7
The Self Divided
1913–1923
The human cost of the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, on all sides, has ever since been overshadowed by the far greater destruction of life caused by the global conflict that was soon to follow. But these wars had an even more devastating, and longer-lasting, impact on the civilian populations of the regions where they were fought, and sometimes far beyond. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were permanently displaced from Europe. Christians, too, in huge numbers were forced from their homes because they spoke the wrong language and used the wrong form of the liturgy in church. Many thousands of those were never able to return either.
Muslim refugees began to crowd into the Ottoman capital, Constantinople. For a time they seemed to threaten public order. Encouraged to move on, many of them ended up in the countryside of western Anatolia, which happened to be the area with the greatest concentration of Greek-speaking Orthodox communities. Within a year, in a domino effect, all along the Aegean seaboard of Anatolia, Muslims who had fled from the Balkans as refugees were turning on the Greek inhabitants, in revenge for the losses they had suffered themselves, and often with the connivance of the local Ottoman authorities. A new wave of emigration began, as whole Greek towns and villages were razed. During the first half of 1914 thousands of Anatolian Greeks abandoned their homes to seek refuge in Greece.
Of course, not all the Muslims of southeast Europe were able to flee, or perhaps wanted to. By the time the Treaty of Bucharest was signed, Greece had acquired a Muslim population of some 350,000. Before 1912 the only significant Muslim minority in the Greek state had been concentrated in Thessaly, incorporated in 1881. Now Muslims made up not far short of 10 per cent of the state’s newly increased population. And it was not only Muslims who suddenly found themselves nationals of a country they had not chosen, and to which they had no natural allegiance. Many Christian families who spoke a Slavic language, if they did not migrate to Serbia or Bulgaria, found themselves in a different kind of minority status – one that would store up problems for later. Others spoke Albanian or Wallachian, rather than Greek. Then there was the sixty-thousand-strong Jewish community of Salonica, most of whom spoke the Spanish dialect known as Ladino or Judaeo-Spanish. How were all these new citizens to be assimilated?
Almost at once, people began to speak of ‘Old Greece’, meaning the state within its pre-1912 frontiers, and the ‘New Lands’ that had been added since. To some extent, and in certain contexts, these terms can still be heard today. Once the euphoria of victory had begun to wear off, officials and soldiers sent to serve in the New Lands sometimes displayed a shockingly colonialist mentality towards their newly acquired fellow citizens. A senior army officer with an upper-class Athenian background wrote home from Salonica in May 1913: ‘How can one like a city with this cosmopolitan society, nine-tenths of it Jews. It has nothing Greek about it, nor European. It has nothing at all.’1
At the same time, more than two million Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians remained outside the borders of the state. There were communities in Romania, Bulgaria and newly emerging Albania that now found themselves in the position of endangered minorities. But by far the greatest number were to be found in the Ottoman Empire. There, the attitude of the Young Turk government had hardened still further. The Young Turks had already established the principle of an exchange of minority populations in their separate treaty with Bulgaria at the end of 1913. Venizelos was obliged to consider similar proposals for the Greeks the following year.
It was a highly volatile situation. If a third Balkan war were to break out, anything could happen. And then, on 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, a Serbian nationalist called Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot that killed the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Time and again in recent years a crisis in the Balkans had threatened to upset the ever more fragile balance of power in the whole of Europe. This time it did. A month after the assassination, on 28 July, the empire of Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia. Within days, this third Balkan war had escalated to become the ‘Great War’, the ‘war to end all wars’.
TAKING SIDES
The outbreak of war pitted the Great Powers of the European continent against one another. It was the outcome that almost exactly a century of concerted diplomacy had been designed to prevent. During the first days of August 1914, Europe split into two great alliances, each determined on the annihilation of the other. On one side was the Triple Entente, consisting of the empires of Great Britain, France and Russia; on the other the Central Powers, namely, the German Reich and the empire of Austria-Hungary.
Like it or not, there was little chance that Greece would be untouched. For the Greek government the choice lay between seizing an opportunity and minimizing a threat. Both were huge, and existential, choices. In a clash of giant empires, a small state such as Greece, even doubled in size as it was, could easily be snuffed out.
It came down to three choices. Few in Greece favoured an alignment with the Central Powers. Even if there had been strong ideological reasons or compelling grounds of self-interest for wishing to, the simple realities of geopolitics ruled out that course. As King Constantine explained candidly to his brother-in-law, the German Kaiser, just after the outbreak of war, ‘the Mediterranean is at the mercy of the united fleets of England and France’; Greek shipping, Greek islands and Greek ports would face annihilation.2 That reduced the options to two: either to enter the war on the side of the Entente or to remain neutral. There were perfectly good, rational grounds for either course. The trouble was, how to choose between them?
In favour of the Entente were both geography and historical ties. Russia had not been much of a friend to Greece of late, but all three members of the alliance just happened to be the same powers that had signed the Greek state into existence almost a century before. Once the Ottoman Empire came in on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914, suddenly the biggest geopolitical forces on the continent were lined up in a way that Greeks had been dreaming of ever since the days of the Friendly Society, in the run-up to the 1821 Revolution. It was exactly this that had failed to happen in the 1850s, when two of the country’s ‘protecting powers’ had ganged up on the third, and imposed neutrality on Greece by force. Now that all three were aligned, and the traditional enemy in the opposite camp, why would a Greek government hold back from joining them? It was the very thing that Otto and the political leaders of his day had most longed to do.
Victory by the Entente would surely bring about the long-anticipated dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The ‘Eastern Question’ would be solved at a stroke – and in just the way that Mavrokordatos had first boldly proposed to the British Foreign Secretary of his day, George Canning, as long ago as 1823. The Russians could be expected to help themselves to Constantinople, so the most cherished prize of all would probably still be out of reach. But David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, in their meetings with Venizelos in London at the end of 1912, had held out the prospect of other gains in Anatolia, not least an enclave that would include the city of Smyrna. Smyrna at the time had the largest concentration of Greeks of any city in the world. The Balkan wars had gifted Greece with control of almost the entire Aegean, including the largest of the islands close to the Anatolian coast: Lesbos, Chios and Samos. To gain a foothold on the mainland was not necessarily an unrealistic ambition. Building on the successes of the two Balkan wars, to fight alongside the Entente would bring a triumphant conclusion to the work of the Revolution that had begun in 1821.
There would be defensive advantages too. Of the other Balkan states, only Serbia was so far involved in the war – and under attack by Austria. Bulgaria, Romania and Montenegro were neutral, Albania not yet fully recognized as a state. Whatever Bulgaria did would be crucial. The sea-based power of the Entente would probably be a better protection against Bulgarian designs on Salonica than any pressure the Central Powers could bring to bear. And there was another aspect to the role of the Entente as ‘protecting powers’. These potential allies had a proven track record of violating Greek sovereignty in the name of the original treaty of guarantee. Greek ports had been blockaded no fewer than three times in the previous century: in 1850, from 1854 to 1857, and again in 1886. This consideration seems not to have figured in initial Greek discussions about policy, but perhaps it should have. It would not have been for the most high-minded of motives, but there would have been a certain political logic in siding voluntarily with the Entente rather than risk the country being hijacked by those powers and forced into hostilities against its will.
The case for neutrality was equally rational, and a good deal simpler. A country the size of Greece, with its limited military strength, could hardly hope to influence the outcome of a European war. To commit to one side would make the Greek people hostage to forces and events they would never be in a position to control. Why risk everything that had been achieved in almost a century for future promises that depended on the outcome of an uncertain conflict, were vague and in any case might never be delivered? In the best case, full, legal neutrality ought to guarantee the integrity of the state’s newly established borders, whatever the fallout might be beyond them, once the war was over. In the worst case (although this scenario would only begin to emerge later), some of the recent gains might have to be traded – but there could surely be no risk to the kingdom within its pre-1912 borders? And then there were the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. Greek neutrality would save them from becoming hostages in their own homes. Greek lives, Greek property, Greek well-being, at home and abroad, would all be preserved. The terrible human cost of war would be avoided. After all, unlike Serbia or Belgium, Greece was not directly threatened by any of the Central Powers.
