So, in 1832 the Turkish Ottoman Empire was forced to sign the Treaty of Constantinople
which ended the Greek War of Independence and created the Kingdom of Greece.
But modern Greece is not a kingdom, so how did today’s 3rd Hellenic Republic
acquire its current borders and why did Greece decide to ditch its king?
Well, the first King of Greece was actually not Greek, instead he was a Bavarian prince, named
Otto von Wittelsbach, who had been made Greece’s monarch by the Great Powers that guaranteed its
independence. He was also the first, but not the last Greek king to be overthrown.
Otto of Greece tried to rule as an absolute monarch, but he wasn’t very good at it. So in 1844
his people forced him to sign a constitution which limited his power, but it didn’t save
Otto in the long run; his failure to make much headway in solving Greece’s economic problems,
combined with his inability to secure the monarchy by producing an heir
and Greece’s humiliation at the hands of Britain (who stopped them from attacking the Turks during
the Crimean War) all contributed to Otto’s general lack of popularity.
The King was also a Catholic, something that didn’t sit well with a mostly Orthodox population.
So in 1862, while Otto was holidaying in the south of Greece, a coup took control of the capital,
Athens, and at the urging of the Great Powers the now former-king didn’t resist it. He returned to
Bavaria aboard a British warship and died there three years later. But the coup, which created
a new National Assembly, didn’t result in a republican government for Greece, far from it.
Quick side note: for the purposes of this video a republic is any state which lacks a monarch;
it doesn’t necessarily have to be a democracy, it just must not not have a royal ruler.
So instead of instituting a republic, the Assembly called a referendum to decide on a new king from
a new dynasty for Greece. The Greek people overwhelmingly chose Alfred Duke of Edinburgh,
a son of Queen Victoria, to succeed Otto in the hopes of getting Britain to hand
over the Ionian Islands to Greece. The islands have a majority Greek population. But Alfred,
at the urging of his mother and at the insistence of the governments of all three Great Powers
said no. So instead the Assembly crowned King George I of the house of Glucksburg.
Like Otto, George I wasn’t born in Greece; he was the son of King Christian IX of Denmark.
But unlike Otto, George I made it very clear to his people that he actually had an interest in
them. He learnt Greek soon after arriving in the country in 1863, and he himself was a Lutheran but
he married an Orthodox Russian Grand Duchess and had their children raised in the Orthodox faith.
He also willingly appointed Greek advisors and accepted a Greek constitution,
while Otto had retained exclusively Bavarian ones until his constitution forced him to do otherwise.
Subsequently George I had a long and fairly prosperous reign.
His reign also marks the beginning of Greek territorial expansion. As a gift to the new King,
who was something of an Anglophile, Britain did decide to hand over the Ionian Islands to Greece.
Interestingly marking the first time in history that Britain voluntarily decolonized a territory.
In 1877 Russia, along with a coalition of rebellious Ottoman Balkan tributaries, attacked
and defeated the Ottoman Empire in, yet another, Russo-Turkish War. Greece didn’t participate,
though they very much wanted to as the Ottomans still controlled most of the Greek speaking world,
not to mention that George I’s sister had married the future Tsar Alexander III.
They only didn’t join in because of the interventions of both Britain and France.
Still at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Greece laid claim to large chunks of Ottoman territory,
and eventually, they received Thessaly and part of Epirus on the mainland.
Notably, just like in the Treaty of Constantinople they didn’t get Crete.
But the Greeks of Crete weren’t overly happy about that. They had already revolted against
the Turks in 1841, 1858, and 1866, and in doing so had won some privileges, including the equality of
Christian and Muslim worship on the island. On paper, anyway. Not being made a part of
Greece once again only angered them further and sporadic revolts in the 1880’s kept tensions high
between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. In 1897 the Cretans revolted once more, but this time Greece
sent an army to support the rebels, beginning the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Also known,
in Greece, as the Unfortunate War or Black ‘97, which tells you something about it how it went.
It went badly for Greece. In just 32 days Ottoman troops pushed the Greek army,
commanded by their Crown Prince, Constantine, almost completely out of Thessaly,
to the point that they threatened Athens. An armistice was signed between the two states,
and the resulting peace treaty saw Greece lose land on the Turkish border and have to pay war
reparations to the Ottomans. However, at the insistence of the Great Powers, Crete
gained significant autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, as the Cretan State, the next year.
Their loss to the Turks caused social upheaval in Greece which culminated in the 1909 Goudi Coup.
The coup eventually brought Eleftherios Venizelos, leader of the Greek Liberal Party
to power as Greece’s Prime Minister in 1910. Venizelos reformed much of the Greek economy,
as well as, importantly, both the army and navy. Two things that came in handy in 1912.
