8
Starting Over
1923–1940
For the first time in Greek history the overwhelming majority of Greek speakers were now citizens of the political state that had been created out of the Revolution of a hundred years before. As a result, the two decades after 1922 present many parallels with the earliest years of independence, back in the 1830s and 1840s. Once again, everything had to be built almost from scratch. Once again, just as during the time of the Bavarians, the quest was on: how to be at once Greek and modern, which really meant western European. New ideas, new openings towards Europe, and particularly the West, were everywhere. Just as had happened then, the eastern heritage of Byzantium and Orthodox Christianity was once again eclipsed in favour of a redefined direct line leading from the high points of classical Hellenic civilization to the present day. It made sense: the geographical heartland of that ancient civilization, with its rival centres of Athens and Sparta, coincided as neatly as it ever had with the now more or less fixed frontiers of the Greek state. Historical memories of the Byzantine millennium were too painfully linked to those eastern horizons that had been lost for ever when the Greek army scuttled out of Anatolia.
The two decades that followed the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1922 were a time of remarkable renewal. They had to be. The political foundations of the state had been all but broken. The economy was in ruins. Economically and socially, Greece was a poorer, more backward country during the interwar period than it had been before the decade of upheavals.1 The same had been true a century earlier, when it emerged from the devastation caused by the Revolution. In both periods, authoritarian government was either a reality or an ever-present threat, more than at most other times in Greece’s modern history. Once again, just as in the 1830s, when people spoke of the ‘nation’ what they meant was the state. Renewal during the 1920s and 1930s would be concentrated, to an unprecedented and eventually extreme degree, on the Greek state and state institutions.
RECOVERY AND RENEWAL
The resettlement of the refugees from Turkey after 1922 has rightly been called the ‘Greek state’s greatest peacetime achievement’.2 But, like other achievements of the Greek state in its nearly two-hundred-year history, this one was built upon international cooperation. An international relief effort was coordinated by the recently established League of Nations. Headed by the American diplomat Henry Morgenthau, it would last for seven years. A mediating role at the Lausanne conference had been played by the Norwegian former polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, in his capacity as the League’s first High Commissioner for Refugees. Foreign loans, brokered by the League, would be necessary too. Once again, the way forward for Greece would not be a matter for Greeks alone.
Exactly how many people came to Greece as refugees between 1922 and 1925 will never be known. The most reliable estimates put the number at between 1.3 and 1.4 million. That is equivalent to just over a quarter of the total population of the country before they arrived. The same proportion of new arrivals in the United Kingdom in 2019 would give a total of sixteen million migrants to be absorbed over a three-year period. For the United States the figure would be a staggering eighty million. The Lausanne Convention had stipulated that they were to be ‘exchanged’ for approximately one-third as many Muslims living in Greece, making a net influx into Greece of around one million. According to the census of 1928, the first to be undertaken after the exchange, one in five of the population of the Greek state was by that time a refugee.3
The country was transformed – not just demographically, but socially, politically, economically, even in its physical appearance. Shanty-towns sprang up all round the cities of Athens, Piraeus and Salonica. Throughout the New Lands of Macedonia, Epiros and Thrace, the islands of the northern and eastern Aegean and Crete, as well as in Thessaly, which had been acquired by Greece as far back as 1881, Muslim families and communities that had been settled for generations were forced to leave, to make way for whole new settlements of incomers. Most of the minarets, which dotted the rural landscape and in older drawings and photographs dominate the skyline of Salonica, were torn down; mosques were converted into warehouses or cinemas. As for the displaced Muslims, few Greeks, either at the time or, it has to be said, since, were sorry to see them go. In Crete, the enforced departure of the ‘Turcocretans’, whose language was the island’s dialect of Greek, was recorded by the art historian and novelist Pantelis Prevelakis, who had been an eyewitness:
The army threw a cordon round the Turkish quarter, secured the entry to the harbour, and then called the Turks to pass in single file into the tenders … Fainting from grief … they came out of their houses with torn clothes, their hands bloodied; the women had thrown off their headscarves. They filed between a double line of soldiers, like thieves who had been caught red-handed, glancing sideways with reddened eyes, their mouths tight with the passion of their feelings.
Almost a century later, descendants of these people have retained their Cretan language and some Cretan customs, in the homeland to which they were displaced in western Anatolia.4
In Greece all eyes were on the plight of those arriving. Ambassador Morgenthau described what had already become a familiar sight, in the harbour of Salonica, in November 1923:
I saw seven thousand people crowded in a ship that would have been taxed to normal capacity with two thousand. They were packed like sardines upon the deck, a squirming, writhing mass of human misery. They had been at sea for four days. There had not been space to permit them to lie down to sleep; there had been no food to eat; there was not access to any toilet facilities. For those four days and nights many had stood upon the open deck, drenched by an autumn rain, pierced by the cold night wind, and blistered by the noonday sun. They came ashore in rags, hungry, sick, covered with vermin, hollow-eyed, exhaling the horrible odor of human filth – bowed with despair …5
This was more than a year after the rout of the Greek army in Anatolia and the burning of Smyrna. Conditions must have been unimaginably worse for all those who had fled from Smyrna, western Anatolia and eastern Thrace in the immediate aftermath of these events. What Morgenthau was witnessing was the Lausanne Convention in action: the consequence of the relatively orderly evacuation of Greek populations from further east, who had not been directly caught up in the fighting. Also on these ships would have been some of the men of military age taken as prisoners of war. Those who had survived notorious conditions in labour gangs in the interior of Turkey had finally been released after the Treaty of Lausanne brought an end to hostilities in July 1923.
It is often said that the refugees brought with them new skills, extra manpower, a broader outlook on the world, and even (this last is certainly true) spicier and more exotic tastes in food – all to the long-term benefit of Greece. It cannot have felt like that during the 1920s. Like most migrants in many different historical crises, these ones did not easily adjust to their new homes. Their arrival was greeted with a corresponding amount of fear and mistrust. The kind of abuse that had first been heard in Athens during the civil war of 1916, directed against those who had already fled from Ottoman persecution, became intensified in the 1920s. The incomers were not ‘real’ Greeks at all, but ‘Turk-spawn’, not real Christians but ‘baptised in yoghurt’.6
They came from all social classes. Some had left behind towns and cities, others were farmers or pastoralists. Many found themselves resettled in environments to which they were unsuited: former city-dwellers in agricultural communities or vice versa, or farmers faced with types of soil, terrain and climate of which they had no experience. Some Orthodox Christians expelled from the interior of Anatolia spoke not Greek but Turkish. Others, such as the Pontians from the region around Trebizond on the Black Sea coast, brought with them a dialect that enthusiasts like to claim is closer than any other to ancient Greek, but was (and is) hard for Greeks from anywhere else to understand. For the next twenty years, ‘refugees’ as a category would stand out as an unassimilated (and huge) factor in Greek social and political life. One of the most notorious of the refugee settlements, on the outskirts of Piraeus, would later enter the mythology of the Greek left under the nickname of Kokkinia (Red-Town), a name that even today has all but eclipsed the official Nikaia (after Nicaea, home of the Nicene Creed, today’s Turkish city of İsnik). True assimilation can probably be dated from as late as the 1980s.