It was an impossible choice. The story of Greece during the First World War, and what has been euphemistically known ever since as the ‘National Schism’ (with capital letters) is too often reduced to the personal rivalry between two men: Venizelos, the elected head of government, and King Constantine, the crowned head of state. Personal chemistry and the obstinacy of charismatic individuals certainly played their part, just as they had done in the civil conflicts of 1823 and 1824, during the Revolution. Then, too, there had been a wider war going on, and then, too, the country had split apart. But just as in those internal conflicts of the 1820s, the ‘Schism’ was not only about individuals and those who followed them. It was not just a tussle over sovereignty or the right to rule. It was not, fundamentally, even about rational decision-making – because both decisions were based on perfectly rational foundations, even if the means used to try to impose them were anything but. It was the very nature of the choice that was bound to split Greece apart – because the war itself had split apart the European continent, and with it European civilization. Greece, created in the particular circumstances of the 1820s and nurtured as it had been ever since, could not help but be a microcosm of that riven continent and that civilization divided against itself.
It was no accident that among those who had the highest responsibility for making the decision, some had close personal and professional links to one side or the other of the European divide. Venizelos had cut his diplomatic teeth in Crete dealing with the guarantor powers during the island’s fifteen-year period of autonomy. Those powers were Britain, France, Russia and Italy. Venizelos’s first foreign language was French. His first visit to London had brought him close to Lloyd George and Churchill. Venizelos was an islander through and through. His geopolitics were based on the sea. He thought as they did.
On the other side, King Constantine was married to the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. He had been trained at the German Military Academy, and had a profound respect for German military methods. Chief of his General Staff, and therefore one of his leading advisers, was General Ioannis Metaxas, a capable officer who had undergone the same training and come out of it with similar views. Venizelos’s foreign minister at the start of the war, Georgios Streit, was himself descended from a German family that had come to Greece with King Otto, and he had studied law in Germany. All of these men were fluent in German. They felt at home in a German environment. They sincerely believed that the war would be won by the German military machine.
This did not make these men any the less ‘patriotic’, as would be claimed. They were all of them part of a Greek elite that had grown up in a kingdom shaped by the Revolution, by Great Power involvement in it and by the formative role of German nineteenth-century philhellenism. It was in the nature of the modern Greek kingdom for its elites to be plugged into all the major languages and cultures of Europe – which were now fatally at war with one another. It was as much a symptom as a cause of the divisions that followed, that each side conversed more easily and more frankly with the diplomatic representatives of one or other of the warring powers than they did with each other.
But there was a deeper cause of division. All along, hidden beneath the surface of the remarkable unanimity of the previous half-century, the old fault line from the 1820s had not gone away. Then, it had been between rival concepts of what it meant to be free. Now, after almost a hundred years of a free Greek state, it was about what it meant to be Greek. For the one side, what mattered above all else was to liberate the nation. For the other, it was to preserve the state. And from 1915 until 1922, Greece’s own microcosm of the First World War would be fought between those who viscerally identified with each of these two incompatible choices.
THE FAULT LINE REOPENS
In August 1914 the agreed policy of the Greek government was for neutrality. It was Venizelos who broke ranks first. On 18 August, less than three weeks into the war, he made an offer to each of the Entente ministers in Athens: Greece would join with them if invited. At the time, while the Ottoman Empire and most of the Balkan countries remained neutral, none of the Allies was enthusiastic about opening a new front in southeast Europe. The overture was politely rebuffed. But once the Ottoman Empire had come into the war on the side of the Central Powers in November, military planners in the Entente capitals began to think again. Would Greece, after all, be willing to come to the aid of Serbia, the British Minister asked Venizelos? If it was solely to fight against the Austrians, then no, replied Venizelos. But the Greek minority in the Ottoman Empire was coming under ever greater pressure. If the empire were to be attacked, and dismembered after the war, the future liberation of this population might be worth some sacrifices in the Balkans. On this basis, the Entente then put a formal offer to Greece on 24 January 1915.
This offer brought Venizelos into direct conflict with the king and the General Staff. At the time they were horrified at the idea of giving up any territory to Bulgaria (still neutral) in return for much bigger but possibly indefensible gains in Anatolia in future. This scepticism seems justifiable – though it is one of the ironies of the ‘Schism’ that the time would come when King Constantine and the same advisers would be content to surrender even more of Macedonia, once Bulgaria had joined the Central Powers, in their determination to frustrate Venizelos’s plans.
Then in February came the start of the Dardanelles campaign. Would Greece send divisions to Gallipoli, to support the Allied landings? Venizelos was all for it. For a time, even the king and his advisers were tempted. Although he had been crowned ‘Constantine I of the Hellenes’, the king enjoyed the mystique that associated his name with that of the last emperor of Byzantium. Particularly in the army, where his popularity was greatest, it was common to refer to him reverently as ‘King Constantine XII’ – that is, of the Byzantine Empire. The objective of the Dardanelles campaign was to seize the Ottoman capital. Surely the emperor-in-waiting should be there, at the head of his troops, as stratilatis, or ‘victorious commander’, an old Byzantine title that his supporters had already begun adopting for Constantine?
In the event, it would prove to be a non-issue. The Gallipoli landings, as we know from hindsight, would end in ignominy, one of the most disastrous campaigns, for the Allies, of the entire war. And in any case Russia would soon veto any participation by Greece. ‘Tsargrad’ had already been promised to Tsar Nicholas II. But before any of these things could happen, on 6 March 1915 the king took the advice of his Chiefs of Staff and overruled his prime minister. Thwarted and furious, Venizelos submitted his resignation. At a press conference the next day, he declared, ‘with tears in his eyes’, ‘Tomorrow the Allies will be masters of the Dardanelles, and the day after of Constantinople; our flag will not participate in the liberation of the city of our dreams … [T]he harm is irreparable.’3
From this time onward, a proxy war began to be waged in the Athenian press. Numerically, newspapers were about equally divided between support for Venizelos and support for the king. The Venizelist press ramped up its rhetoric about liberating Constantinople, fulfilling the Grand Idea and abolishing tyranny in ‘lands utterly Hellenic’ in the Ottoman Empire. The other side adopted a more soothing tone, dampening expectations about the Grand Idea and reassuring its readers that the country had been saved from certain disaster thanks to the wise intervention of the monarch.4 The battle lines that from now on would define the ‘Schism’ were being drawn. At the same time King Constantine, ruling through a rapid succession of prime ministers, became in effect the leader of a political party. Around the banner of ‘anti-Venizelism’, the political survivors of the ‘old’ parties that had been sidelined after the coup of 1909 regrouped to form a new ‘Party of Nationalists’, under the leadership of a talented parliamentary orator, the ill-fated Dimitrios Gounaris.
Venizelos was soon back. On 13 June 1915 his Liberal Party won the first election that had been held for three years – with a reduced majority, to be sure, but still with a convincing mandate to govern. The king’s illness during that summer was perhaps more serious than was given out at the time. It appears that his health never really recovered. Even once he was well enough to swear in the new government, an event that had to be delayed until the end of August, Constantine’s reluctance to work once more with Venizelos was palpable. Within days he was confiding to the German Minister in Athens his frustration with a man ‘who as late as yesterday declared that he was … convinced as firmly as a rock of the final victory of the Entente’.5 The king was just as convinced of the opposite. He had no intention of bringing his country into the war. But he did believe sincerely in the superiority of German arms. Cooperation with Venizelos would surely be impossible. And so it proved.
