Eleftherios Venizelos: Greece

By Andrew Dalby

The Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936)was one of the stars of the Paris Peace Conference, impressing many of theWestern delegates, already possessed of a romantic view of ‘the grandeur thatwas Greece’, with his charm and oratorical style. He won support for hiscountry’s territorial ambitions in Asia Minor, the ‘Great Idea’ of a revivedHellenic empire controlling the Aegean and stretching to the Black Sea.Venizelos had won this support by bringing Greece into the war on the Alliedside, but in doing so he had split his country, and in order to secure hisgovernment’s position he had to deliver territorial gains at the expense of theOttoman Empire. It was the Greek occupation of Asia Minor, however, thatspurred the Turks to support Mustafa Kemal and resulted not in the creation ofa Greater Greece but the modern Republic of Turkey.

The conflict between Greece and Turkey began the tensionbetween the two states that has continued for the past 90 years and is mostclearly seen in the dispute over the divided island of Cyprus. The Paris PeaceConferences were where the modern Near East, with all its problems of competingnationalisms and ethnic divisions, was created, and Venizelos’s Greece was thekey player in this process.

Andrew Dalby is an historian and linguist whose work hasappeared in several languages. His writings on Greek history and literatureinclude Rediscovering Homer (2006), Flavours of Byzantium (2003)and the acclaimed Siren Feasts: a history of food and gastronomy in Greece(1996), which won a Runciman Award. He is also the author of light-heartedbiographies of Bacchus (2003) and Venus (2005), and of Languagein Danger (2002) on the probable linguistic future.