Other groups that remained in place, though they were much smaller, would prove even harder to assimilate. If the exchange of populations had relieved the Greek state of the need to find an accommodation with most of its Muslim subjects, there remained (and remains today) a Muslim minority in western Thrace, protected, and to some extent isolated from the rest of the country, by the terms of the Lausanne Convention. The Muslims of western Thrace are the only officially recognized ethnic minority in Greece. Other Muslims exempted from the exchange were the Albanian-speaking Tsamides, or Chams, of Epiros. In other parts of the same region were (and still are) communities of Vlachs, Christians who speak a language close to Romanian. Jewish communities had existed for centuries in several parts of Greece and were Greek-speaking (these were the Romaniot Jews). But the community in Salonica, still more than fifty thousand strong in the 1920s, maintained a distinct identity linked to its Spanish-derived language as well as the Jewish religion. Macedonia, in the 1920s and 1930s, would continue to be home to many who had previously adhered to the Bulgarian Church, and who still spoke their own Slavic dialect. No Greek government has ever recognized this group, known colloquially as ‘Slavo-Macedonians’, as an official minority, although between the wars they may have numbered as many as a quarter of a million.7
The state was now home to far fewer unwilling subjects than it had been between 1913 and 1923. But all of these groups that remained, no less than the incoming refugees who were regarded as ethnically Greek but often despised for being ‘other’, would come under intense pressure to assimilate during the next two decades.8 Even after the distinction between the state and the wider nation had been all but erased, the centralized state would struggle to impose homogeneity upon its diverse subjects. When something approaching homogeneity did come, it would be due not to the Greek state but to its total collapse during the 1940s, to the horrors of a world war and a brutal occupation. Most of those divergent groups, for different reasons, would pay dearly for their difference when that time came.
Despite these formidable challenges, the rest of the 1920s saw some remarkable successes. The refugees were housed, and the worst of the damage to the economy was repaired. Young intellectuals and artists of the upcoming generation were being formed in a crucible of competing ideas and impulses. Writing during the next decade, one of their number, Giorgos Theotokas, in his panoramic novel Argo, depicted the young university students of that time as ‘Argonauts’, who argued passionately over every new philosophical, political or artistic idea or movement, but were united by a melancholy determination to live up to the ‘great name’ they had inherited. For these young men, and a smaller number of women, now was the time:
… to free themselves from a sterile past, to gaze out to sea, to live once more the life of the spirit, no longer as humble imitators of their great ancestors and belated disciples of foreigners, but as explorers, as conquerors, as true Hellenes.9
Theotokas was looking back at the formative years of what would prove to be an extraordinarily creative generation, not just in literature but in all the arts. In literature they have come to be known as the ‘Generation of the Thirties’. But they had been formed during the previous decade, in the immediate aftermath of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Theotokas’s own debut came in 1929, in the form of a polemical manifesto for a new era of the arts in Greece. Entitled Free Spirit, the book begins with the author imagining himself looking down at the European continent from an aircraft far above. From such a height, the distinctions between one country and another begin to fade. Free Spirit argues that Europe, for all its tribal differences, is a single entity, and that Greeks ought to go out and embrace their destiny within it. The Catastrophe had blown away an entire world. Just as the rest of Europe was reinventing itself after the trauma of the Great War, the creative energy of the young in Greece was ready to seize the moment: ‘The time is ripe for bold pioneers,’ Theotokas concluded.10
An early poem by Theotokas’s friend, the poet George Seferis, kicks over the traces of traditional verse-making to celebrate a symbol of these modern horizons in their city. The poem is entitled ‘Syngrou Avenue, 1930’, and it evokes the wide, straight boulevard that had recently been completed to link the centre of Athens with the sea at Phaliro, named after the banker and benefactor from Constantinople, Andreas Syngros.11 Both writers had been born and had spent their earliest years as citizens of the Ottoman Empire – Seferis in Smyrna, Theotokas in Constantinople. Both had recently settled in Athens after studying in Paris. Odysseus Alepoudelis was still there at the end of the 1920s, imbibing the spirit of newly minted Surrealism and translating the poetry of one of the movement’s champions, Paul Éluard. When he returned to Greece and began publishing his own exuberantly surrealist poetry in the 1930s, Alepoudelis would adopt the pseudonym of Elytis, partly in homage to Éluard. Later in the century, Seferis and Elytis would each be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1963 and 1979, respectively.
These are some of the best-known names. But there were many others. The turn of the decade saw an unprecedented spate of published poetry and fiction that experimented with new ideas and new techniques that were causing excitement (and often outrage) in Paris, London or New York. The same thing was happening in the other arts. In 1925, Dimitris Pikionis returned to Greece after studying in Paris and Munich to become one of the leading influences on Greek architecture for many decades. Pikionis is best known for his landscaping of the lower slopes surrounding the Acropolis of Athens in the 1950s. In painting, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, the surrealist Nikos Engonopoulos, Giannis Tsarouchis and Giannis Moralis were all undergoing their formative experiences at this time. The composer Nikos Skalkottas was scraping a living in Berlin, determined to follow in the footsteps of the musical avant-garde led by Arnold Schoenberg, before returning to Greece in 1933. Dimitri Mitropoulos, best known as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic in the 1950s, was also an avant-garde composer and followed a similar path until his departure for the United States. All of these innovators in the creative arts, some sooner, some much later, would achieve international recognition on a scale never achieved by any other Greek generation before or since.
And it was not only the young. Nikos Kazantzakis, now in his forties, had turned to Communism, and in 1928 published an account of his travels in Soviet Russia. At the same time he was starting to work on what may well be the longest poem ever published, his sequel to Homer’s Odyssey. Another larger-than-life figure from the same generation, Angelos Sikelianos, with his American wife Eva Palmer, instituted festivals of ancient Greek drama at Delphi in 1927 and 1930. The performances were intended to recreate the total experience that ancient drama must once have been, matching the words of the text to music and dance as well as the visual elements of staging. Ancient theatre in this way became an ultra-modern art form. For the first time the new medium of cinematography was used to capture a performance of an ancient Greek play performed in its original setting. Although they had no immediate sequels, these Delphic festivals were the distant precursors of the international arts festivals that since the 1950s have flourished all over the world, not least in Greece itself, at the theatres of Herodes Atticus in Athens and at Epidaurus.
During the later 1920s and 1930s, Greek cultural and intellectual life was infused with an abundance of youthful energy. The same could not be said for the political class or political institutions. It was an ageing generation that was in control. And even proper control proved hard to establish during the first years after the Catastrophe, as the divisions of the previous decade continued to play out.
POLITICIANS AND GENERALS
The military that had been so roundly defeated abroad had returned in 1922 to take charge at home. It was a ‘revolutionary’ government that had executed the Six in November of that year. Then in October 1923 came an attempt at a counter-revolutionary coup by officers loyal to King George II. The attempt failed. But it was to prove the first of many such interventions during the interwar period. It was the army, not the politicians, still less the public at large, that first made an issue out of the monarchy in Greece.
Traditionally the armed forces had been fiercely loyal to the throne – and during the Balkan wars to their commander-in-chief, Crown Prince Constantine. But going all the way back to the discontents that had led to the first coup of 1909, there had been a small coterie who had wanted to do away with the monarchy altogether. The division between these two groups had been magnified out of all proportion by the series of purges and counter-purges of the officer corps that had begun in 1916. For every senior officer on active service there was at least one more who had been removed from the same post, waiting in the wings. Throughout the interwar period Greece had in effect two corps of senior officers, while there were only enough jobs for one. The rivalry between them was no longer in any meaningful sense between political allegiances: it was simply a matter of keeping your job (if you had one) or getting it back (if you didn’t). Over the next twenty years it was support for the monarch or support for a republic that would prove to be the way to do this. Political leaders almost invariably, throughout those years, would find themselves in hock to the bitterly opposed factions of the military.
Return to nominally civilian rule at the end of 1923 did nothing to change this. In a typically self-defeating gesture the first parliamentary election held since the Catastrophe, in December, was boycotted by all the parties of the royalist, anti-Venizelist opposition. For a few brief weeks at the start of 1924, Venizelos was back as elected prime minister. But not even he had the authority to put the army back in its box. The monarchy was abolished by a vote of yet another Constituent Assembly in March. After a referendum to confirm the vote, Greece became officially a republic in April. For the next half-century the monarchy would become one of the most fiercely contested issues in Greek political life.