When Bulgaria mobilized its forces a few weeks later, on 21 September, it was immediately apparent that Greece’s old Balkan adversary was preparing to enter the war and join with the Central Powers. Greece responded with mobilization of its own. This was an uncontroversial precaution. The Bulgarians were known still to have designs on regaining the Aegean coastline that they had won in the First Balkan War and lost in the Second, as well as on Salonica, which had so nearly become theirs in 1912. The priority of the Entente powers was quite different. For them, the entry of Bulgaria into the war presented a new threat to Serbia, which had so far managed to withstand repeated onslaughts by the much more powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire.
At once, and once again without consultation, Venizelos made an offer to the British and French: Greek troops would be available to help defend Serbia if the Bulgarians were to attack. But the king, not the prime minister, was commander-in-chief. Within twenty-fours Venizelos had been forced to rescind his offer. He took his case to parliament. On 4 October 1915, the day that Bulgaria formally declared war against the Entente (though not against Greece), Venizelos won a vote of confidence in the chamber. But the king would not be overruled by parliament either. Ignoring the principle of the ‘declared majority’, he now dismissed his prime minister.
For the Entente, the overriding concern was the defence of Serbia, which during the next few weeks came under simultaneous attack by Austria from the north and by Bulgaria from the east. King Constantine may have thought himself well rid of Venizelos, as he boasted in a private telegram to Berlin. But he could do nothing to prevent the landing of thousands of British, French and colonial troops at Salonica, beginning in October 1915, under the overall command of the French general Maurice-Paul Sarrail. Meanwhile, in a last-ditch attempt to match coercion with inducement, in October Great Britain made a formal offer to the Greek government of sovereignty over Cyprus if Greece would join the Entente. Not even this was enough to win over either Constantine or the minority government that had been sworn in after the forced resignation of Venizelos. So the British and French settled for coercion pure and simple. They proceeded to occupy islands and strategic positions all over Greece. These included Souda Bay in Crete, the fortress of Karabournou that guards the entrance by sea to Salonica, and the whole of Corfu, in due course to house the army and exiled government of the defeated Serbs. Lemnos, in the northern Aegean, became the home to a new British naval base established at Moudros. All of these actions took place in defiance of the will of the Greek government, and in flagrant violation of the country’s declared neutrality.
By this time, King Constantine had been obliged to call a new parliamentary election, since his government had lost a vote of confidence. The election took place on 19 December 1915. According to Venizelos and his supporters, this was unconstitutional because his party still enjoyed a majority and his policy had been upheld by the chamber as recently as October. Also, an election carried out under conditions of general mobilization could not be a fair one. It was an unfortunate irony that Venizelos had himself come to power through a similar tactic on the part of Constantine’s predecessor, King George, in 1910. Even more unfortunate was Venizelos’s decision to repeat the response of the offended parties then: to boycott the election. It is true that participation in the election of 19 December was much lower than it had been six months previously. But it is impossible to know whether this was because voters (who had to be male) were absent serving with their army units, or actively heeded the Liberal call for a boycott. In any case, the result was the immolation of Venizelos’s party as a parliamentary force. Whether this was the intention or not, it was inevitable that the action from now on would have to be conducted outside parliament.
During the first six months of 1916, tensions continued to rise. The flashpoint came at the end of May. By this time, the Serbs had been defeated by Austria and Bulgaria and their country overrun. The remnants of the Serbian army had been first evacuated to the safety of Corfu, then brought by sea to Salonica to regroup alongside the French and British forces already there. The ‘Macedonian Front’, as it was becoming known, had become even broader, with the arrival of reinforcements from Italy (now a belligerent on the side of the Entente) and from Russia. A new corps made up of Greek volunteers, mostly recruited from the ‘New Lands’, brought the number of Allied forces on the front to six. Officially, Greece was still neutral, but still also fully mobilized for war. From the point of view of the Entente, the armed forces of the Greek state represented a potential threat to their rear. On the other hand, as seen by the Central Powers (particularly Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria), the neutrality that the Greek government continued ever more desperately to protest was fast becoming a bad joke, since in their eyes that government had lost control of strategic parts of its territory to the enemy.
At the end of May 1916, it was the turn of the Germans to make demands. The Greek frontier fortress of Rupel must be surrendered to Germany’s ally, Bulgaria. When the king’s government complied – to the consternation of the Venizelists, who could do nothing to stop it – the Entente powers stepped in with a show of British and French naval force close to Athens. A diplomatic ‘Note’ delivered by the representatives of Great Britain and France on 21 June demanded that the Greek army be disbanded at once, and the government itself resign, in favour of a ‘non-political’ one that would give the Allies a free hand. This was a blatant intervention in the internal affairs of the country. To justify it, the text of the ‘Note’ invoked the rights of the ‘protecting powers’ that went back to the treaty of guarantee for Greece in 1832, and were supposedly enshrined in the Constitution of 1864. King Constantine had no choice but to comply.
This intervention by the Entente powers did more than anything else that had happened so far to swing Greek public opinion against them. That meant also against Venizelos, and behind the king and his government. It only made matters worse when Venizelos expressed in a telegram to the prime minister of France his gratitude that ‘the Protecting Powers have acted like parents in the fullness of their rights’.6 King Constantine’s boast to the Kaiser at being rid of his prime minister had at least been expressed in private. But Venizelos’s telegram was leaked to the press.
The ‘Note’ had been meant to remove the threat to the Entente forces from their rear, by demobilizing the Greek army. But an unintended consequence for Greece was to turn loose upon the country thousands of armed men fiercely loyal to their commander-in-chief, the king, and now subject to no official control or discipline. For almost a year the ‘Reservists’, as they were called, became a byword for violence and terror. The establishment of a rival ‘National Reservists League’, loyal to Venizelos, was the clearest sign yet that what was beginning was nothing less than a civil war.
In August the imminent entry of Romania into the war on the side of the Entente changed the balance of forces on the Macedonian Front. Fighting began in earnest between General Sarrail’s forces and those of Bulgaria, Austria and Germany. Over the next few months the French, the British and the regrouped remnants of the Serbian army, with their other allies, made modest gains in western Macedonia. At the same time Bulgaria proceeded to annex the eastern part of the region unopposed, its forces uprooting the Greek-speaking population as they went. In early September the strategic town of Kavala surrendered, along with an entire Greek division that was supposed to be defending it. ‘Neutral’ Greece was being carved up between the two sides in the European war, while its own army had just been stood down and the country’s leaders were at each other’s throats.
On 27 August 1916, Venizelos addressed a mass demonstration in the centre of Athens. He still offered cooperation with the king, who he claimed had been led astray by his General Staff. But he also hinted plainly at other measures. Two days later it became apparent what this might mean. In Salonica, officers of the Greek divisions stationed there, members of a recently formed ‘Committee for National Defence’, staged a show of strength and repudiated their allegiance to the king and the government in Athens. This action is often described as a coup d’état, though the officers were in no position to set up their own ‘state’. They carried the day only thanks to active support from General Sarrail. It was far from being a popular uprising, and of course it was condemned as the highest form of treason in Athens.
This was Venizelos’s moment. But even now he hesitated to act. Finally, on 25 September, he took ship for Crete, from where he had started out. There, outside the capital, Chania, in the tradition of that island’s century of revolutions, Venizelos staged a demonstration in arms, and announced a new ‘Provisional Government of the Kingdom of Greece’. A proclamation addressed ‘the Nation, which is called, in the absence of the State, to answer a national emergency’, and explained: ‘Whereas the State has betrayed its obligations, it remains to the Nation to act in order to achieve the task assigned to the State.’7 From now on, and to some extent for decades afterwards, the ‘Schism’ would lie between ‘Old Greece’ – the kingdom as it had been before 1912 – and the ‘New Lands’ acquired during the Balkan wars.
