The Aexample@ of Crete

In AD 395 the island passed to Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire), and the Arabs gained control over parts of Crete after 824, contesting with the Byzantines for several centuries thereafter. In 1204, in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, crusaders sold the island to Venice, which fitted Crete into its growing commercial empire. The native Cretans, however, never abandoned their Orthodox religion, Greek language, and popular lore. The Ottoman Turks, who were already in control of parts of Crete, wrested the capital city of Candia (now Iráklion) from the Venetians in 1669 after one of the longest sieges in history. Crete stagnated under Turkish rule, but native uprisings were always frustrated, including ones in 1821 and 1866. The Turks were finally expelled by Greece in 1898, after which the island held autonomous status until its union with Greece in 1913.

The first war, also called the Thirty Days' War, took place against a background of growing Greek concern over conditions in Crete, which was under Turkish domination and where relations between the Christians and their Muslim rulers had been deteriorating steadily. The outbreak in 1896 of rebellion on Crete, fomented in part by the secret Greek nationalistic society called Ethniki Etairia, appeared to present Greece with an opportunity to annex the island. By the beginning of 1897, large consignments of arms had been sent to Crete from Greece. On January 21 the Greek fleet was mobilized, and in early February Greek troops landed on the island, and union with Greece was proclaimed. The following month, however, the European powers imposed a blockade upon Greece to prevent assistance being sent from the mainland to the island. They took this step to prevent the disturbance from spreading to the Balkans. Thwarted in their attempt to assist their compatriots in Crete, the Greeks sent a force, commanded by Prince Constantine, to attack the Turks in Thessaly (April). By the end of April, however, the Greeks, who were inadequately prepared for war, had been overwhelmed by the Turkish army, which had recently been reorganized under German supervision. The Greeks then yielded to pressure from the European powers, withdrew their troops from Crete, and accepted an armistice on the mainland (May 20, 1897). A peace treaty, concluded on December 4, compelled Greece to pay the Turks an indemnity, to accept an international financial commission that would control Greek finances, and to yield some territory in Thessaly to Turkey. Subsequently, the Turkish troops also left Crete, which had been made an international protectorate, and an autonomous government under Prince George, the second son of the Greek king, was formed there (1898). Crete was finally ceded to Greece by the Treaty of London (1913), which ended the First Balkan War.

B From the Encyclopedia Britannica, compact disk edition

The revolution began as a mutiny in the army. The rebels quickly gained control of European Turkey from their base in Salonika, and threatened to march on Constantinople. By the end of July 1908 the Sultan had capitulated and promised a constitution. Elections were held in November, resulting in a large majority for the Young Turks. They found power harder to exercise than to win. Five months later a counter-revolution took place in Constantinople (April 1909) under the inspiration of conservative religious leaders loyal to the Sultan. The army at once moved on the capital in defence of the revolution. The Sultan was deposed and replaced by a nonentity; and the Committee of Union and Progress resumed control. Meanwhile the Balkan nations and their neighbours were quick to take advantage of the confusion in the empire. In October 1908 the Austrian government annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Simultaneously King Ferdinand of Bulgaria proclaimed his country's independence. Less dramatically, the Slavonic peoples met in conference in Prague and the Albanians in Monastir; but there could be no doubt that independence was their theme.

Among the Greeks, the first reactions to the Young Turks' revolution were confined to Crete. At the end of July 1908 the powers still in occupation of the island began to withdraw their troops. Three months later, on 12th October, the Cretan Assembly proclaimed its union with Greece. A committee of five, including Venizelos (who was technically a Greek subject by birth), was formed to carry on the government in the name of King George. The Greek government was put in the unenviable position of having to choose between offending Greek nationalist opinion and offending the Turkish government, and perhaps also the powers. The prime minister, George Theotokis, who had succeeded to the leadership of Trikoupis' party, declared that he could take no official cognizance of the Cretan proclamation, but resigned in July 1909 under nationalist pressure. His successor, Dimitrios Rallis, found an alternative escape in a formula disavowing the Cretan action, but placing the future of Crete, Macedonia and Epirus in the hands of the powers. The powers, however, had in the meantime completed their withdrawal from Crete, and the Cretans promptly ran up the Greek flag. The pusillanimity of two successive prime ministers had by this time so exasperated the Greek nationalists that a rebellion broke out in Athens, in a form not unlike that of the Committee of Union and Progress in Turkey a year earlier. . .

. . . A large majority of those who thought of themselves as Greeks were still outside Greece's national boundaries. But King George I was 'King of the Hellenes', and that was taken to mean all of them. The Great Idea had certainly not died with Otho and Amalia. The new king was expected to assert Greece's national claims just as enthusiastically, only more effectively. His marriage in 1867 to the Russian Grand Duchess Olga was taken as a satisfactory sign that the Tsar's support for Greek expansion would be renewed. When their son and heir was born in 1868, popular clamour demanded that he should be christened Constantine (as he was), with the implication that he would one day reign in the capital which shared his name. Constantinople was still a long way off. But there were much nearer territories with a predominantly Greek population---Thessaly, Epirus, Crete and other islands. The only question was, which would claim enosis first? The answer came when King George had been on the throne less than three years. It came, as might have been expected, in Crete.