Nobody seems to have been very surprised, let alone roused to protest, when in the summer of 1925 General Theodoros Pangalos abolished the Constituent Assembly and soon afterwards set himself up as President. As a young officer, Pangalos had been one of the architects of the 1909 ‘revolution’ at Goudi that had brought Venizelos to power. Pangalos lasted only a little over a year, before being ousted by a rival general. Georgios Kondylis would soon bow to pressure and reinstate parliamentary rule. For a few months in 1927 the main parties tried setting their differences aside and ruling in coalition. But by early the next year that was not working well either. The stage was set for the elderly Venizelos to present himself as the only leader who could reunite the fractured nation.
Venizelos had declared repeatedly that he had retired from politics. But then, in April 1927, he returned from self-imposed exile to his old home in Crete. A year later, he placed himself at the head of a newly invigorated Liberal Party. On 19 August 1928, a few days short of his sixty-fourth birthday, his party was elected to power with the biggest landslide in Greek electoral history. Together with smaller splinter groups, the Venizelists had captured 223 seats out of 250. Writing when it was all over, Theotokas chose to place the scene of Venizelos’s return to parliament close to the climax of his novel:
[He was] tall, straight, robust and slim, his cheeks glowing, in the pink of health, smiling in all directions an enigmatic smile that combined fatherly tenderness, womanly vanity and superior irony; autocratic and affable, easy-going, open-hearted, intimate and fearsomely strong-willed, effortlessly master of himself and all around him, a hard man but one of uncommon grace, exquisite cunning and flexibility: this was Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, son of Odysseus, full of sinew, passion, strength, spirit and above all artistry.12
It was a moment of delirious triumph for supporters such as Theotokas and most of those who, like him, had been displaced from the new Turkey. It marked the start of the only stable, democratically elected government to hold power in Greece between the two world wars. Here, finally, was the opportunity for reconciliation that had eluded all parties for so long. Statesman of world stature that he undoubtedly was (never mind the hyperbole), Venizelos now held in his hands the mandate to heal the split that he himself had played such a large part in creating. His programme, he declared, would change the face of Greece and make the country ‘unrecognizable’. It was the beginning of what has been called a ‘second Golden Age of Venizelism’.13 The hopes and aspirations of Theotokas and his generation seemed about to be fulfilled.
It began well enough. An ambitious programme of economic and social reforms revived and carried forward initiatives that went back almost twenty years, to Venizelos’s first period in office, and had since stalled. Brigandage, that scourge of rural life in Greece that the Bavarians had first tried to kill off a century before, was finally eradicated. A social security system that still exists today was inaugurated. A new Agricultural Bank, reforms to land tenure, reclamation of marshes, all boosted the prosperity and life chances of a population that still primarily lived off the land.
Still bolder initiatives came in foreign policy. Security had yet to be fully guaranteed within the new frontiers of the state – as had been shown by incidents involving Italy in 1923 and Bulgaria in 1925. From the moment of the Greek defeat in Anatolia, Venizelos had accepted the geopolitical realities of the new Greece. Systematically he set about creating regional alliances with former rivals and enemies. One by one, he mended fences with Italy, Albania and newly christened Yugoslavia. Romania had already been brought on side by the previous government. Venizelos did his best to reach an understanding with Bulgaria, too. The most dramatic of all these diplomatic achievements was a far-reaching ‘Pact of Friendship, Neutrality, Conciliation and Judicial Statement’, signed at the end of October 1930 between the two modern republics, Greece and Turkey. This was the policy that would lead to the establishment of a ‘Balkan Entente’ in 1934, consisting of Greece, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia. Only Bulgaria, of the regional powers, remained unreconciled, though relations were at least better than they had been.
On the wider stage, Venizelos’s visits to Paris and London, early in his premiership, were designed to rebuild good relations with the remaining ‘protecting powers’ from the previous century, without being as dependent as in the past. Russia, now the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had by this time long renounced all obligations inherited from the former tsarist regime. With Britain and France what mattered to Venizelos was not so much hundred-year-old guarantees as capital investment and (as ever) the availability of loans. On these fronts he was successful, too – although his determination to follow Great Britain in adhering to the gold standard would soon prove the undoing of his country, and his government.
Part of that undoing, too, lay in another of those foreign-policy achievements. To reach a diplomatic understanding with Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey, only eight years after their respective citizens had been murdering one another in their homes as well as on the battlefield, was a remarkable feat. Venizelos had to use all his oratorical skills to persuade parliament and public opinion that the traditional enemy must now become a friend. It was necessary to protect the integrity of the state. The price was the outstanding claims of the refugees. Effectively, those who had lost everything in their flight to Greece had to renounce any possibility of future compensation. But there was more to it than money. Although the wording of the settlement actually made it possible for individuals once again to move between and buy property in the two countries, its political impact was the exact opposite: one in five of the Greek electorate had now to come to terms with the reality that the homes they had lost were lost for ever. Up to now, the refugee population had voted, almost to a man, for the Liberals or other pro-Venizelist parties. No longer. The electoral cost of this would not be counted for another two years, by which time further disasters had beset the Liberal government.
Venizelos’s government had been only a little over a year old, in October 1929, when the Wall Street Crash brought the international banking and financial systems tumbling down. While the world’s most advanced economies were gripped by the Great Depression, Greece had at first been let off relatively lightly. Then in September 1931 Britain abruptly left the gold standard. The value of the pound plummeted. At once the drachma and the Greek economy came under intolerable pressure. For the second time in its history the country was obliged to default on its external debts, in effect to declare bankruptcy. This happened on 25 April 1932. The government, despite its huge majority in parliament, was already tottering. A series of bad harvests had worsened the economic crisis. Scandals and splits within the Liberal Party had weakened Venizelos’s authority. He himself was not implicated in any wrongdoing. But Venizelos had never been one to consult or confide in his ministers. Lack of trust and a degree of personal arrogance had left him increasingly isolated as he approached his seventieth year.
Nothing damaged Venizelos’s electoral chances more than the failure of his economic policy of pegging the drachma to sterling and the gold standard, and the fallout from his rapprochement with Ankara. The collapse of the international tobacco trade, heavily concentrated in the New Lands where Liberal support had always been strongest, added to the turmoil. Recognizing that the tide was turning away from him, Venizelos fought the election campaign of September 1932 on a ticket that explicitly reopened old wounds: what he called the ‘civil war continuing since 1915’ must now be won, either by conciliation or by the victory of one side.14 Politically, after Greece’s second bankruptcy in 1932, the chance to heal the rift that went back to the First World War had all but vanished. Far from dampening down the old divisions, or trying to bridge them, politicians and their supporters in the military, on both sides, now began to vie with one another to rekindle the hatreds of almost twenty years before. It made matters worse that all the political leaders of any consequence were of an age to have been shaped by the polarization of that time. While the young people of the generation of Theotokas and Seferis were transforming the arts in Greece, the political class seems to have been starved of new blood or new ideas.
The election resulted in a close tie between the Liberals and the People’s Party, now led by Panagis Tsaldaris, ‘an essentially well-meaning, provincial lawyer with none of Venizelos’s charisma, energy, or vision’.15 All the advantages that had been gained by the spectacular victory of the Liberals four years before had been dissipated. First Tsaldaris and then Venizelos formed a precarious government that fell at the first vote of confidence. A new election in March 1933 again brought equal numbers of votes to both sides, but this time the electoral system gave a majority to the People’s Party. Enter, once again, the generals.
The military had been sidelined as a political force during Venizelos’s four-year term of office. Now, they were back. On the day after the election, one of the Liberals’ most vigorous supporters in the armed forces staged a military coup to try to overturn the result. Nikolaos Plastiras had form: he had been one of the two officers who seized power and created the ‘revolutionary’ government after the defeat of 1922. Like most such attempts between the wars, this one petered out after a few days from sheer lack of support. Venizelos was still politician enough to distance himself from the officers who had acted in his name.