NATION VERSUS STATE
From Crete, Venizelos made his way through the islands to Salonica. Greece’s second, newly acquired city was to become the seat of the Provisional Government. For the next eight months Greece would have two governments, one in Athens, the other in Salonica. It was a re-run of what had happened in 1823 and 1824. And just as had happened then, each government denounced the other as illegitimate. The Provisional Government of Salonica declared war against the Central Powers in November, whereas the ‘official’ government in Athens remained neutral. In December 1916, from Salonica the king was declared to be deposed, while in Athens he reigned and the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece carried out the anathema of Venizelos, excommunicating him from the Church and burying his effigy under thousands of stones ritually thrown by loyal citizens.
Again, just as had happened in the 1820s, the forces of one government took the field against those of the other. At the beginning of November the town of Katerini in Macedonia, near the former border with Old Greece, was captured by National Defence forces after an armed skirmish. Only French intervention to establish a demilitarized zone along the old frontier prevented many more such actions. Then at the beginning of December, civil war came to the streets of Athens. Because the calendar in use in Greece at the time was thirteen days behind the Western one, the episode has ever since been known in Greek as the ‘November events’. King Constantine’s government was effectively under siege from British, French and Italian ships anchored off Phaliro and Piraeus. Demobilization was not enough to satisfy the Entente powers. That part of Greece which had not joined with Venizelos and the Provisional Government in Salonica was not merely to be neutral, as it had always asserted its right to be, it must be neutralized.
On 1 December the commanders of the fleets gave an ultimatum for the government to hand over its arsenals and heavy munitions. What happened that day bears striking parallels with another confrontation in the centre of Athens, on almost the same date twenty-eight years later, that would mark the start of a new phase in the last and most violent of all Greece’s civil wars. Now, on Friday, 1 December 1916, a force of three thousand Allied troops, most of them French, landed to seize the contested depots and supplies. They found the disbanded Greek army waiting for them. The first shots were fired at around eleven in the morning. Fighting between Allied and Greek troops broke out at several places in the city. The foreigners were driven back. Shells fired from the Allied ships began to burst in the city centre.
King Constantine had won at best a pyrrhic victory. A compromise saw the Allied troops withdraw to their ships and only a part of the contested armaments surrendered, for the time being. But the events of that Friday became the signal for a rampage throughout the city against anyone and everyone suspected of Venizelist sympathies. Venizelos’s own house was attacked and looted. The Grande Bretagne Hotel was raked with gunfire. The mayor of Athens, the widely respected Greek-Egyptian cotton millionaire and benefactor Emmanuel Benakis, was dragged from his home by the enraged mob. His daughter, the novelist Penelope Delta (author of In the Time of the Bulgar-Slayer), was convinced they were taking him to the Ilissos river to lynch him, as had apparently already happened to others. Next day she went to the city’s prison, ‘not knowing whether we would find him alive’ – though in due course he would be released unharmed.8 The arrested Venizelists were accused of high treason. Others were murdered or beaten up, their property ransacked. An official report published in Paris two years later put the number of dead during two days of violence at thirty-five, with almost a thousand imprisoned. The printing presses of Venizelist newspapers were destroyed, their editors were among those jailed. Unable to hit back at the ‘protecting powers’ that had invaded their capital, the mob and the Reservists took their revenge on their own people. Although no evidence was ever found to corroborate this, it was claimed that the Venizelists had been planning an uprising to coincide with the landing by the hated foreigners.
The actions of the Reservists during those two days, and continuing at a lower level for months afterwards, have been described by a respected academic historian writing a century later as ‘proto-fascist’ and a ‘pogrom’.9 A favourite target for the Reservists were refugees, often destitute, who had fled persecution in Anatolia for the safety of free Greece, and were now lumped together with the Venizelists. This was because support for Venizelos’s policies was highest in the newly acquired territories and among those groups who looked to him for the future liberation of their homelands. Many in the anti-Venizelist camp already despised these incomers from beyond the frontiers as ‘unknown faces, outsiders, refugees, Cretans’, ‘a rabble for hire’, ‘scoundrels’.10 So much for the Grand Idea and the unity of the nation.
The violence was not all on one side. Venizelos’s Provisional Government imposed martial law upon the areas it controlled. Pockets of resistance were ruthlessly crushed. Notorious cases were in the Chalkidiki peninsula near Salonica, and at the village of Apeiranthos on the island of Naxos, where women and children were among the victims. There were even disturbances in Venizelos’s native Crete and in Samos.
The ‘November events’ and their aftermath had the effect of polarizing Greece irreparably. Up to this point, the Allied powers had held back from formally recognizing the Provisional Government in Salonica. They did so now. At the same time they began to impose a tight blockade on Old Greece. To humiliation was added widespread starvation. There were reports of military supplies being looted by desperate citizens. The king’s government had almost no freedom for action left. Instead, all but abandoning the fig leaf of neutrality that was its only remaining rationale for existing, the king and his ministers seem to have placed their hopes on an offensive by the Germans and Bulgarians to dislodge the Provisional Government from Salonica – and presumably to hand most of Macedonia to Bulgaria if they had won. An old tactic was revived. Irregular volunteer fighters were sent over the border to destabilize the enemy, without the government being accountable. Only, this time, the ‘border’ was the demilitarized zone between Old Greece and the New Lands. The methods that had once been directed towards expanding the kingdom were now turned against the rival Greek government in the north.
In May 1917, Greek troops raised by the Provisional Government saw action for the first time on the Macedonian Front. By the following month their strength had risen to sixty thousand. As far as the internal affairs of Greece were concerned, the Entente powers now felt confident enough to impose their will upon the whole of the divided country. Once again the key decision was taken in London. A conference held there at the end of May determined that King Constantine must be deposed, by force if necessary. The demand was made, once again, in the name of the ‘protecting powers’. The king left Greece, with his immediate family, on 15 June. He had not formally abdicated. With the approval of the Allies, his place on the throne was taken by his second-born son, Alexander.
The way was now open for Venizelos to return to Athens as leader of a reunited Greece. After almost three years of bitter division over the issue, Greece had made its peace with the Triple Entente – and become for the first time formally a belligerent in the world war. The ‘National Schism’ was, supposedly, over.
It was nothing of the sort. The crowd that Venizelos addressed in Syntagma Square, in the centre of Athens, at the end of June 1917, was much smaller and more subdued than the one that had cheered him there when he first took office in 1910. Even while he was speaking, armed French troops occupied every rooftop and every strategic point in the city. Local sensibilities (no less racist, in the language of today, than anywhere else in Europe at the time) were particularly offended by the fact that many of those troops came from France’s African colonies. Venizelos had acted in the name of the ‘Nation’. But who were the masters now? Not even his rhetoric could disguise the fact that it was the ‘protecting powers’ that had brought him there. It had been ever thus for Greece, of course, since the 1820s. But this was all the more reason for resentment by those who resented it.
In his speech, Venizelos looked forward to the ‘unity of spirit’ of the Greek people. Apart from those with the highest share of responsibility, he declared, there would be no reprisals. But the circumstances were far from normal. Well-meaning words went nowhere. Parliament was dissolved – but with a renewed mobilization of the whole country, there could be no question, now, of a general election. Instead, the last but one parliament, which had been elected two years earlier, before the election of December 1915 that the Liberals had boycotted, was brought back to life – earning it the nickname of the ‘Lazarus parliament’. In this artificially resuscitated chamber Venizelos won a vote of confidence at the end of August 1917.
