ‘constitutional coup’ and a ‘parliamentary dictatorship’.²⁵ Venizelos’s new Liberal Party was based closely on the model of the party of the same name that he had already led in Crete. In no time the rudiments of a party organization were set up all over the country. The Liberals brought to Greek politics for the first time the elements of a disciplined, organized party structure. Control was firmly exercised from the top. Venizelos was consolidating his power base in the country. On the opposite side, the electoral boycott by the existing parties was the first of several such fateful actions in Greek parliamentary politics – a tactic that has invariably proved self-defeating. Quite what the three party leaders hoped to achieve by their action is unclear. Technically, Venizelos had violated the Constitution of 1864 by asking for a dissolution, and the king by granting it. This was because a Constituent Assembly, unlike a normal parliament, could not be dissolved except by itself. But boycotting an election was never going to undo what had been done.

The election of 11 December 1910 swept Venizelos to power with an overwhelming majority. This gave him a mandate to oversee revision of the constitution and reform of anything else that the ‘Revisionist National Assembly’ took within its sights. Change was on the way. But it had not been done, quite, within the letter of the law.

The months that followed saw an unprecedented bustle of legislative activity. The revisions to the constitution were completed quickly. Mostly they were designed to streamline the business of government. Individual and civic rights were strengthened – but new provisions allowed for exceptional circumstances when these could be suspended. An innovation was that for the first time the notorious ‘language question’ became a matter for formal legislation. Venizelos himself was sympathetic to the reformers who were pushing for demotic, the spoken language, to be enshrined as the official language of the state. But, ever the pragmatist, in the face of entrenched opposition he allowed this article to go onto the statute book instead: ‘The official language of the state is that in which the constitution and the texts of Greek legislation are drawn up; all intervention leading to its corruption is prohibited.’²⁶ The formal split between demotic and katharevousa (the officialese of the constitution itself and the legal profession) would last until 1976 – a harbinger and perhaps a symptom of the much deeper split in Greek society that would be opened up by Venizelos’s initiatives a few years later, and would take as long to heal.

The revised constitution came into effect in June 1911. For the next nine months, the Revisionist Assembly continued to govern, now formally reconstituted as a regular parliament. During that time an astonishing 337 new laws were passed. Many of these, too, were about streamlining government. There were also social reforms. These included breaking up the huge landed estates in Thessaly, where the peasants who worked the land were still little more than serfs. Astonishingly, the country’s most agriculturally productive province, acquired in 1881, was still bringing no gain to the national economy thirty years later. Conditions in prisons and access to justice were improved. Trade unions were recognized and restrictions placed on the exploitation of women and children in the workplace.

Much of what was achieved during the first eighteen months after Venizelos came to power can be put down to his own huge investment of personal energy, charisma and sheer political competence. By the time a new parliamentary election was held in March 1912, the economy was in surplus – a minor miracle that remains to be fully explained. Money was at last available for military and civilian projects that went back to the time of Trikoupis in the 1880s. Military missions from Great Britain and France had arrived to overhaul the organization and equipment of the navy and the army respectively.

It is easy with the benefit of hindsight to put all this activity down to a long-term strategic vision, as though Venizelos could have foreseen the opportunities and the challenges that would emerge later in that same year, 1912. But nothing that Venizelos either did or proposed was as radical as the changes that Enver Pasha and the Young Turks were bringing about in the Ottoman Empire, to say nothing of the seismic shift that Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) would set in motion after the First World War. All Venizelos’s constitutional and legislative initiatives were carried out in the spirit of revision, as he himself had insisted in his first public speech in Athens in 1910. In modernizing the country’s infrastructure, economy and armed forces, so as to be ready to fight for the Grand Idea, he was doing neither more nor less than fulfilling the programme that had been laid down by Trikoupis more than three decades before. The achievement of Venizelos’s early years in power lay in streamlining the mechanisms for getting things done and then doing them. If Venizelos had a ‘vision’, it was the old one of the Grand Idea, which had been tarnished but not discarded after the defeat of 1897. And that vision, even if it had lost some of its appeal, was still not controversial, let alone divisive, in 1912, any more than it had been fifteen years earlier.