But the political world was slipping inexorably beyond the control of parliament and towards violence. In June the same year, Venizelos and his wife narrowly escaped assassination when the car carrying them was chased by gunmen and shot through with bullets on the road between Athens and Kiphisia. The government was accused of dragging its feet, when little seemed to be done to bring perpetrators to justice. During the next two years, while the People’s Party was in power, fist fights broke out in parliament. Venizelos did nothing to calm matters by thundering from the wings about an impending ‘explosion, which could take the form of a most savage civil war’.16
On 1 March 1935 the explosion came. Plastiras tried again. And this time his attempt had the full support of his political master, Venizelos. In conception and execution, it was a textbook case of a general (and a politician) fighting the last campaign instead of the next one. Exactly as had happened in 1916, the coup attempted to set the New Lands against Old Greece, with simultaneous uprisings in Crete, the islands and Macedonia. Rather than challenge the government directly, the conspirators seem to have aimed once again to divide the country and set up their own administration in the ‘co-capital’ of Salonica. Fighting broke out in the north. For a few days, the Tsaldaris government was paralysed. This has led some to suggest that ‘with better planning and leadership’ the coup ‘might have succeeded’.17
But Plastiras failed. Both he and Venizelos fled the country. They were tried and condemned to death in their absence. Venizelos would never return, and would die in Paris a year later. But Plastiras still had a future in Greek politics. Three lower-ranking conspirators, less fortunate, were subjected to show trials and executed. Others were publicly humiliated. All senior ranks of the military were purged, along with the civil service and the judiciary. If Venizelos had set out to take the country back to 1916 by endorsing Plastiras’s action, their enemies in revenge had taken it, instead, back to 1922 and the execution of the Six.
The dust had barely settled from those events when a half-hearted election campaign took place under martial law. This was lifted only just in time for the election itself, on 9 June. Venizelists, subjected to intimidation just as they had been in 1916, repeated the classic, self-defeating mistake of boycotting the contest. This time it hardly mattered. The anti-Venizelists in the military were in no mood to rely on any political party, not even the one that had brought them back from the wilderness. These were men who had been marginalized for a dozen years and had only recently been swept back into positions of power by the tide of reprisals against the perpetrators of the failed coup. The only way to put an end to Venizelism for good would be to abolish the republic and bring back King George II from his exile in England. Nobody necessarily thought that restoration of the monarchy would heal the divisions, or bring any more stable government. On the contrary, it was to be the proof of who was in charge now, one in the eye for the hated Venizelists. The old ‘Schism’ was back in strength.
Its first casualty was the prime minister, Tsaldaris. The leader of the People’s Party had been elected as the undisputed master of the chamber. But this did not prevent the chiefs of the armed forces from intercepting him in his car on his way into Athens, on 10 October 1935, and politely demanding his resignation. Later, it would be the parliamentary system itself that would fall victim to the same inveterate rivalries within the officer corps that had been simmering for twenty years.
The arrest of the elected prime minister by the military was in effect another coup d’état. This one brought to power General Georgios Kondylis – the same man who had toppled the unloved General Pangalos and had since changed sides and become a royalist. Kondylis’s personal ambitions would fare no better on this second attempt. With the backing of the royalist faction in the military, his first act was to reimpose martial law. Under these conditions a rushed referendum on restoring the monarchy was held on 3 November. The result was an implausible 97.87 per cent of votes cast in favour of the king’s return.
King George II of the Hellenes landed at Phaliro on 25 November 1935. Greece’s first republic since independence had lasted for eleven and a half years. It has been dubbed, in a classic modern study, ‘stillborn’. It had been founded on political expediency and jockeying for position within an officer corps whose ranks and whose political heft had been unnaturally swollen by the civil strife of the 1910s. Its roots were shallow and it failed to create long-lasting institutions. Neither the role of President nor the elected second chamber, which would be abolished along with it, ever attracted individuals of stature or achieved much influence. Had Venizelos chosen to run for President himself, as had briefly been a possibility at one time, things might have turned out differently. As it was, the demise of the republic was part and parcel of a wider political failure. The drift towards authoritarianism had been encouraged at different times and in different ways by both political factions. By 1935, there was a real fear of renewed civil war between them.18
The second King George was a very different man from the first, and still more different from his father. He had first come to the throne in 1922, when King Constantine had been bundled out of the country in the wake of the defeat in Anatolia. He had reigned for only eighteen months before sharing the same fate, though in his case without ever abdicating his throne. The experience had left him understandably embittered. Returning to the country that had already rejected him once, he was distrustful of the Greeks in general and Greek politicians in particular. Greece, he was once reported as saying, ‘could not be regarded as a Western country. Greeks were Orientals and looked upon soft treatment as weakness.’19 His parents and grandparents had been Danish, Russian and German. The first King George had set himself assiduously to become a leader of his people. After him, King Constantine had made himself more Greek than the Greeks, winning the hearts and minds of the soldiers he led into battle. The second King George was the first monarch since Otto who in his own eyes and those of his subjects seemed an outsider.
During his exile in England, he had made many friendships there, including with the British royal family, to whom he was also related. It was inevitable that he would find it easier to confide in the British Minister, Sir Sydney Waterlow, than in his own compatriots – just as both his father and Venizelos had done with rival foreign diplomats during the First World War. The return of King George ensured that Greece would enjoy good relations with Great Britain for as long as he remained on the throne. The mutual trust and reliance between the restored king and the British Foreign Office might have seemed to bring benefit in the short term to both countries. But, however well intentioned it may have been on both sides, this closeness would exert an extraordinary and distorting effect on Greek political life throughout the next decade.
To his credit, the king started well. He dismissed Kondylis and insisted on a free and fair parliamentary election. This was held in January 1936. For once, nobody boycotted it. The result was yet again an even draw between the Venizelists and the anti-Venizelists, led by the People’s Party. Parliamentary government had been restored, but the impasse had not been resolved. There was a difference, though. This time, the balance of power was held by a party that until now had played only a marginal role in Greek politics. This is where the Communist Party of Greece (or KKE, to give it its Greek initials) enters the story.
THE FAULT LINE SHIFTS
The Socialist Labour Party of Greece had been launched in 1918. The initiative had been encouraged by Venizelos, who was seeking at the time to boost working-class support for his side of the ‘National Schism’. Then in 1924 the party changed its name to the Communist Party of Greece, or KKE. At the same time it became an affiliate of the Comintern, the international body founded in 1919 by the Russian leader Vladimir Lenin. The ideology of the KKE would be rigidly aligned to the Soviet model – as indeed it remains to this day, long after the demise of the Soviet Union.
Over the next decade, a handful of communist deputies sometimes won seats in parliament, but made little impact. Greece had almost no ‘proletariat’ to speak of, in the sense of an urban, industrial working class. But Communism found adherents in the tobacco industry, where large numbers were employed on low wages, and trade unionism was just beginning. It also began to have an appeal among a small number of intellectuals. Until 1935 the Comintern, perhaps influenced by lingering echoes of Russian pan-Slavism from the previous century, supported a separate state for the ‘Slavo-Macedonians’ of Greece’s northern provinces. That, taken together with its renunciation of nations and nationalism in principle, was enough to alienate most shades of opinion among Greeks.
