Kingdom of Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of Greece was born from a secret society formed in 1814 by three men who met in Odesa. Nikolaos Skoufas, Emmanuil Xanthos, and Athanasios Tsakalov had one purpose: to unite all Greeks in an armed uprising against Ottoman rule, which had held Greek lands since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Seven years after that meeting, the fuse was lit. What followed was nearly four centuries of occupation shattered in a single decade of revolt, and a new kingdom assembled on the ruins. But the Kingdom of Greece would prove to be one of the most turbulent constitutional experiments in modern European history. Kings were deposed, exiled, and restored. Republics rose, collapsed, and were reborn. A single ideological dream, the Megali Idea, drove the kingdom outward for generations, nearly doubling its territory before delivering a catastrophe that ended the dream entirely. What shaped this kingdom? Who held real power, and who only appeared to? And how did a state forged in revolution end up twice abolished by military juntas of its own soldiers?

• 2. A Kingdom Assembled

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  Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was the first candidate for the Greek throne. He turned the offer down. The Greeks then settled on Otto von Wittelsbach, Prince of Bavaria, who arrived at the provisional capital, Nafplion, in 1833 aboard a British warship. He was a Roman Catholic ruling a predominantly Orthodox Christian people, and his marriage to Queen Amalia remained childless, leaving the succession perpetually uncertain. A council of Bavarian regents ruled in his name until 1837, imposing rigid German administrative ideas and keeping significant offices away from Greeks. They dissolved four hundred small monasteries with fewer than five monks or nuns and declared the Greek Church autocephalous, breaking it away from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. That decision rankled for decades. In September 1843, the military garrison in Athens revolted and forced Otto to grant a constitution. The new document created a bicameral parliament, an Assembly called the Vouli and a Senate called the Gerousia, and introduced universal male suffrage. It was modelled on the French Constitution of 1830 and the Belgian Constitution of 1831, and it established, formally, that the ministers were responsible to the monarch rather than to the parliament. That ambiguity would haunt Greek politics for the rest of the 19th century.

• 3. The Language and the Land

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  By the late 19th century, the United States Consul in Athens, William Moffet, reported that Greek agriculture used wooden ploughs and mattocks unchanged since antiquity, that fields were planted until the soil was exhausted, and that Greek olive oil and wine would not bear transportation. Greece entered independence in 1833 with a countryside devastated by war, depopulated in places, with bad roads and primitive agriculture. The government's response was the Law for the Dotation of Greek Families of 1835, which extended credit of 2,000 drachmas to every family for purchasing a twelve-acre farm. The kingdom was full of displaced refugees and empty Ottoman estates. A series of land reforms over several decades distributed confiscated land to create a class of free peasants. Even with this redistribution, the country remained deeply poor. By 1893, public insolvency was declared, partly because the reformist Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis had borrowed heavily to build infrastructure including the Corinth Canal, overtaxing a weak economy. Greeks grew rich as merchants and shipowners, Piraeus became a major port, but little of this wealth reached the rural peasantry. Poverty was eased mainly by large-scale emigration to the United States. A second battle, no less charged, was being fought over Greek itself. Educated elites promoted Katharevousa, a purified archaic Greek used in government documents and newspapers that few ordinary Greeks could read. When the New Testament was translated into everyday Demotic Greek in 1901, riots erupted in Athens and the government fell, in what became known as the Evangeliaka. The Constitution of 1911 later declared Katharevousa the official language of the nation, and this battle over which Greek would continue to trouble the country until the 1970s.

• 4. The Megali Idea in Practice

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  Thessaly and small parts of Epirus were ceded to Greece in 1881 under the Treaty of Berlin. It was a partial satisfaction. The Megali Idea, the dream of uniting all Greek-speaking lands into a single state with Constantinople as its capital, had driven Greek foreign policy since the kingdom's founding. Crete remained the sharpest frustration. A prolonged revolt in Crete from 1866-1869 inflamed nationalist feeling. In 1897, Prime Minister Theodoros Deligiannis bowed to popular pressure and declared war on the Ottomans. The badly trained Greek army was defeated. Through Great Power intervention, Greece lost only modest border territory, and Crete was made an autonomous state under the High Commissioner Prince George of Greece. Real momentum arrived only after the Goudi coup of the 15th of August 1909, when inexperienced military conspirators asked the Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos to come to Greece as their political adviser. Venizelos became Prime Minister in October 1910, invited French and British military missions, and by spring 1912 had helped organise the Balkan League among Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia. When they declared war on the Ottoman Empire in October 1912, Ottoman intelligence had miscalculated Greek intentions entirely. The Army of Thessaly under Crown Prince Constantine concentrated all seven Greek divisions against a single Ottoman corps, seized Thessaloniki, and captured its garrison of 26,000 men along with 70 artillery pieces, 30 machine guns, and 70,000 rifles. These gains from the Balkan Wars nearly doubled Greece's area and population.