At the time of the parliamentary election in March that year, Greece was better equipped than ever, whether for peace or war. The ‘old’ parties, realizing their mistake in boycotting the last election, returned to the fold for this one. But they now stood no chance. Venizelos and the Liberals swept all before them. The new mandate was as great as before. And this time, no one could cast aspersions on its legitimacy.

By the summer of 1912, Greece was ready, even if no one yet knew exactly for what.

INTO BATTLE

On the external front, events had been moving rapidly since the last months of 1911. European colonial expansion into the continent of Africa had all but ended before the end of the previous century – there were few lands left to conquer. The Mediterranean coast of Africa and its hinterland had once upon a time all been part of the Ottoman Empire. The French had taken control of Algeria after 1830, the British of Egypt in 1882. The first decade of the new century saw Morocco divided between France and Spain. That left just one stretch of African coastline still in Ottoman hands – the provinces then known as Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, today as Libya. And there was one European power that had come late to the game. Outliers of the Ottoman Empire had been picked off with impunity in 1908. Now it was the turn of Italy to stake a claim, to that part of North Africa that conveniently was also the closest to its own shores.

War between Italy and the Ottoman Empire in North Africa began on 29 September 1911. The campaign in the African provinces did not go well for the Italians. So, early the next year they extended the sphere of their operations into the Aegean. The Dodecanese, the twelve islands closest to the southwestern tip of Anatolia, including Rhodes, with their overwhelmingly Greek Orthodox population, were unilaterally annexed. Italian occupation of these islands would last until the Second World War. Italian warships appeared off the Dardanelles. The ‘Ottoman endgame’, or ‘War of the Ottoman Succession’, had begun.²⁷

This was the background to a series of bilateral talks, many of them secret, among the rival Christian states of the Balkans. A formal pact was signed between Bulgaria and Serbia in March 1912. Using the correspondent of The Times as a backchannel, Venizelos began his own cautious overtures to the government in Sofia. With public opinion in Greece still gripped by the heroic figure of the Byzantine emperor Basil the ‘Bulgar-Slayer’, and with low-level guerrilla actions continuing against the Bulgarian komitadjis in Macedonia, it was a high-risk strategy. But the war with Italy was showing up, by the day, just how weak the Ottoman Empire might now be. The original inclusive spirit of the Young Turk movement had largely evaporated by this time. Greece signed a treaty of mutual support with Bulgaria on 30 May. Venizelos now turned his attention to reaching a similar understanding with Serbia.

On their own, these diplomatic moves were not enough to make war in the Balkans inevitable. But the Ottomans were under pressure on another front. In the empire’s provinces that bordered the Adriatic, it was the turn of Albanian speakers to demand independence and a nation state of their own. A sustained uprising against Ottoman rule had begun in January. The Christian states of the region had no reason to be sympathetic towards the Albanians. The territory claimed for a new Albania would be at the expense of Greece, Serbia and Montenegro. And the Albanian national movement was not based on a shared religion, as all of theirs had been, since Albanian speakers were fairly evenly divided among Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims. But just as had happened in 1821, when the revolt of Ali Pasha had given cover for the Greek insurgents of the Peloponnese, the action of the Albanians tied down numbers of Ottoman troops during 1912.

And then in Constantinople yet another coup d’état temporarily ousted the Young Turks from power. For several months, from July to October, the Ottoman capital was reduced to a state of ‘virtual civil war’.²⁸ Hostilities with Italy and with the Albanian insurgents ended in concessions by the Ottoman government in September. The empire’s weakness was evident for all to see. Even so, most of Europe seemed to be taken by surprise when the First Balkan War broke out. When it did, the immediate expectation was that the Ottomans would see off this threat, as they had so many others.