As an international movement that was putting down roots in Greece, however shallow, Communism had begun to alarm the Greek political establishment before the end of the 1920s. A knee-jerk reaction to a phenomenon that was feared but not well understood was a new law against the ‘special offence’ of subverting the ‘established social order’, brought in by Venizelos in July 1929. Known ever since as the ‘Idionym’ law (from the word for ‘special’ in Greek legalese), this measure was mainly directed against communists and trade unionists. It has often been held up, particularly by the Greek left, as proof of Venizelos’s tendency towards authoritarianism. For the first time, it criminalized political opinions. During the remaining three years of Venizelos’s term of office, some fifteen hundred people fell foul of this law. In 1931 the penalty of internal exile – usually to a remote island in the Aegean – was re-introduced specifically for this type of offence. Both the penalty and the ‘Idionym’ law itself would remain in force until 1974, by which time the number of actual or supposed communists had multiplied exponentially, and the number of internees in proportion.
In 1935 the Comintern changed its stance. Two years earlier, Hitler had come to power in Germany. Now, communists were encouraged to participate in a broad ‘anti-fascist’ front. Calls for Slavic speakers in Macedonia and Thrace to have their own state were dropped. The way was open for the KKE to win its fifteen seats in the Greek parliament. The risk that the communists might seize power in Greece and overturn the ‘established social order’ – something that so far had happened only in Russia, and under the very particular pressures of a world war – could easily be exaggerated. But during the first months of 1936 that order was indeed under very grave threat. To understand why, we have to look at what was happening in the Greek economy during those years.
Beginning with the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, Greece’s agricultural exports had taken a severe hit. By 1932 production in tobacco, wine and currants had halved. Thousands of workers had been laid off. The total volume of foreign trade in 1932 had dropped by just over 60 per cent from the level of three years before. Gross National Product fell by a third, while unemployment grew by the same factor.20 As international markets collapsed or were drastically reshaped, Greece, like other countries, was forced back on its own resources. ‘Autarky’ – self-sufficiency – became the watchword. In its last months Venizelos’s Liberal government took a set of measures that were the polar opposite of economic liberalism. Tariffs were imposed on imports; domestic production was deliberately increased by government action. The state had never before intervened so drastically in managing the economy. And it really was the state that was intervening, not the government, once the measures had been set in place. Throughout the years of increasing political chaos between 1933 and 1936, the management of the economy was in the hands of those who would now be called ‘technocrats’ – officials of the Bank of Greece and the Agricultural Bank, and senior civil servants. Short-lived governments did little more than look on.
And the remarkable thing is that it worked. By 1935 observers both at home and abroad were astonished by the ‘remarkable recovery from the crisis’ and the ‘perceptible atmosphere of prosperity [that] prevails compared to two or three years ago’. Intervention by the Agricultural Bank to promote new, more productive strains of wheat greatly reduced Greece’s endemic reliance on imported cereals. But the very success of the economic upturn brought with it new instability and would play its part in realigning the fault line running through Greek social and political life during those years. In the new conditions, under protectionism and state intervention, the rich got richer and the poor poorer. As one historian puts it, ‘It was economic growth which taxed the capacities of the existing system and pointed the way to an eventual realignment of political forces.’21
As inequalities grew, the state apparatus was less and less able to cope with the fallout. In 1935 and during the first months of 1936, strikes and demonstrations became frequent. In May 1936 a strike by tobacco workers in Salonica brought the city to a standstill. After more than a week of escalation, a mass demonstration on 9 May was confronted by the armed gendarmerie. Thirty-two people were killed, and more than three hundred injured. The British Minister, Sir Sydney Waterlow, had written to the Foreign Office just one month before these events:
As new issues take shape, new lines of cleavage may be expected gradually to cut across the old, turning old hatreds into new channels … Perhaps the problem is insoluble: it may well be that parliamentary government will break down altogether.22
He was right. Four months later, it did. The blow, when it came, would come not from below, from the communists or the working class, but from above.
The name of Ioannis Metaxas has been a recurring, but mostly low-key, presence in these pages so far, going back all the way to his formative experience as a young army officer in the disastrous war of 1897. To most Greeks who followed public events during those years, he would have appeared in much the same light. Metaxas in the early months of 1936 was a man whose day was about to dawn. It happened that several of the elderly figures who had dominated Greek politics for two decades or more died during those months: the exiled Venizelos in March, then Tsaldaris, the leader of the People’s Party, in May. General Kondylis (who had toppled two governments, once acting as a Venizelist and the second time as a royalist) had preceded them at the end of January. As luck would have it, in April the same fate befell the caretaker prime minister appointed by the king to oversee the stalemate in parliament until a proper government could be formed. Metaxas, aged sixty-five that month, was not the youngest among these men, but would prove still to have five years of life left in him. How Metaxas would use those years probably not even he could have foreseen.
For one thing, he hardly looked the part that he was about to play. ‘General Metaxas is far from being endowed with the physical qualities necessary for success as a dictator,’ wrote Waterlow’s successor as British Minister in 1939. ‘His short, corpulent, ill-dressed figure could never evoke popular enthusiasm.’23 ‘General’ Metaxas had not worn a uniform since he had briefly served as Chief of Staff to King Constantine at the beginning of the First World War, and never would again. Propaganda photographs seem to glorify rather than to hide the paunch, the receding hair, and especially the rounded, chubby cheeks. His propagandists would promote Metaxas as a genial, paternal figure – the very antithesis of the fire and steel associated with Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin.
But Metaxas possessed steel of a different sort. Born into an aristocratic family from the Ionian islands, but in a country that from the beginning had never recognized aristocratic titles, Metaxas nurtured a lifelong veneration for Greece’s only official hereditary institution, the royal family. He was no less devoted to the military discipline in which he had been trained as a young staff officer in Germany. Politically, his overriding concern had always been for the integrity of the Greek state. During the First World War, Metaxas had been the most articulate advocate for neutrality. Later, almost alone on the royalist side after Venizelos’s electoral defeat in 1920, he had stood out against continuing the war in Anatolia. With a mixture of tenacity and shrewdness, Metaxas had established his own political party and stubbornly kept it going ever since. As capable of pragmatism as Venizelos, he had been the first political figure on the anti-Venizelist side to recognize the republic – a position that he had also been the first to repudiate, when the tide swung back after the failed Venizelist coup in 1935.
But, unlike Venizelos, Metaxas had never had much luck with the voters. His ‘Party of the Liberal-Minded’ (often misleadingly translated as ‘Freethinkers’) was neither named nor presented in a way that would easily appeal to those implacably opposed to Venizelos’s ‘Party of the Liberals’. In 1936, Metaxas’s party won fewer seats than the communists. If the electorate had never warmed to Metaxas, neither had he to them. By this time he had come to despise the entire parliamentary system, as it had evolved in Greece over the last two decades. In this he was by no means alone. Venizelos had effectively reached the same conclusion when he gave his blessing to Plastiras’s attempt to seize power by force.
So how it did happen? How did this unlikeliest of characters become, in effect, dictator for life on 4 August 1936?
The parliamentary arithmetic at the end of January allowed for only three possibilities. Either the Liberals or the anti-Venizelist bloc led by the People’s Party could form an alliance with the communists to form a majority. Or the two great blocs, which between them held most of the seats, could settle their differences and work together to keep the communists out. An understanding between the anti-Venizelists and the communists was out of the question – their ideological differences were just too great. That left a Liberal–communist alignment, or one between the Liberals and the anti-Venizelists. Both were tried. And both fell at the same hurdle.
It took less than a month after the election for the Liberals and the communists to come up with a set of compromises that would allow them to form a government. But the military chiefs of staff would have none of it. The minister for military affairs in the caretaker administration visited King George to break the news. The king summoned Metaxas and placed him in charge of the ministry instead. Within days Metaxas had also been appointed deputy prime minister. The character of the caretaker government had changed. And it was the veto by the generals that had changed it.