• 5. National Schism

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  King Constantine I was born in Greece, the first Greek king to be Greek Orthodox, and his name had been chosen to evoke the Byzantine emperors. He had commanded the Greek Army through the Balkan Wars. Eleftherios Venizelos was his Prime Minister. When World War I broke out in 1914, their diverging views cracked open. Constantine had been educated in Germany, was married to Sophia of Prussia, sister of Kaiser Wilhelm, and believed the Central Powers would win. Venizelos was an ardent anglophile. Constantine favoured continued neutrality. Venizelos sought entry on the Allied side. When the Allies offered Cyprus in exchange for Greek help at the Dardanelles in 1915, the split became irreparable. Venizelos was dismissed, won elections, was dismissed again. In August 1916, Venizelist officers rose up in Allied-controlled Thessaloniki and Venizelos established a rival Greek government there. In November 1916, the French occupied Piraeus, bombarded Athens, and forced the Greek fleet to surrender. Constantine was removed in June 1917 without formally abdicating. His second son Alexander became king. Greece entered the war on the Allied side, but the National Schism had hardened into something deeper than politics. When Alexander died unexpectedly in 1920 and the Venizelist liberals lost elections that November, a plebiscite brought the hated Constantine back from exile. Italy and France used his return as justification for switching their support to Mustafa Kemal. In August 1922, the Turkish army shattered the Greek front and took Smyrna. A compulsory population exchange followed, uprooting over 1.5 million Christians and almost half a million Muslims. The catastrophe ended the Megali Idea and triggered the abdication of Constantine, the Trial of the Six, and the proclamation of the Second Hellenic Republic on the 25th of March 1924.

• 6. Dictatorship and Occupation

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  On the 10th of October 1935, Georgios Kondylis abolished the Republic in a coup and declared the monarchy restored. The plebiscite that confirmed the change recorded 97.88% in favour; it was widely regarded as rigged. King George II returned, immediately dismissed Kondylis, and appointed Professor Konstantinos Demertzis as interim Prime Minister. Within months, a series of deaths reshaped Greek politics: Kondylis died in February 1936, Venizelos in March, Demertzis in April, and Tsaldaris in May. The path was clear for the retired royalist general Ioannis Metaxas, who on the 4th of August 1936, with the king's support, suspended parliament and established the 4th of August Regime. Metaxas promoted the concept of a Third Hellenic Civilization, introduced the Roman salute, created a national youth organisation, and founded the Greek Social Insurance Institute, known as IKA, still the largest social security institution in Greece. He also constructed the Metaxas Line of defensive fortifications. Despite these measures, the regime lacked a genuine popular base. The Greek people were, the record shows, largely apathetic. Italian troops crossed the border on the 28th of October 1940, but a determined Greek defence drove them back into Albania. Metaxas died in January 1941. Adolf Hitler attacked Greece through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria on the 6th of April 1941, and by the end of May the Germans had overrun most of the country. The occupied territory was divided into three zones, German, Italian, and Bulgarian. During the winter of 1941-1942, hundreds of thousands perished in a famine caused by German appropriation of agricultural production and a British blockade that initially hindered relief. The largest resistance group, the National Liberation Front known as EAM, was controlled by the Communists, and a civil war within the occupation had already begun between EAM's armed wing ELAS and non-Communist groups.

• 7. Civil War and Economic Miracle

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  German forces withdrew on the 12th of October 1944, and the government in exile returned to Athens. On the 3rd of December 1944, a large pro-EAM demonstration in Athens ended in violence, beginning the Dekemvriana, an intense house-to-house struggle with British and monarchist forces. The Varkiza agreement disarmed ELAS. Fighting broke out again in 1946. By the end of that year, the Communist Democratic Army of Greece faced the governmental National Army, backed first by Britain and after 1947 by the United States. In 1949, Yugoslavia closed its borders following the split between Marshal Josip Broz Tito and the Soviet Union, dealing the insurgents a major blow. Marshal Alexander Papagos launched a final offensive in August 1949 that forced the remaining fighters to surrender or flee north. The civil war left 100,000 dead, at least 25,000 Greeks evacuated to Eastern bloc countries, and 700,000 displaced inside the country. The 1947 Treaty of Paris required Italy to hand over the Dodecanese islands to Greece; these were the last majority Greek-speaking territories to be united with the Greek state, apart from Cyprus, which became independent in 1960. From this devastation, Greece built what the source describes as an economic miracle under Prime Ministers Alexandros Papagos and Konstantinos Karamanlis. Growth in manufacturing, particularly textiles, chemicals, and metallurgy, reached annual rates approaching 11% during 1965-1970. Tourism expanded. Emigrant remittances supported the balance of payments. But on the 21st of April 1967, a group of right-wing colonels led by Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos seized power, suppressed civil liberties, dissolved political parties, and imprisoned or exiled thousands of suspected communists and political opponents. A failed counter-coup by King Constantine II on the 13th of December 1967 forced him into exile. The monarchy was abolished in 1973 by the junta itself, a decision confirmed by a democratic referendum in 1974, when the Third Hellenic Republic was established.