Leading members and supporters of the previous government were rounded up and exiled to Corsica – an act that showed the hand of France at the highest level. Lower down the scale, and despite Venizelos’s earlier promises, wholesale purges were carried out of the armed forces, the civil service, the judiciary and even the Church. The Archbishop who had pronounced the anathema was dethroned and replaced by a Cretan who was a friend and supporter of Venizelos.
Through the last months of 1917 and the first of 1918, while the Allies prepared for their next offensive on the Macedonian Front, Greece was more divided than ever. In May 1918 three Greek divisions took part in the Allied victory over Bulgarian forces at Skra di Legen, just inside the present-day boundary between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. All three divisions had been raised in the New Lands. Earlier in the year, in Old Greece, whole units had mutinied and been subjected to exemplary punishment. In these and other punitive measures, the role of Cretan gendarmes was prominent: these tough mountaineers were greatly feared by other Greeks, and ferociously loyal to their compatriot Venizelos. Even as a superficially united Greece contributed significantly to the Allied war effort, to the rear a savage and undeclared civil war was still going on.
It was against this background that the decisive breakthrough on the Macedonian Front was made in September 1918. Greek troops made up one-third of the forces engaged on the Allied side. On the same day that the Bulgarians sued for a separate peace, in Berlin the German High Command came to the conclusion that the war was lost. It ended first in the East: in the armistice signed with the Ottoman Empire at the British naval base at Moudros on the island of Lemnos on 30 October. The final armistice, on the Western Front, followed on 11 November. The next day, the first of the victorious Allies marched into Constantinople. Since Russia had abandoned the war after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, no one was talking, now, of ‘Tsargrad’. Instead, a combined British, French and Italian military administration was put in place, which would last for almost five years. Greek troops, too, were allowed to play a small part, and received a rapturous welcome from the city’s Greek population. With them went the ‘dreadnought’ Averof, which had won battle honours in the First Balkan War.
By this time Venizelos was already in London. Even before the armistice, he had presented to the British prime minister, Lloyd George, his detailed proposals for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Based on the meetings he had had with Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, back in 1912, these envisaged the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia being divided three ways, with the whole western section, bordering the Aegean, going to Greece. His country had made its contribution to the Allied victory, even if only by the skin of its teeth. Venizelos was in early with his claim for a share of the spoils.
The peace conference began in Paris in January 1919 and lasted for a whole year. Its effects would transform the map of Europe and the Middle East, replacing age-old empires with the still-evolving patchwork of nation states that we know today. The best-known product of the conference was the Treaty of Versailles. This was completed relatively quickly, in June. Negotiations for peace with the Ottoman Empire would drag on for more than a year after that.
Most of this time Venizelos spent away from Greece, at the negotiating table, where he excelled. The young British diplomat Harold Nicolson was sufficiently overawed to declare, ‘He and Lenin are the only two really great men in Europe.’ Hearing Venizelos speak, Nicolson had been struck by ‘a strange medley of charm, brigandage, welt-politik, patriotism, courage, literature – and above all this large muscular smiling man, with his eyes glinting through spectacles and on his head a square skull-cap of black silk’. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, too, was impressed by Venizelos’s ‘inexhaustible eloquence’.11
Through diplomacy, persistence and adroit footwork Venizelos secured two huge gains for Greece, both in land and in prestige. The first was a mandate to occupy Smyrna and the vilayet of Aydin in western Anatolia, in May 1919. The second was the award of an even larger slice of Ottoman territory in Anatolia, together with most of Thrace, excluding Constantinople, by the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, a little over a year later. Both of these apparent gains, as events turned out, would prove disastrous for Greece – for reasons that were not really foreseeable at the time. Both gains came about, not as a result of feats of arms, but of an assiduous policy of pursuing tactical alliances and exploiting the divisions among rival, greater powers. It was in essence the same tactic that had worked with such brilliant effect in the 1820s.
On 12 August 1920, two days after signing the Treaty of Sèvres, Venizelos was ready to leave Paris. His work there was done. The Greek administration of Smyrna was now a little over a year old. One hundred thousand copies of a coloured map of ‘Great Greece’ were being printed in England, and would soon be reproduced on postcards too. Coloured orange were Greek territories that almost completely encircled the Aegean Sea, with a gap for an international zone around Constantinople and another in the southwest corner of Anatolia and the islands of the Dodecanese, which the treaty had assigned to Italy. The map also featured a personification of Greece as a long-haired maiden carrying aloft a huge Greek flag in one hand, while in the other she held a placard that read, ‘Greece is destined to live and will live’. In the top left corner appeared the bearded, mustachioed head of Venizelos with his signature flat-lensed spectacles. This was a new Greece ‘of two continents and five seas’, a favourite expression used by Venizelos and his supporters. All of this new ‘Great Greece’ defined by the Treaty of Sèvres was already occupied by Greek troops, with the exception of parts of Thrace, which very soon would be.
The state had achieved the greater part of what it had been trying to achieve ever since it had first come into existence – to expand so as to embrace the entire nation. And Venizelos was confident that where Greeks still lived outside its borders, either those borders would be extended eventually by the same diplomatic means, or people would be induced to move home: Turkish-speaking Muslims into the rump Ottoman state in central Anatolia, Greek-speaking Christians into the Greek-controlled areas.
On that August evening in 1920, as Venizelos prepared to board his train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, the Grand Idea had been realized. Then two gunmen ran up and opened fire. The attackers turned out to be former Greek army officers who had been cashiered in the recent purge. The smouldering Greek civil war had reached as far as Paris, the capital of the civilized world. With terrible inevitability from that moment on, the whole mirage began to fold up and dissolve.
THE END OF THE GRAND IDEA
Venizelos escaped with light injuries, and spent only a few days in a Paris clinic. The day after the attack, when the news reached Athens, the city was convulsed by a wave of violence against known anti-Venizelists. It has been described as a repeat of the ‘November events’ of 1916, although on a smaller scale. At its height, Ion Dragoumis, by this time one of the most eloquent of Venizelos’s critics, was dragged from his car and shot dead by agents of the security forces. It happened in broad daylight on a busy street, close to the site of today’s Athens Hilton. The city’s mayor, Emmanuel Benakis, was accused of complicity. Dragoumis had been apparently unmoved when Benakis had been threatened by the lynch mob in 1916. Now, the fortunes of civil war were reversed.
This was the climate in Athens when Venizelos returned from his triumph at Sèvres. The first thing he had to do was face a parliamentary election. The life of the ‘Lazarus’ parliament had been artificially prolonged twice already, because of the continuing state of martial law and mobilization to keep the army in Anatolia. There had not been a fully contested election since June 1915. So martial law was lifted, and an election called for November. The opposition politicians had finally been allowed to return from their exile in Corsica. The ‘Party of Nationalists’, which had been founded by Dimitrios Gounaris in 1915, was now renamed the ‘People’s Party’. In his first campaign speech, in October 1920, Gounaris spoke of ‘obliterating the tyranny’ of the present government. In future the country would be ‘decontaminated to remove the pestilence of tyranny’.12 It was not an auspicious start.
Matters were complicated further by the sudden and unexpected death of King Alexander from sepsis, after being bitten by a pet monkey in the grounds of the royal estate at Tatoï, outside Athens. The young successor to Constantine had acted, for the most part obligingly, as a figurehead during his three-year reign. The election had to be postponed for another week, to allow for the obsequies, and for a regent to be sworn in. By the time it took place, on 14 November, the contest was no longer merely a referendum on the performance of Venizelos’s government. Out of the blue, and beyond the wildest hopes of his opponents, there was now a real alternative. The election became a two-way race between the charismatic opponents who had faced one another down over the last decade: Venizelos and the exiled King Constantine.