Then on 13 April 1936 the interim prime minister, Konstantinos Demertzis, died. King George now exercised a prerogative that still existed, under the Constitution of 1864. He appointed as prime minister a man whose party held only seven out of three hundred seats in the chamber: Ioannis Metaxas. In hindsight it seems extraordinary that two weeks later Metaxas went on to win a vote of confidence with an overwhelming majority. In this way the deputies of the established political parties willingly sleepwalked towards the abolition of the democratic institution that they had been elected to serve.
Five days after winning the vote, Metaxas declared a parliamentary recess, to last until September. Events now moved rapidly. A wave of strikes, culminating in the violence in Salonica in May, gave credence to fears that a general uprising organized by the Communists was imminent. Metaxas did everything he could to ramp up those fears. They may have been genuinely shared by King George. Diplomatic observers at the time thought the risks were being much exaggerated, a view shared by historians since. Then in July came the second serious attempt by the political parties to form a government. But this one, too, it soon turned out was no more acceptable to the armed forces than the previous deal with the communists had been. The price exacted by the Liberals for shoring up the anti-Venizelist bloc was to be the reinstatement of all those purged from the armed services in reprisal for the Venizelist coup attempt the previous year. This put the jobs of many serving officers on the line – the ones who had been drafted in to replace them and in many cases had themselves been the victims of previous purges.
The king appeared to accept the proposals of the party leaders to form a coalition. But it seems that this was the moment when he and Metaxas decided to act. The occasion and the pretext were provided when the General Confederation of Greek Workers called a twenty-four-hour general strike for Wednesday 5 August. The day before the strike was due to begin, martial law was declared, articles of the constitution were suspended, and parliament was dissolved. Soon afterwards, all political parties were disbanded, including Metaxas’s own. The ‘Regime of the Fourth of August’ had begun.
Such was the climate of the time that no show of strength was even necessary. The day passed peacefully. There was no resistance. By the time anyone was minded to protest, it was too late. The reason that Metaxas and his spokesmen would give for their intervention, tirelessly and repetitively over the next days, months and years, was that it had been necessary to forestall a violent takeover by the communists.
The reality was different. What seems fundamentally to have motivated Metaxas, and enabled him to persuade the king to back him, was the fear that the old civil war of 1916 would be revived within the army. If the grand coalition of Venizelist and anti-Venizelist parties had been allowed to go ahead, there was a real prospect that the two rival corps of officers would have ended up fighting it out between them. Added impetus to these fears came from what had just happened in Spain.
Only two weeks before Metaxas’s seizure of power, Spanish military units based in Morocco and in the Canary Islands had declared war on the Popular Front government that had recently been elected to power in the Spanish Republic. The Spanish Civil War that began in July 1936 would soon play out as a proxy war between Communism and Fascism. But that would not have been immediately obvious during its first weeks. What thoughtful Greek observers would have seen happening in Spain was a war waged by one half of the country’s armed forces against the other. Perhaps the same thing really could have happened in Greece? We will never know. But we can at least judge by results. The intervention of General Franco in Spain in July 1936 started a civil war. That of General Metaxas in Greece, three weeks later, did not. On the other hand, whatever may have been the motivation of Metaxas and King George II, the consequence of their action in the long run would be not to prevent civil conflict, but only to postpone it.
The effect of the Metaxas regime would be the equivalent of pouring a deep layer of concrete over the shifting fault line that divided Greek society. When the plates began to move again, the nature of the forces driving them would have changed. The concrete did not suppress or diffuse the pressures that were building up. But it did make them split along a different axis. The KKE, a largely imaginary threat invented to excuse the seizure of power in 1936, would in the short term be almost destroyed by the Metaxas regime. But the rhetoric of that threat would go on to nourish the creature it was meant to destroy. Communism was not a significant force in Greece in 1936. Ten years later, it would have become one.
The Greek left, which despite official persecution would go on to dominate the country’s intellectual life from the 1940s onwards, would paradoxically emerge as an unintended beneficiary of the Metaxas regime. Modern notions of left and right entered Greek politics with the imposition of a manifestly and extreme right-wing dictatorship in 1936. When the fault line once again broke through the concrete, in the next decade, it would be along the right–left axis that Greece would split apart, in the country’s second civil war of the twentieth century.
THE ‘NEW STATE’ AND THE ‘THIRD GREEK CIVILIZATION’
The regime began by establishing complete control over the press and communications. By the evening of the first day, the police had visited the offices of all the country’s newspapers and delivered instructions on what they would and would not in future be allowed to publish. The latter included the instructions themselves. The public was not even supposed to know that the newspapers they read had become mere instruments of the regime – although this was a secret that could hardly be kept for long. Later in the month, a new ‘Undersecretariat of Press and Tourism’ was formed. Its remit was defined as:
Instruction of public opinion, i.e. matters pertaining to the Greek and foreign daily and periodical press, Congresses and Exhibitions of all kinds, the Theatre, cinema, gramophone records, every form of advertisement, lectures, publications and in general printed matter of every kind, performances whether live or reproduced by mechanical means, so as to comply with the framework of national traditions and aspirations, including control of radio broadcasts.24
Beneath its innocuous-sounding name, the ‘Undersecretariat’ was modelled along the lines of the notorious Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels in Berlin. Indeed, most of the rhetoric and many of the methods adopted by the Metaxas regime are immediately recognizable as ready-made borrowings from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. New media were to be exploited to the full for the purposes of control and to promote the regime’s message throughout the population. Before long, slogans would appear everywhere – even stamped on lightbulbs, postmarks on letters, and all over the countryside. Other echoes of the Nazis were the short-lived Labour Battalions and Metaxas’s most cherished creation, the National Youth Organization (known by its Greek initials EON). Young people were encouraged, and after 1938 effectively forced, to join EON. Summer camps became compulsory and included political indoctrination. The young members of EON (numbering one million by 1939), and workers conscripted into the Labour Battalions, learned to give a variation of the Nazi salute – though it is said that the ‘Leader’ himself never returned it.
Metaxas and the elderly appointees who made up his government (hardly any ministers had a background in politics) made no distinction between the nation and the state. For them, the supreme value was the corporate state. Metaxas’s belief in the ‘State’ was obsessive. It was a fixation. The state was ‘a living organism’, it had an existence of its own, interests of its own. It was founded upon ‘an organized national mass’. In the early months of the dictatorship the regime began to promote what it called the ‘New State’. The language used by Metaxas in his first address to the students of Greece’s second university, in Salonica, is chilling:
I forbid any of you, male or female, to have any ideas other than those of the State. I require you not only to have the same ideas as the State, but to believe in them and to work accordingly with enthusiasm. If any of you have different ideas he or she had better not be educated.25
Just as Hitler had proclaimed the Third German Reich and Mussolini the Third Rome, Metaxas in a speech in June 1937 came up with the ‘Third Greek Civilization’. This was not so much intended to describe present conditions as to represent a goal for the future. It was to be ‘a civilization superior to those of the past and capable of keeping our nation among those who wish, are able, and are worthy to live’.26 The model from the past chosen by the regime and its ideologues was not democratic Athens, but militarist, corporate, disciplined Sparta – which in turn had been the inspiration for militarist traditions in Germany that went back well before the Nazis.
But there was more to the Regime of the Fourth of August than ideology and slogans. Its domestic policies (including repressive measures taken against communists) were mostly not new, but built on and intensified efforts that had begun under Venizelos. Indeed, there was more continuity between the four-year period of stable parliamentary rule under Venizelos and the authoritarian regime of Metaxas than is often realized.
First of all, state institutions were further strengthened. The civil service was increased. So was the police. The regime embarked on an ambitious series of public works. A series of laws did much to resolve the crisis in labour relations that had resulted from the economic recovery since 1932, and that none of the previous elected governments had proved capable of handling. Strikes were declared illegal, but so were lock-outs by employers. Both sides in industrial disputes were forced to accept compulsory arbitration. An eight-hour working day was introduced. The social security system, another embryonic legacy of the Venizelos years, was considerably extended. These and other measures were intended to bring about ‘social reform’ and ‘a just distribution of wealth’, in this way addressing the most glaring of the grievances of workers and the unemployed who had suffered disproportionately during the years of recovery.27 State-driven measures to increase employment seem not to have been very successful, and tax rates rose. But the drive to increase wheat production, initiated in Venizelos’s final year in office, continued to such an extent that output doubled between 1936 and 1938 under Metaxas, with a corresponding further reduction in reliance on imports.