Why? Well because in October of that year the Kingdom of Montenegro declared war on the
Ottoman Empire and it was joined by its allies Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. This time around,
the Greek Army, 200,000 strong, decimated the Ottoman one and they quickly advanced north
into Ottoman territory. On November 9th, Greek forces took Thessaloniki, the largest Greek city,
bar Constantinople, ruled by the Ottomans. Which sounds great for the Greeks, and it was,
with one caveat. After the city’s capture George I, Crown Prince Constantine, and Venizelos
all travelled there, but the King never left. In March 1913, shortly before the
1st Balkan War’s conclusion he was shot by a Greek socialist and died instantly.
His son, the now King Constantine proved to be a much less successful monarch than his father.
He did lead Greece to victory against the Ottomans and then the Bulgarians in the Balkan Wars,
in the process expanding Greece almost to her modern borders, but he came into conflict,
the National Schism, with the Prime Minister over Greek participation in WW1. Venizelos
was pro-Entente and saw the war as an opportunity to take more Greek-inhabited
land from the Ottomans. Constantine, having married the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
was sympathetic towards the Central Powers, though he wanted Greece to remain neutral in the war.
For three years Constantine withstood pressure from Venizelos and Britain and France
to join the war on their side, but in 1917 the Russian Empire fell to revolution and they had
been the only Entente power that was willing to back Constantine remaining on the Greek throne
if he wasn’t going to join the war. So, he was forced to abdicate and fled into exile
with his eldest son, another George. His second son became King Alexander and Greece
entered the war. They mostly fought against the Ottomans and Bulgarians.
Which from a territorial standpoint was a great idea. The Entente’s victory in WW1 saw Greece gain
Western Thrace from Bulgaria and Eastern Thrace and Ionia from the Turks. Another side note:
the name Ionia has nothing to do with the Ionian Islands and in Greek the names are distinct.
Those last two gains never actually ended up becoming Greek territory though, because the
Ottoman Empire was in the process of collapsing and being replaced by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s
Republic of Turkey. Ataturk wasn’t interested in keeping to the old empire’s treaty obligations
and so the 2nd Greco-Turkish War broke out over Eastern Thrace and Ionia in 1919.
In 1920 King Alexander was attacked by a monkey and later died of sepsis. At roughly
the same time Venizelos was voted out as Prime Minister and with his son dead, Constantine
briefly returned to the Greek throne. He lost it again in 1922, after an army revolt, the
same year that Greece lost the war to Turkey and Ataturk’s republic kept Eastern Thrace and Ionia.
This time Constantine’s eldest son did come to the throne as George II, but he didn’t really
rule the country. The monarchy itself had become more and more unpopular after it at
first refused to have Greece join WW1 and then led it to defeat against Turkey. So in 1924,
it was abolished and the 2nd Hellenic Republic was proclaimed. But the republic was unstable and
eventually, a military dictatorship took power and, after a rigged plebiscite, it restored the
monarchy and George II. Who, in 1936 appointed a nationalist, authoritarian government, the 4th
of August Regime. It lasted until Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria occupied Greece in 1941 during WW2.
George II led a government-in-exile from London for most of the war, but the Greek
resistance back home was largely fought by the National Liberation Front, which was backed
by the anti-monarchy Communist Party. When the King returned to Greece in 1944 the country was
plunged into civil war between Communist and Royalist forces. By 1949 the Royalists had won,
saving the monarchy, though George II died and he was succeeded by his brother Paul in 1947,
the same year that the defeated Italians ceded the Dodecanese to Greece.
Under Paul, Greece functioned democratically, albeit a bit dysfunctionally, but in 1964 he
died and was succeeded by King Constantine II, the last Greek King. What finished him? Well,
in April 1967 a group of middle-ranking officers staged a coup, and Constantine,
who was Commander-in-Chief of the Greek military, made two errors that doomed the monarchy. 1. He
failed to act decisively and order loyal troops to put down the coup out of fear of bloodshed,
and 2. He then led a bungled counter-coup against an already entrenched military junta in December.
Constantine was forced to flee the country, but the junta nominally retained the monarchy until
1973. In that year a sham referendum was held on its abolition, for a second time,
which of course went in the junta’s favour and a Third Republic was proclaimed. A year later,
the junta was forced out and democracy returned to Greece, but a new referendum confirmed that
Constantine and the monarchy would not. Greece remains a democratic republic to this day.
If you enjoyed this video don’t forget to subscribe and hit the notification
bell below so you don’t miss the next one. Also if you want to know more about Greece,
find out how it became independent from the Ottomans in the video on the Greek Revolution
to the left, and as always, I’ve been James and thank you for watching Look Back History.