The Cretans rose regularly in revolt, for which they had ample provocation in the Turks' fiscal oppression and the denial of judicial equality and educational opportunity. They rose in1841, soon after the island was transferred back from the Egyptian pashalik to direct Turkish rule, and again in 1858, when they secured the removal of the governor and the promise of a degree of self-government. The promise was not fulfilled, and in 1866came another rising. The Sultan sent Egyptian troops to suppress it, again promising reforms if the islanders would agree to a restoration of the union with Egypt. The islanders convened an Assembly at Sphakia, rejected the Turkish offer, proclaimed their union with Greece, and appealed to the powers for protection. Volunteers flowed into the island from Greece, but the king and his government under Koumoundouros prudently maintained neutrality until the powers had decided. France and Russia both favoured a plebiscite on union with Greece, but the British government, having heard unfavourable reports of Greek mis-government in the Ionian Islands since enosis, alone opposed it. There followed two years of violence and disorder, in which the most dramatic episode was the destruction of the monastery of Arkadi by its own Abbot, who blew up the powder-magazine rather than surrender (November 1866). A settlement was finally reached in the terms of what was known as the Organic Statute (1868). By this Statute, the Sultan conferred limited but equal rights of representative government on both Greeks and Turks in the island. The settlement lasted on paper for ten years, though it was never fully effective. Meanwhile it became plain to the Greeks that they had again lost the sympathy of the powers. In February 1860 they were obliged to accept a declaration of the powers on the initiative of Bismarck, requiring them to prevent the arming of frontier-crossers or blockade-runners into Turkish territory. In the following year the creation by the Turks of the Bulgarian Exarchate---in other words, an independent national Church, not subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople---found the Greeks without support for their resentment from either Britain or Russia. . .

. . .The most dramatic outburst of nationalist fervour, which was disastrous in the short run but probably decisive in the end, came in 1896. Once again the cause was Crete, where the Turkish administration proved itself incompetent to restrain the intolerance of the Muslim minority. In May there were riots in Khania. Britain opposed the wish of the other powers to blockade the island in order to prevent Turkish reinforcements from reaching it. The Sultan hastily agreed to restore the Pact of Khalepa and to re-appoint a Christian governor. But in the following year the riots broke out again on a far more serious scale, and the leaders of the Greeks (prominent among them the young Eleftherios Venizelos) withdrew from Khania to declare an independent government on the neighbouring peninsula (Akrotiri). This time Deligiannis was able to carry with him not only the Assembly but the king in proclaiming a virtual crusade. War was declared on Turkey in April 1897. The Greek army was sent across the northern frontiers, under the Crown Prince Constantine. A flotilla under the king's younger son, Prince George, sailed to Crete to cut off Turkish reinforcements, and a force of Greek volunteers under Colonel Vassos was landed on the island. Once again the powers felt compelled to intervene. In Crete their object was simply to end the bloodshed. She governments - - the British, French, Russian, Italian, German and Austrian -- combined forces to occupy Khania and to bombard the insurgents on Akrotiri. They promised to exclude-Turkish reinforcements, blockaded the island, .and proclaimed its autonomy under their own protection. In the following year the arrangement was regularized by the appointment of Prince George as High Commissioner, under Turkish suzerainty but subject to the removal of all Turkish troops (November 1898). Forces of four of the powers (Austria and Germany having withdrawn) remained in occupation to ensure peace and order. It was clear to the Greeks that enosis was now only one step away, and for the time being they were content.

From C. M. Woodhouse, A History of Modern Greece, pp188-189; 177-8, 182.

The nature of the Greek Cypriot political mission and the religious fervour with which it was pursued allowed no accommodation for any possible objection of the Turkish Cypriot minority. It was assumed they would join the Turkish minorities which already existed in Western Thrace and Rhodes in becoming Moslem citizens of the Greek Kingdom. The Turkish Cypriot community, although long resigned to economic decline, was not as fatalistic in the political sphere. While allowing the hegemony of Ottoman times to lapse into a favoured minority role in the limited machinery for consultation offered during British colonial rule, they would not willingly become a depleted and impotent minority in the Greek state. Moreover, the Cretan model was held up as an example to be avoided at all costs. In Crete, agitation for Enosis, ruthlessly put down by Ottoman governors at the end of the nineteenth century, had resulted in Cretan autonomy, whereby Greek majority rule and Turkish minority rights were safeguarded by a concert of European powers. The Cretan Greeks indulged in revenge on their Turkish counterparts while this arrangement was being put in place and the Turkish population of the island was halved. In1909, after a majority resolution in the Cretan parliament, the European powers agreed to the union of Crete with Greece as a result of the first Balkan War.

From Diana Markides, The Issue of Separate Municipalities and the Birth of the New Republic: Cyprus 1957–1963.