Much of the new legislation was aimed directly at the disaffected peasantry and agricultural workers. In subjecting all social classes to the diktat of the corporate state, Metaxas was trying to neutralize the perceived threat from below by presenting himself as the ‘Leader’ of the oppressed. Elaborate public occasions, speeches and radio broadcasts promoted the dictator as the ‘First Peasant’ and ‘First Worker’. However quaint or even absurd these period postures seem today, they are of a piece with Metaxas’s championship of the spoken language, or demotic Greek. Metaxas was the first to commission an official grammar of spoken Greek, bucking a trend that for much of the twentieth century linked demotic with the political left and the official form of the language, known as katharevousa, with the right.
The most effective internal measures taken by the Metaxas regime were those directed against the communists or, increasingly, against dissenters of any kind. Metaxas’s favoured instrument of oppression was not the army but the police. His Minister of Public Security, Konstantinos Maniadakis, was the most feared man in Greece. As well as being head of the rural gendarmerie and the city police force, Maniadakis also ran an efficient service of underground surveillance. Thousands of communists were rounded up, interrogated, dosed with castor oil, and in many cases sent to detention camps on remote islands. The price for release was to sign a ‘Declaration of Repentance’. In 1940 the regime boasted that forty-seven thousand individuals had signed these declarations – a figure more than three times the recorded membership of the KKE in 1936.28 As for the party itself, by that time it had been driven underground. Its leader, Nikos Zachariadis, and the members of its Central Committee were in prison. The threat that had provided the pretext for the regime to seize power had been extinguished, if it had ever existed. On the other hand, thousands who had been victimized by the regime had been given an outlet for their new sense of grievance in future, one that might never otherwise have occurred to them.
In hindsight, it is hard not to see the imposition of dictatorship in Greece in 1936 as part of the slide towards totalitarianism that was happening all over Europe at the time, and would culminate in the Second World War. It was not only in Greece that parliamentary democracy had first come under threat and then, increasingly, become discredited. Mussolini had held sole power in Italy since 1922, Stalin in Russia since the mid-1920s, Hitler in Germany since 1933. Other countries were jumping on the bandwagon. To many in Greece during the second half of the 1930s, it must have looked as though the political chaos of the last few years, and the impasse of the hung parliament of 1936, had shown up the limits of a system that was crumbling not just at home, but all over the continent. When everything else had been tried and failed, perhaps their portly, self-proclaimed ‘Leader’ and the authoritarian methods of these seemingly unstoppable rising powers really did represent the way of the future?
Certainly, there was little overt resistance. A widespread view seems to have been that while it left much to be desired, the ‘New State’ was still to be preferred to the chaos that had preceded it. At least no one was talking, now, of the risk of civil war. Organized attempts to overthrow the regime and restore parliamentary government were made on only two occasions. Both came in 1938. Both were brief, half-hearted and decisively put down. By the autumn of that year it was obvious to all that Metaxas was there to stay.
Resistance was not conspicuous in the world of the arts and intellectuals either. This was in marked contrast to what would happen later, under the dictatorship of the ‘Colonels’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Few prominent figures in the arts at this time identified with Communism. Exceptions were the poets Kostas Varnalis and the young Giannis Ritsos, and the historian Giannis Kordatos, who in the 1920s had written the first Marxist history of the Greek Revolution. Ritsos circulated some of his poems in underground publications, such as the communist newspaper Rizospastis (The Radical). But much of his work had no overt political content and appeared in mainstream periodicals that were subject to censorship. For the most part, writers and intellectuals kept their distance from the regime. The spectacle of public burnings of books, and the banning of some of their own previously published work, was hardly likely to endear them. And the sentiment seems to have been mutual: ‘Though I honour and respect pure intellect,’ Metaxas once said in a speech, ‘I have to admit that I communicate better with people of practical professions.’29
This is not to say that artists and intellectuals were either won over or submitted to coercion, as happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany at this time. There was no mass exodus, either, as there was from Germany. Poetry, fiction, visual arts, theatre and cinema (the last two tightly controlled by the regime) had already embarked on their own, subtler, quest for autarky – seeking the indigenous roots of a uniquely Greek character, history and culture – and carried on in the same direction. The avant-garde, experimental techniques, whether in writing, painting or music, that had burst upon the Greek scene at the end of the 1920s, became fused during the last years of the decade with an agenda of national self-discovery. The novel known in English as Zorba the Greek, written by Nikos Kazantzakis in the early 1940s, provides as good an example of this trend as any. The regime itself is best understood as an expression (crude and plodding by comparison) of this same quest.
There was one section of Greek society that would not be reconciled to the regime – nor the regime to it. This was the urban underclass, whose distinctive voice had first begun to be heard in the first decade of the century. Its numbers had been hugely swelled, and its repertory of self-expression greatly extended, by the arrival of the refugees in the 1920s. Many of those who were destitute drifted into the world of petty crime and the defiantly antisocial society of the manges that flourished around the dockyards of Piraeus and the poorer suburbs of Athens, Salonica and the larger towns. The music and songs known as rebetika celebrated a different kind of self-sufficiency from the official one.
The manges and the urban underclass that sustained them and their songs were never politically organized. But they were the reason that the otherwise surprising item of ‘gramophone records’ appeared in the list of media to be censored, within weeks of the regime taking power. Rebetika were like a red rag to the regime’s ideologues. Here was a working class that presented itself as impervious to authority, its own values as superior to those of the state, its practices corrosive of everything that the ‘New State’ stood for. How was the ‘Third Greek Civilization’ to be born out of a society that tolerated hashish junkies, criminal behaviour and contempt for the corporate state?
Perhaps most objectionable of all about rebetika was the music itself. The favourite instrument of the manges, the bouzouki, belongs to the same family as the Turkish saz. The music of rebetika continued to be based on the system of modes, the makam system, that characterizes much of the music of the Middle East. It does not sound ‘European’, still less Western. At a time when the Greek state was more determined than it had been for a hundred years to define itself exclusively as part of western Europe, all such reminders of an ‘oriental’ past must be blotted out. Probably worse even than the reminder of Turkish rule, the music of rebetika kept alive memories of a Greek nation that had been widely dispersed throughout the East, and itself formed part of the Ottoman system. Rapprochement with modern Turkey was one thing – a political form of expediency begun by Venizelos that Metaxas did nothing to disturb. But memories of a past that was specifically Ottoman, and of a Greek nation that had once extended far beyond the reach of the official Greek state, could not be tolerated.
The regime went into action. Musical styles, instruments and vocal techniques regarded as ‘Turkish’ were cleared from the order books of the recording studios. Composers and performers were harassed, imprisoned, or exiled on islands for various forms of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. The bouzouki itself, identified by this time almost equally with a ‘Turkish’ past and with the criminality of the underworld that cultivated it, became a symbol of subversion in the eyes of the authorities. Instruments were liable to be seized and smashed, their owners taken in for questioning. This was the time when the younger cousin of the bouzouki, the baglamas, came into its own – the more easily to be concealed beneath clothing or in a specially designed pocket sewn into an overcoat.
