The history of Greece continues as a succession invasions and periods of domination. After the Macedonians Empire, the Greeks were generally occupied by the by the Romans. Next a transition occurred to successors to the Romans in the east, the Byzantine Empire which ended in 1453 AD. However, the Greek Islands were often occupied by other powers of the day like the Franks and Venetians. They were also periodically besieged by pirates which is greatly responsible for many prominent cities in the islands being built in high places and with narrow, winding streets that make attacks disorienting.
Ultimately, the Byzantine Empire ended in 1453 AD when the Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul. The Ottoman rule over Greece lasted for almost four centuries. This represented a dark period for the inhabitants of the ex-Byzantine Empire, particularly Greece. Seeking their freedom, people of the Greece territory started to organize themselves and various revolts exploded against the Turks.
The Greek War of Independence formally began in 1821 and led to the establishment in March 1831 of a new and independent Greek State. Figuring prominently in the Greek War of Independence were the contributions of three relatively small Greek Islands – Hydra, Spestes and Psara.
Strife continued in Greece to follow in the form of civil war, prior to the difficult occupation during World War II by the Axis Powers, principally Germany. Thereafter, Greece was not able to fully enjoy the joy of liberation because it encountered more civil war. Greece also experienced the dictatorship of Metaxas from 1967 to 1974. An analysis of Greek history reveals the complexity, suffering and alienation of its people who continually fought for its liberation – a liberation it has now achieved.
A monarchy was established a few years after that by the Great Powers. Later, the Greeks elected Eleutherios Venizelos as their first Prime Minister. Venizelos rose to the leadership of the Liberal Party, and was supported by workers and merchants. The Liberal Party won the elections of 1910 and 1912 catapulting Venizelos to the post of Prime Minister. He achieved the passage of constitutional amendments, established social laws to improve worker’s rights. Venizelos also expanded and rearmed the Greek military.
In 1896, Greece hosted the revival of the Olympics with the modern Olympic games in Athens. The 1896 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the I Olympiad, were an international multi-sport event which was celebrated in Athens, Greece, from April 6 to April 15, 1896. It was the first Olympic Games held in the modern era of the Olympic Games. Because ancient Greece was the birthplace of the Olympic Games, Athens was chosen as the appropriate choice to stage the inaugural modern Games. It was unanimously chosen as the host city during a congress organized by Pierre de Coubertin, a French historian, in Paris, on June 23, 1894. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was also established during this congress.
Despite many obstacles and setbacks, the 1896 Olympics were regarded as a great success. The Games had the largest international participation of any sporting event to that date. Panathinaiko Stadium, the first big stadium in the modern world, overflowed with the largest crowd ever to watch a sporting event. The highlight for the host country was the marathon victory by Greek distance runner, Spiridon Louis.
Venizelos, after whom the beautiful, state of the art international airport in Athens was named, was a lawyer from the island of Crete. Venizelos was the most influential Greek politician of the first half of the twentieth century. He worked hard for the reunification of Crete with Greece in the 1890s and was chosen in 1909 to direct a new civilian government, after a coup of the military officers. A great achievement of Prime Minister Venizelos is that he successfully stabilized the majority of Greece. Sadly, but only a few years thereafter, Venizelos was assassinated.
At this time, Athens actively supported Macedonia for its re-unification to Greece. The city of Thessaloniki had also developed a deep nationalist feeling. A pact with Serbia and Bulgaria was signed by Greece and the three nations decided to cooperate military. They declared war against the Turkish occupiers and within few weeks, the Greek armies had taken Thessaloniki and Ioannina.
The Ottoman Empire, in 1913, with the Treaty of London, ceded all its European possessions to the Balkans except Albania and Thrace which later acceded to independence.
Greece and Serbia, in a bilateral agreement, divided the Macedonian territory between those two nations. For that reason, a Second Balkan War was declared by Bulgaria against both Greece and Serbia. Bulgaria was defeated resulting in the Treaty of Bucharest in August 1913.
After the Balkan Wars, the territory of Greece had been expanded by approximately 68 percent, but still more than 3 millions Greeks remained in Ottoman controlled territories.
A new king, Constantine, was crowned in 1913 on the eve of the First World War. During that time, Europe was divided in two parts: the Triple Entente which included principally the allies of Britain, France, and Russia. They were juxtaposed in the growing fog of upcoming conflict by the Triple Alliance or Central Powers, principally consisting of Germany, Austria, Italy, and eventually, the Ottoman Empire.
As World War ! erupted in the summer of 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Ferninand in Sarejevo, Greece faced a difficult choice as to which side to take which caused great distress within the new young nation. The Central powers included Bulgaria in their alliance which was still a rival of Greece for territorial reasons, and also wanted to include Turkey, Greece’s worst enemy. On the other hand, the Entente had supported the national cause during the war of independence but Queen Sofia of Greece was the sister of the Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. However, Greece shared a common religious heritage with Russia as both were principally orthodox nations.