Neither of the two could be described at this time as close to the people. Constantine had been languishing in Switzerland since 1917. Venizelos had spent most of his last three years in power abroad and had only just returned. Distance from the flesh-and-blood protagonists only helped to foster the climate of almost religious fanaticism that had built up around each of them since the ‘November events’. A pro-Venizelos newspaper compared its hero to Christ and Mohammed, a prophet sent by God at a new critical moment in human history to enlighten mankind. For his supporters Venizelos was a Messiah, the representative of Divine Providence on earth. Predictably, for his enemies, he was a ‘false prophet’ and ‘fake Messiah’, a deranged mental cripple driven by ‘Satanic inspiration’.13
The Liberals lost. Constantine returned to Greece and his throne, after a hastily arranged referendum that produced an implausible 99 per cent of votes cast in his favour. Even before the ballot had opened, a diplomatic ‘Note’ on behalf of the governments of Great Britain, France and Italy informed the new Greek administration that ‘the restoration to the throne of Greece of a King, whose disloyal attitude and conduct towards the Allies during the war caused them great embarrassment and loss, could only be regarded by them as a ratification by Greece of his hostile acts’.14 Unfair – possibly. Interference in the country’s politics – certainly, but this was nothing new. A separate communiqué made it clear that if Constantine were to return as king, there would be no financial assistance from the Great Powers either. The warning could not have been clearer.
Astonishingly, and despite its own manifesto commitment to end the occupation of Ottoman territory in Anatolia and bring the troops home, the new government decided to continue the campaign, even though it now meant going it alone.
Shortly before his fall, Venizelos had pleaded with Lloyd George to authorize a new advance eastwards by the Greek army, to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres. Since the Greek landings in Smyrna in May 1919 – and indeed, to a significant extent, because of them, as can be seen in hindsight – a new force had entered the politics of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Kemal we have already met as the seventeen-year-old military cadet from Salonica, too late to enlist in the war of 1897 and bitter about the intervention of the Great Powers to bail out Greece in its defeat. Kemal had served with distinction during the world war, in the successful Ottoman resistance to the Gallipoli landings and on the Russian and Mesopotamian fronts. His future title of Atatürk (father of the Turks) had yet to be earned.
In May 1919, just four days after Greek troops disembarked in Smyrna, Kemal had taken advantage of a posting to the interior of Anatolia to put himself at the head of a new movement that was preparing to fight back against the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. In September 1919 a first congress of Turkish Nationalists had drawn up and proclaimed a ‘national pact’. This was to become the blueprint for the Republic of Turkey as it still exists today.
Defying the authority of the puppet Sultan in Constantinople, whose government was controlled by the occupying powers, Kemal and the Nationalists soon set up a rival Provisional Government in Ankara. Once the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres became known, the Nationalists determined to repudiate it. Belatedly, the time had come for the Turkish-speaking Muslims of Anatolia to do what the Greeks had done a century before them. The Ottoman Empire was a thing of the past. The modern Republic of Turkey would become a secular nation state, on the European model and based upon the Turkish-speaking heartland of Anatolia, together with a tiny corner of Europe surrounding Istanbul, which would no longer be a capital city. And, as with so many nation states before it, the supporters of this one were ready to kill and if necessary to die, to liberate their land from foreign occupiers: in reality, this meant the victors in the world war. But the mandate that Venizelos had accepted, to occupy Smyrna and the vilayet of Aydin, meant that Greece had become their proxy. The war between Greece and the Turkish Nationalists that lasted from 1919 to 1922 has ever since been known in Turkey as the country’s ‘war of independence’. Greece and Turkey, as modern nation states, have each fought a ‘war of independence’ against the other.
Such hindsight was not available in the first months of 1921. A new government was in power in Athens, united by nothing so much as resentment against the Venizelists who had victimized its members and their supporters over the last three years. Venizelos himself had prudently left the country, but continued to watch affairs closely. Kemal’s new power centre in Ankara looked to most observers like just another insurgency. It had no international recognition. The entire logic of the Paris Peace Conference – a flawed logic, as we now know – had been predicated on the victors dictating terms to the vanquished. Germany had seen the Rhineland occupied and was crippled by hyperinflation, partly as a result of having to pay swingeing ‘reparations’. The empire of Austria-Hungary had been carved up. Whatever the peace conference decided about the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, this was the new international order, and must be obeyed. It was in this spirit that Venizelos wrote to Lloyd George in October 1920. Kemal’s threatened defiance was simply a matter of enforcement. Provided that at least one of the leading signatories to the Treaty of Sèvres was prepared to give him the necessary authority, Venizelos had been prepared once more to send in Greek troops as enforcers.
This was the strategy that the new royalist government in Athens also determined to pursue, early in 1921. It remains something of a puzzle why they did it. The strategy was a legacy of the hated Venizelos. It also depended completely on British support. That support had now been withdrawn, after the return of King Constantine. It has been suggested that it was fear of their internal enemies, the Venizelists, as much as antipathy to Kemal’s Turkish Nationalists, that drove them. The new regime in Greece had to show the world, and especially Great Britain, that it could do just as well without Venizelos. If it failed to act against Kemal, it might itself be toppled. If that were to happen, the ‘Venizelist terror’ would be back. Even a military defeat in Anatolia might be the lesser evil, compared to that.15
So it was once again a deeply fissured body politic that went to war against Kemal in the spring of 1921. It was also an army that within the last few months had been thoroughly purged of officers who had been promoted by the previous regime – many of them on the strength of battle honours they had won on the Macedonian Front in 1917 and 1918. A first Greek offensive in March was driven back. It was an inauspicious way to celebrate the centenary of the outbreak of the Greek Revolution. A reshuffle brought Gounaris, the leader of the rebaptized People’s Party, back to head the government. Undeterred by this first failure, it seems to have been Gounaris’s idea to send King Constantine himself to Smyrna, to take up what this time would be no more than a symbolic high command. The day chosen for him to sail was another anniversary. It had been on 29 May 1453 that Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, and the last Constantine to occupy the Byzantine throne had died in battle. On this day in 1921 his spiritual heir, still known to some fancifully as ‘Constantine XII’, set out to fulfil the old prophecies about the return of ‘the City’ to Orthodoxy. Never mind that Constantine, although only in his early fifties, was ‘a tired and sick man, without his old stubbornness and will’.16 On 10 July two Greek armoured columns struck eastwards towards Kemal’s provisional capital, Ankara.
The battle of the Sakarya river has been described as the ‘last real battle of the First World War’.17 It was fought in the intense heat of the central Anatolian plateau in late August and early September 1921. The Greeks had stretched their supply lines to their limit. The Turks had the advantage of being able to draw on ever more recruits from farther east. But they, too, were short of food, weapons and ammunition. The Provisional Government in Ankara did not yet have anything like the resources of an organized state. The Greeks had better organization and stronger forces. The outcome remained in doubt until the very end. Kemal even made contingency plans to abandon Ankara. But it was the Greeks who broke first. After almost three weeks of fighting, the order was given to retreat. The Greek army had come within fifty miles of Kemal’s provisional capital. Now, there was nothing for it but to retrace its steps.
The endgame dragged on for a whole year. The Greek army remained dug in along the same defensive line that it had held before the campaign began, some two hundred miles east of the Aegean coast. In Athens, the Gounaris government won a vote of confidence in November and made desperate overtures to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, for mediation with the Turkish Nationalists and a loan to cover the soaring costs of keeping an army in the field. Some half-hearted efforts were made on the British side, but nothing came of them. Among increasingly desperate measures to raise revenue, in spring 1922 all banknotes in circulation were called in, to be cut in half. The Greek government eventually fell in May 1922, and a new coalition came to power – united, to the extent that it was, by its opposition to ‘Venizelism’.