And yet despite these measures, and in marked contrast to all other enemies of the regime, actual or supposed, rebetika flourished. Gramophone records – their lyrics ‘cleaned up’ by censorship – had never been so popular. The greatest songwriter and bouzouki player of the interwar generation, Markos Vamvakaris, many years later recalled the summers of the late 1930s when he and a small rebetika band set up shop in the blighted shanty-town on the western outskirts of Athens called Votanikos:
It was pandemonium every night … All sorts of people used to come. High society aristocrats as well as manges and street kids and they’d rave it up until dawn. The whole crème de la crème of Athens came by … The whole of Athens, Piraeus, all the suburbs. They came from Larisa, Tripoli, Salonica, from all over Greece.30
The boastful exaggeration is part of the style. But there was truth in it. Rebetika were on their way up. However unlikely it may seem, it was during the Metaxas years that this particular expression of Greek identity began to move beyond the underclass that had nurtured it, to enter the mainstream, in due course to be hailed by the painter Giannis Tsarouchis as the ‘sole proof of the existence of a modern Greek culture’.31 The Metaxas dictatorship can hardly take the credit for that. But in a society where every public utterance was controlled, and in which no direct evidence of public attitudes was ever allowed to be collected, the survival of this music and the spread of its appeal through the social classes during those years are testimony to aspects of the Greek character that the regime was never going to tame.
The evidence of rebetika gives substance to the verdict of one Greek historian, delivered in the twenty-first century, on the regime and its statist vision: ‘For Greeks, unlike the concept of the nation, the state had always been an object of popular derision. Thus, in their time-honoured tradition they merely paid lip-service to this grand design.’32
ULTIMATUM
In one respect the Metaxas regime could not have been more different from its Nazi and Fascist counterparts. Mussolini had revealed imperial ambitions overseas in 1935 with his invasion of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). In Germany, the goal of expanding the state to create Lebensraum (living space) for its citizens at the expense of the ‘inferior’ peoples of eastern Europe and Asia lay at the heart of Nazi ideology. The Regime of the Fourth of August had nothing militaristic or expansionist about it. Greece had learned its bitter lesson in 1922. Metaxas had been against the war in Anatolia then; nothing that had happened since had inclined him to change his mind. His simple hope, ‘for our dear little Greece to be spared’, set down in a private letter at the start of one world war, would accompany him to the end of his life at a crucial moment during the second.
The Metaxas regime kept up the system of local defensive alliances that had been brokered by Venizelos, including with Turkey. The greatest headache for the regime, as it would have been for any Greek government during those years, was the threat from the European powers that once again seemed on a collision course that must lead to war. Once Hitler had annexed Austria and part of Czechoslovakia in 1938, it could only be a matter of time before Mussolini would feel the need to flex his own muscles in the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
The only other power that could be a match for Italy in the eastern Mediterranean was Great Britain. On 3 October 1938, just days after the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had declared ‘peace for our time’ after agreeing to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Metaxas addressed an extraordinary plea to the Foreign Office:
An alliance with Great Britain is what I want. And why not? We must assume as a plain fact that in the event of European war the use of the Greek islands and Greek ports will be an imperative necessity to the British Fleet and Air Arm. If you cannot have this automatically as an ally, you will be obliged to take it …
This was of course what had happened in 1916. Metaxas had lost nothing of the bitterness he and very many Greeks had experienced at that time. Now, his solution was to steal the policy of his then opponent Venizelos: better by far a pre-emptive alliance than the deadly cocktail of partial occupation and civil war.33
To his diary Metaxas confided his belief that his offer would be rejected. Recalling the moment a year and a half later, by which time Britain and Germany were at war, but not yet either Italy or Greece, he would speculate, ‘Are they now about to offer us an alliance? I shudder. But maybe better if so.’34 In any case, in 1938 Metaxas’s intuition was correct. In Great Britain the climate of appeasement still continued. More pragmatically, if short-sightedly, the Foreign Office calculated that it ‘would eventually secure all that Metaxas promised without the obligations of an alliance’.35 And so the nations stumbled on towards war.
In March 1939 the German army marched into those parts of Czechoslovakia that had not already been annexed by the Third Reich. At the end of the month, the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, paid his second visit to Greece. After a meeting with Metaxas, Goebbels professed himself satisfied that in the event of war the Greek government would remain neutral and was well disposed towards Germany. Metaxas, for his part, noted telegraphically in his diary, ‘Reassurances on both sides.’36 A week later, on 7 April, Italian troops landed at Durrës on the coast of Albania. Twenty-four hours later they had occupied the entire country. Metaxas was no longer so reassured. A week after that, the governments of Britain and France issued a statement supporting the integrity of Greece and Romania against attack – a declaration well short of a guarantee, and destined to be swept aside by events. Then, on 1 September, Hitler invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun.
The first nine months, which have often been called the ‘phoney war’, were in the Balkans rather a time of ‘phoney’ peace. Italy did not join the war until June 1940. By this time most of northern Europe had already fallen to the Nazis. While the Battle of Britain raged in the skies above the English Channel, and then when bombs began to devastate British cities in September, the government of Winston Churchill was in no position to offer much support to Greece, even when it looked increasingly likely that an Italian attack was imminent.
On 15 August, at the height of the annual pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary on the island of Tinos, a torpedo fired from a submarine sank the Greek cruiser Elli, at anchor outside the harbour. No one doubted that the submarine had been Italian. But the newspapers were not allowed to say so. Metaxas sent an urgent telegram to the British government, asking for help in the event of an attack. A reply came within days from Churchill himself. But there was still no commitment. Metaxas, ever true to his principles, kept all mention of this exchange out of the newspapers, to avoid the risk of provoking further action by Italy.
In the meantime, Metaxas had kept in secret touch with the Germans. He had still not given up hope that Hitler could be prevailed upon to restrain his ally, Mussolini. But the price the Nazis held out to Greece was to join the Axis. This Metaxas could not risk doing – for exactly the same geopolitical reasons that King Constantine had once set out in response to the equivalent demand by the Kaiser. Greece was a maritime power and Great Britain was master of the seas.37 In the midst of that summer of crisis and uncertainty, Metaxas noted with grim fatalism in his diary:
If the Germans prevail, we will become their slaves. – If the British prevail, we’ll become slaves to them! – If neither, Europe will fall apart. It’ll fall apart anyway. My God, what despair!38
Summer ended late in Greece that year. As October drew to a close, the nights were still warm. Athens was full of rumours that the Italians were about to attack from Albania. The government had prepared secret orders to mobilize reservists at a moment’s notice. On Friday 25 October there was still no sign of the anticipated invasion. Metaxas went to the opera that evening to hear Puccini’s Madama Butterfly performed by an Italian company. ‘Enthusiastic reception,’ he noted in his diary. The next day the Italian ambassador, Emanuele Grazzi, invited the cast and members of the Greek government to his embassy to celebrate. Then on Sunday the Italian news agency claimed that Greek raiders had attacked Italian troops inside Albania.39
On the morning of Monday 28 October, Grazzi and Metaxas met again. It was 3 a.m., at the dictator’s unassuming home in Kiphisia. Metaxas had to be roused from bed to receive the ambassador. The embarrassed Grazzi had come to deliver an ultimatum. Greece must surrender unspecified strategic positions and allow Italian troops to pass unhindered through the country. Tradition has it that Metaxas answered with a single word: ‘Ochi’, the Greek for ‘no’. Ever since, the date has been celebrated as a national holiday in Greece, known as ‘Ochi Day’ in celebration of this act of defiance. In reality, whatever conversation took place would have been conducted in French, the international diplomatic language of the time. What Metaxas actually said was probably most accurately preserved by the first of his ministers to arrive for an urgent cabinet meeting shortly afterwards: ‘Donc, Monsieur, c’est la guerre’ (‘In that case, sir, it’s war’).40
For the second time in the twentieth century, Greece had been dragged into a European war that would soon engulf almost the entire world. And the never-popular Metaxas, whose entire military and political career had been built on trying to prevent this from happening, overnight became a national hero.