Montenegro declared war on the empire on 8 October 1912. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia followed ten days later. Much as they had attempted to do fifteen years before, two Greek armies struck northwards across the mountain passes, one into Macedonia from Thessaly, the other, in the west, into Epiros. The larger of the two forces, in Macedonia, was again commanded by Crown Prince Constantine. At the same time, the Greek fleet quickly gained control throughout the northern and eastern Aegean. Between October and December, one by one the islands of Samos, Lemnos, Thasos, Samothrace, Mytilini (Lesbos), Chios, Tenedos and Imbros raised the Greek flag. All but the last two of these would remain in Greek hands from that time on. At the battle of the Dardanelles, fought near the entrance to the straits on 16 December 1912, Admiral Pavlos Koundouriotis, aboard the ‘dreadnought’ Averof, led the small Greek fleet to victory and imposed a blockade on the approach to Constantinople from the Mediterranean.

A simultaneous thrust by Bulgarian land forces was directed southeastwards towards Adrianople (Edirne) and Constantinople. As there was little, if any, coordination among the high commands, this undoubtedly helped the Greeks win their greatest prize in Macedonia. On 8 November the army led by Prince Constantine entered Salonica, beating a Bulgarian division by only a matter of hours. Four days later, on a bitterly cold day of rain, the Crown Prince was joined by his father, King George, and Venizelos. The three rode in triumph through streets decked out with blue and white Greek flags, to the cheers of the city’s Greek inhabitants. True, they made up only about a third of the population, and the rest probably stayed indoors out of the rain. But for Greece and for most Greeks it was their greatest victory since the glory days of the Revolution. The Greek state had acquired its second great city, later to be dubbed its ‘co-capital’. This was what the Grand Idea had always been about – and until now had so often failed to deliver.

By the end of November the Balkan allies were winning on almost all fronts. Only the Greeks, bogged down for the time being outside Ioannina, the chief town of Epiros, refused to join a general armistice that was agreed at the beginning of December. Representatives of the belligerents and of the Great Powers were called to London for a peace conference. Not to be left out, even though his country had not laid down its arms, Venizelos took the train from Salonica to Paris and arrived in London on 12 December. It was to be expected that once again the future of Greece would be determined in one or more of the capitals of the Great Powers. This was what had always happened until now. This time, Venizelos was determined to be there in person. He was a natural negotiator. He would be in his element.

In the event, things turned out rather differently. The first round of talks, in December 1912 and January 1913, was fractious from the beginning. Negotiations were fatally derailed on 23 January when in Constantinople the ousted Young Turks took back control in a bloody counter-coup and immediately repudiated the peace terms that had just been handed down from London. Venizelos took this as his cue to head for home. What he took back with him were not terms for peace, but something potentially even more enticing and more far-reaching. Within days of his arrival in London, Venizelos had been introduced to David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, later to become prime minister, and to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. A series of private meetings had mapped out the possibility of a future ‘entente’ with Britain, and perhaps also with France. It was the fullest version yet of the kind of alliance that Mavrokordatos had first proposed to Foreign Secretary Canning almost a hundred years before. And this time, here was the democratically elected prime minister of Greece himself to put the case in person. Lloyd George was impressed. ‘He is a big man, a very big man,’ he is reported to have said, the day after Venizelos left London. Much of Venizelos’s foreign policy over the next ten years would be grounded in the prospects held out in these formative discussions in London, in the shadow of the abortive Balkan peace conference.²⁹

In the meantime, all this was to be kept top secret. It was only with difficulty that Venizelos extracted permission to share what had been discussed in London with his king. On his way back to Athens he stopped off in Salonica just long enough to do so. It would prove to be his last opportunity. Less than two months afterwards, on 18 March, King George set out for his usual afternoon walk to the city’s most famous landmark, the White Tower on the seafront. He was accompanied by a single aide. At a discreet distance followed two Cretan gendarmes. He was returning when a young man got up from the bench where he had been sitting, just after the king had passed, and shot him at close range in the back. The king died instantly, six months short of the jubilee that would have celebrated fifty years of his reign. No political motive for the assassination has ever been proved, though plenty were suspected. The assassin, Alexandros Schinas, was officially described as a ‘dipsomaniac’ and a vagrant, and died shortly afterwards in police custody.