With the war on the battlefield stalled, and no honourable end to Greece’s Anatolian campaign in sight, the fault line between state and nation began to widen still further. All the viciousness that been stirred up by the simmering civil war of the past six years and more began to rise to the surface. In August a notorious editorial in the pro-government newspaper Kathimerini carried the headline, ‘Homeward …’. There must be ‘no more blood wasted in continuing the adventure imposed upon the people by the man who, unhappily for Greece, still lives’ – meaning, of course, Venizelos. It was time for ‘Asia Minor’ (as Anatolia has historically been known in Greek since Roman times) ‘to be given up to its noble inhabitants’, an expression that seems to annul the very distinction between Greek Christian and Turkish Muslim upon which Greek national identity had been founded from the beginning. For Georgios Vlachos, the editor of the newspaper, who later claimed to have been writing at the behest of Gounaris, what was at stake was no longer the future of the ‘liberated’ nation but the honour and prestige of the Greek state and its institutions, the army especially.
Perhaps most chilling of all, though also prophetic, were the words of the High Commissioner of Smyrna, Aristeidis Stergiadis, the most senior Greek civilian official in Anatolia. Asked, when it was already too late to avert a humanitarian disaster, why he did nothing to help the Greek population to flee the city, Stergiadis is said to have replied, ‘Better they stay here and be massacred by Kemal, because if they go to Athens they’ll turn everything upside down.’18 It was a fear that would linger, long after the bitter outcome of the 1922 campaign.
The end came suddenly, during the same hot weeks of late summer that, a year before, had seen the battle of the Sakarya river. The Turkish assault began at dawn on 26 August 1922, along a broad front. Two days later the Greek army was in full retreat. By 8 September the remnants of the defeated army had fallen back to the immediate hinterland of Smyrna. The order was given to bypass the city to the south and embark from the port of Çeşme, separated by only a narrow channel from the Greek island of Chios. It was an inglorious end to almost a century of expansionist dreams. The Grand Idea was dead.
The next day, 9 September, the vanguard of Kemal’s army entered Smyrna. The date is still celebrated in the city, where Dokuz Eylül (9 September) University was founded as recently as 1982. The agony of the Greek and Armenian populations of Turkey was about to begin. Armenians, having nowhere else to go, were systematically murdered in their homes. For more than a week, Greek women and children from the interior had been streaming into the city. The famous ‘Quay’ of Smyrna, more than a mile of waterfront lined on the landward side with grand buildings in the neoclassical style, was jammed throughout its length by a desperate crowd of refugees. Allied warships stood off in the bay. Their crews were under strict orders to pick up only their own nationals. By night Turkish searchlights swept the crowds. Machine-gunners and snipers randomly opened fire into this mass of humanity, and picked off those who tried to swim towards the safety of the ironclads. Only the timely intervention of an American philanthropist, who chartered a fleet of merchant ships, enabled many thousands to escape before Kemal’s deadline passed for all Greek subjects of the former Ottoman Empire to leave the city. Most of those were women, children and the elderly. Men of military age had already been rounded up, to be conscripted into labour gangs and put to work in the interior.
The city itself would soon be engulfed in flames. The fire that destroyed the greater part of ‘infidel Smyrna’ during three days, beginning on 13 September, has been variously blamed on arson by Armenians, Greeks, the victorious Turkish army or the irregulars that followed in its wake. Whether intended or not (and there are indications that it may have been), the effect of the fire was to cleanse the city of almost all visible signs of a Greek, Christian and European presence that went back centuries and had made Smyrna one of the greatest cultural meeting places and commercial centres of the Levant.
It is not known how many Christians – Greeks and Armenians – lost their lives in and around Smyrna and in other parts of Anatolia between 1921 and 1923. The number is generally reckoned to run into hundreds of thousands. Even this huge toll reflects only one part of the total losses, on all sides, during the twelve-year ‘War of the Ottoman Succession’ that was only now coming to an end. It has been estimated that by 1923 the total population that had been living within the borders of the empire in 1911, Muslim and Christian combined, had fallen by some 20 per cent – a casualty rate, including flows of refugees both into and out of the empire, of one in five.19
In the annals of the modern Republic of Turkey, which would be formally inaugurated just over a year later, the taking of İzmir (Smyrna) marks the crowning victory of the nation’s ‘war of independence’. For Greeks, the destruction of the city and the mass killings and deportations that followed are remembered as the horrific climax to the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’, often shortened to just ‘the Catastrophe’.
RETRIBUTION
In Greece, at the time, the response was swift and deadly. The ashes of Smyrna had barely had time to cool before army officers among the troops evacuated to the nearby islands of Chios and Lesbos formed a Revolutionary Committee on 26 September. The Committee demanded the resignation of the entire government and the immediate abdication of King Constantine, as collectively responsible for the disaster. Before the ships carrying the revolutionaries had even reached Piraeus, a panic-stricken government had conceded all their demands. King Constantine left the country on the last day of the month, this time for good. His eldest son inherited the throne as George II. Some twelve thousand of the troops that had been so recently defeated outside Smyrna now marched into Athens. The Revolutionary Committee took over the government. The opportunity for a catharsis that might have swept away the vicious divisions of the last few years seemed quickly to fade. Within weeks the dominant forces behind the new military government emerged as loyal to Venizelos. The former prime minister himself kept his distance from Greece, but agreed to represent the regime abroad.
In the meantime, and in the face of horrified pleas from foreign governments and their representatives in Athens, a show trial was set up to convict the five politicians and one military commander deemed the most to blame for the disaster. The ‘Six’, as they have been remembered ever since, were shot by firing squad on the hilltop of Goudi, where the whole cycle of triumph and disaster had begun with the putsch back in 1909 that had first brought Venizelos to power. So ended the careers of former prime minister Dimitrios Gounaris; Foreign Minister Georgios Baltatzis; Minister for War Georgios Theotokis; Petros Protopapadakis, who had had the misfortune to be prime minister at the time; Nikolaos Stratos, a bitter personal enemy of Venizelos who had just had the portfolio for foreign affairs thrust upon him; and the army Chief of Staff, Georgios Chatzianestis.
The charge of high treason on which the ‘Six’ were convicted by a court martial was of course absurd. Nobody, the condemned men included, had ever had the slightest desire or intention to damage, let alone destroy, their country and its interests. But both the charge and the savagery of the sentence reflected exactly the language of accusations and counter-accusations that had been flying between Venizelists and their opponents since the early years of the First World War. ‘Treason’ had come to stand for the wrong interpretation of where the country’s interests truly lay. The ‘Six’ were obvious scapegoats, judicially murdered in a paroxysm of collective humiliation and revenge for failure. And, as has been observed, this bloodletting would only serve to leave the question of real blame for the catastrophe festering below the surface – for generations afterwards.20
This opens up the question of Venizelos’s own share of responsibility. For those who had feared and loathed his policies and his influence from the beginning, or been victimized during the years of the ‘Venizelist terror’, it was axiomatic that the arch-culprit had to be Venizelos himself. Since at least 1915 he had been routinely branded a ‘traitor’ by his opponents. For the rest of his life, and long after it ended, this substantial section of Greek society could not forgive Venizelos and his supporters, either for the national humiliation in Anatolia or for the execution of the ‘Six’. More sober historians, not otherwise hostile to Venizelos or his legacy, at the time and since, have also been reluctant to absolve him.