Factors like these led to a significant division at the highest levels of the Greek government when World War I erupted. King Constantine believed in maintaining a neutral position, but Prime Minister Venizelos was strictly pro-Entente. The Entente reinforced his position by promising to award Asia Minor, Including all of modern Turkey, to Greece. Many of these lands had been Greek lands in antiquity, including the present Istanbul which had been founded as a Greek colony, Byzantium.
Eleutherios Venizelos resigned as Prime Minister when King Constantine opposed the Alliance with the Entente. Venizelos established an allied revolutionary government in Thessaloniki and invaded the city of Smyrna, a city with a large Greek population on the west coast of Turkey. This caused a constitutional crisis called Ethnikos Dikhasmos, or the National Schism.
The treaty that followed provoked a population exchange. 400.000 Turkish Muslims were traded against one million Orthodox Greeks. A new wave of economic difficulties followed.
The next decade was filled with internal political disruptions and economic hardship. Greece endured a succession of monarchies, a military rule and brief democracies. All of that occurred before the horrific inception of the upcoming World War II.
In 1936, General Metaxas was appointed Prime Minister by King George II. Metaxas instituted a harsh, and oppressive fascist dictatorship. To his favor though, Metaxas was staunchly opposed to German and Italian domination. In one of the most famous statements in modern Hellenic history, Metaxas summarily refused the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini’s demand to occupy Greece during World War II with a one word response – “ohi,” simply meaning no. To this day, Greeks all over the world celebrate “Ohi Day” as a national holiday.
Nonetheless, Italy invaded Greece after receiving Metaxas cryptic rebuff, and was treated like an invading army in antiquity. The Italians were handed a stern and startling defeat. The Italian military efforts went downhill from there on and they would never be a serious factor in advancing the Nazi cause after the defeat at the hands of the Greeks.
Germany had counted on Italy’s being able to secure and conduct operations in Greece to free its resources up for its planned invasion of Russia. A successful German conquest of Russia might have significantly changed the history of the west. However, significant German resources had to be diverted to Greece because of its strategic location.
Greece ultimately fell to Germany in 1941. This invasion resulted in the destruction of ancient sites, large scale executions and the extermination of the largest part of the Jewish community by the Nazis. Resistance movements against the Nazi’s sprang up and were divided between a royalist and communist movement. Some of the fiercest resistance took place on the island of Crete where many villages which had been part of the Cretan resistance were totally destroyed by the Germans. In one of the most famous Greek resistance incidents, Cretan resistance fighters assisted by a young British philhellene, Patrick Leigh Fermor, captured the leading German general on Crete and transported him to the allies in Egypt.
Similar incidents took place on mainland Greece. For example, two villages were the subject of the most brutal massacres. In Kalavryta, Greece in a mountanous regious of the Peloponnessus, the entire adult male population of this sizable village was annihilated by its Nazi occupiers on December 13, 1943. The beautiful town of Kalavryta itself also suffered total destruction at the hands of these German occupying forces during World War II. Kalavryta is the most serious case of war crimes committed during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II based on the number of innocents massacred.
On a mass murder mission called Unternehmen Kalavryta in German or Operation Kalavryta in English, which began from the coastal area of Achaea in Northern Peloponnese, German Wehrmacht troops marched to the town of Kalavryta burning villages and murdering civilians on their way. When they reached Kalavryta, they locked up all women and children under the age of 14 in the village’s schoolhouse, and then commanded that all male residents 14 and older be marched to a field just outside the village. There, the German troops machine-gunned down 1,258 of the adult Greek males of Kalavryta. There were only 13 survivors. The women and children managed to free themselves from the school while the town was set ablaze. To add far more than insult to injury, the next day, Nazi troops burnt down the Monastery of Agia Lavra, a landmark of the Greek War of Independence and the place credited with the beginning of the Greek revolution on March 21, 1821.
Unfortunately, the Kalavryta massacre was not the only atrocity of the most horrific degree that would befall Greece in World War II. In some ways, Distomo was even more senseless. The Distomo massacre was another Nazi war crime perpetrated by members of the Waffen-SS in the village of Distomo, Greece, during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II. Distomo is a beautiful mountain village located near the holy city of Delphi, north and west of Athens.
Four days after the successful D-Day invasion in Normandy, France, on June 10, 1944, during a period of just two senseless hours, Waffen-SS troops of the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division went door to door and massacred Greek civilians in Distomo, reportedly in revenge for a partisan attack. A total of 218 men, women and children were killed. According to survivors, SS forces "bayoneted babies in their cribs, stabbed pregnant women, and beheaded the village priest."
In the 1960s, the government of West Germany paid Greece 115 million German marks in restitution. Later four relatives of victims made claims for individual compensation and sued in the German courts and the European Court of Human Rights, which could have made Germany liable for several billion dollars in reparations. The claims were denied by the European Court of Human Rights and by German lower courts and in June 2003, and were subsequently rejected by the Federal Court of Justice.
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