King George had lived to see the country that he ruled more than double its size and population. The Ionian islands had been added to Greece in the first year of his reign. Less than a fortnight before his death, Greek troops had finally entered Ioannina, on 6 March 1913, bringing to an end the triumphant successes of the First Balkan War. Peace had not yet brought stable frontiers. But by far the greatest expansion of the Greek state that ever took place, bringing it very nearly to its present extent, had been achieved during the reign of the former Danish prince who had reinvented himself as King George I of the Hellenes.

How much of his briefing from London Venizelos ever felt himself empowered to share with King George’s successor, who now came to the throne, we may never know for sure.³⁰

The war in the Balkans had been won decisively by the Christian states. But for the first time in the history of the region there was to be no lasting peace settlement imposed from above by the European powers. They did try nevertheless. In parallel with the conference that Venizelos had attended in London, in December 1912 and January 1913, the ‘London Ambassadors’ Conference’ brought together the representatives of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy. Their remit was to revise the terms of the previous settlement, which had been worked out at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, so as to fit the new realities of the Balkans. The best they could do was to lay down terms for the exhausted belligerents, more or less in line with the military situation on the ground. The Treaty of London, signed on 30 May 1913, was one of the very last acts of what remained of the ‘Concert of Europe’.

It was also one of the least effective. Even before the treaty was signed, the victorious Balkan states were already at loggerheads. Bulgaria had gained an Aegean coastline in Thrace and territory that brought its frontier to just west of Constantinople, but lost out in Macedonia, which was mostly partitioned between Serbia and Greece. On the same day that the treaty was signed, a new government took power in Sofia. Venizelos in the meantime had signed a bilateral treaty with Serbia. The stage was set for the Second Balkan War to begin.

Bulgaria went into action first, at the end of June 1913, with simultaneous attacks on Greek and Serbian forces in Macedonia. This Second Balkan War was shorter, and even messier, than the first. Greece and Serbia were fighting to keep the Bulgarians out of Macedonia. Bulgaria was the enemy, and anyone could join in. The Young Turks, once again led by Enver Pasha, seized their opportunity and clawed back Eastern Thrace, including Edirne, from the Bulgarians. Romania, having taken no part in the First Balkan War, now grabbed a share of Bulgarian territory along the river Danube.³¹

It was all over quickly. Hostilities ended on 30 July, just over a month after they had begun. The Romanian capital was chosen as the place to settle the terms of peace. The Treaty of Bucharest was signed by the delegates of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania on 10 August. Some of them seem to have hoped that the Great Powers would intervene to revise the treaty in their favour. But the divisions among the powers were almost as great as among the regional rivals. And so, for one of the few occasions in the history of the region, the map of southeastern Europe was redrawn by the Balkan states themselves. A separate Treaty of Athens, signed between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in November, brought Crete at last within the kingdom. Greece had now increased its land area by 68 per cent. In less than a year the country’s population had increased from 2.7 to 4.8 million.

By the time these treaties were signed, Greece had a new monarch. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, standing a head taller than most of his troops, Constantine had acquitted himself well as commander-in-chief. His failures of 1897 could at last be forgotten and forgiven. Forty-four years old when he came to the throne, Constantine was more than twice the age that either of his predecessors had been on their accession. He had political and military experience behind him. Already related, through his parents, to the royal families of Great Britain and Russia, he was married to the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. If dynastic relations still meant anything in the unpredictable world of European politics, King Constantine brought to his role the widest and deepest connections with the royal houses of the Great Powers of any Greek monarch so far.

Greece had triumphed in war. The king was secure upon his throne. In Venizelos he had a prime minister with a rock-solid parliamentary majority, ruling under a newly revamped, modernized constitution. The king had proved his worth in the field, Venizelos in diplomacy and statesmanship. Together they had steered the Greek state to victory. What had seemed scarcely conceivable only a few years before was now entering into the history books. The Ottoman presence had been rolled back out of Europe. The Greek state had reached out to embrace the far-flung nation. How much more would it take to turn the Grand Idea into political reality at last?