Something like a consensus has emerged that the root cause of the disaster lay in Venizelos’s decision to accept the mandate of the Allies and land troops in Smyrna in 1919. By the time of his electoral defeat a year and a half later, he had compounded the error by failing to recognize the true nature of the Turkish nationalism that he was up against. His plan for a new military campaign against Kemal in the interior of Anatolia was therefore doomed from the beginning. Its eventual failure was the fault of Venizelos, who had started it, not of his successors, who had merely pursued it to the bitter end. And anyway, a Greek enclave in western Anatolia would never have been viable (as General Metaxas had warned back in 1915). No frontier in that region would have been defensible against attack from the east by the Turks. To have cut off Smyrna from its Muslim Turkish hinterland would have made no economic sense either. Within a few years, if Greek rule had continued, Smyrna would have lost all reason to exist.21 So it has been persuasively argued.
There is inevitably something speculative about all such questions. But, to take the second point first, compare the fortunes of Salonica. The physical setting and economic history of both cities are very similar. So, even, was their traditional urban layout, before each was destroyed by fire, the one in 1917, the other in 1922. The Greek population of Smyrna was larger both as an absolute number and as a proportion of the total than was the Greek population of Salonica. Salonica, too, has been to various degrees cut off from its hinterland since it became part of Greece in 1912. This includes the half-century when the ‘Iron Curtain’ that divided Europe during the Cold War ran just fifty kilometres to its north. Greece’s frontiers in Macedonia and Thrace, established between 1913 and 1923, would prove impossible to defend on the one occasion when they were attacked, in 1941. Imagine that a Greek frontier in western Anatolia had been negotiated between Venizelos and Kemal, and consolidated by a much less drastic movement of populations than in fact took place. After all, Venizelos’s diplomacy with Kemal’s representative İsmet Pasha at Lausanne in 1923, and with Kemal himself in 1930, would prove his pragmatic skill in negotiating a settlement in circumstances much less favourable to Greece than existed in 1920 and 1921. Ironically enough, had that happened, Greece’s Anatolian province, adjacent to neutral Turkey, might have been the only part of the country to escape occupation by Axis forces twenty years later.
And then there is the fateful decision to go into Anatolia at all, in 1919. The key lies in the fact that Venizelos only, and always, went into action when he was assured of Great Power backing.22 He had that backing in 1919. He had it also in 1920 when he ordered his troops to extend their zone of occupation, both in Anatolia and in Thrace. He was seeking it again at the time when he fell from office. Without far more robust guarantees than were available to his successors, Venizelos would never have pressed ahead with the offensives of 1921. But even without those guarantees, it is remarkable how close that campaign came to success. The battle of the Sakarya river was very nearly won by the Greeks. The Turks had made preparations to abandon Ankara. Even Kemal himself seems to have experienced moments of despair, and might have given up the struggle.23 Allied forces, even though they no longer actively supported the Greeks, remained in control of Constantinople and the straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Their resolution to retain that foothold in former Ottoman territory had not yet been tested. (When it was, in the Chanak crisis of September and October 1922, the climb-down that followed would cost the British prime minister, Lloyd George, his job.) From a purely military point of view, the balance of advantage was still with the Greeks, even at the time of the Turkish counter-offensive in August of that year. If the morale of the Greek troops had been better, it has been suggested, that battle could well have gone the other way.24
So defeat in Anatolia was still not inevitable, three years after Venizelos had first committed Greek troops, and almost two years after his own fall from power. Even without the logistical and diplomatic advantages that would have been available to Greece in the meantime if Venizelos had retained the premiership, the supposedly ‘doomed’ tactic of defeating Kemal by military force still came closer than is often realized to success.
Venizelos’s fundamental mistake, if there was one, goes much farther back. His brilliance at negotiating with foreign statesmen had not been matched by his political skills at home. It was Venizelos who forced the ‘National Schism’ upon the country by his early insistence that Greece should join the Triple Entente. Even the Entente powers themselves thought this premature. He could have bided his time. He could have worked with King Constantine and the General Staff. He could have directed his genius for persuasion where it was most needed, which was also the place closest to home. The loss of trust between these two camps seems to have come about very early on, and the consequences of that loss would prove irreparable. The whole logic of Venizelos’s expansionist plan for the state was based on his Cretan, outsider’s perception of the nation. If he was to prevail, he would have had to sell that perception to the leaders and the populace of an Old Greece who had become used to the comfortable certainties that had grown on them since the arrival of the Bavarians in the 1830s.
Entirely indicative is the perception of General Metaxas, King Constantine’s former Chief of Staff and the future dictator who would lead Greece into the Second World War. Writing in a private letter, at the moment in July 1914 when war seemed finally inevitable, Metaxas had confided, ‘In the midst of this great disaster, I hope for our dear little Greece to be spared.’25 Much the same view, shorn of its evident personal sincerity, could be read daily in the royalist press throughout the height of the ‘Schism’. Venizelos and his supporters would rant against what they saw as small-minded parochialism, while they championed, instead, the boundless horizons of the ‘Nation’. Where Venizelos failed was in not recognizing, and giving them their due, the passion and sincerity of those who wished to preserve intact a ‘small honourable Greece’. Seemingly unable to understand the perspective of his opponents, Venizelos resorted to means that were the very opposite of diplomatic. Once he had concluded, probably around the summer of 1915, that the only way to gain his objectives was by overthrowing the constitutional basis for the government that he led – by repudiating the authority of the king – every step that Venizelos took would strengthen his hand abroad, but weaken it fatally at home.
It was there, back in 1914, if not even earlier, that the seeds of the disaster lay. But on one thing Venizelos cannot be faulted: he had fully absorbed the lesson of 1897. Every one of Greece’s military advances and diplomatic gains between 1912 and 1920 was made in alliance with foreign partners. Military and diplomatic campaigns were run in tandem, each feeding into the other, and each responsive to opportunities and constraints experienced by the other. In 1921 and 1922, even if it was a close-run thing, it was the unwillingness or inability of the royalist Greek government to restore that partnership that made the difference – and must indeed have made itself felt, down to the morale of the humblest conscript facing the Turkish barrage in August 1922. Greece had been created in the first place, and had expanded its borders since, through diplomacy as much as on the battlefield. The immediate cause of the ‘Catastrophe’ was the failure of diplomacy. And that was a mistake that Venizelos himself would never have made.
It was Venizelos who represented Greece at the peace talks, arranged under the auspices of the recently formed League of Nations in the Swiss lakeside town of Lausanne. His negotiating hand was weak. Mustafa Kemal’s representative, İsmet Pasha, later known as İnönü, was intransigent, and in a position to push through his side’s demands. A full peace treaty would take until the following July to hammer out. Its terms would include international recognition for Kemal’s Turkey as the newest among several new nation states created after the First World War – a process of nation-building throughout the continent that had begun with recognition of Greece almost a century before.
But the most pressing question weighing upon the negotiators at Lausanne, when they met in November 1922, was how to deal with an immediate humanitarian crisis. Some eight hundred thousand Greeks had already fled from Anatolia. A quarter of a million more were streaming out of Eastern Thrace, evacuated by the Greek army in October. İsmet made it plain that the new Turkish government was not prepared to have them back. The upshot was a bold plan. At the time, it was unprecedented on such a scale. The Convention of Lausanne, signed on 30 January 1923, would set a baleful legacy for the resolution of future conflicts throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond.
The opening article of the Convention set out starkly what had been agreed by the Greek and Turkish plenipotentiaries:
As from 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory.
These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece respectively without the authorization of the Turkish Government or of the Greek Government respectively.
The only exceptions allowed were for Greeks living in Constantinople and for the Muslim community of western Thrace.26
At a stroke, almost the entire Greek nation had now to be crammed within the existing borders of the Greek state. In a way that had never been intended, the Grand Idea, which had been left for dead on the battlefields outside Smyrna, would be fulfilled after all. But the rupture that had opened up during the First World War would not be healed for another half-century.