“Greece has a certain sensitivity to foreign ultimatums and occupations, most notably on the part of Germans”

Excerpted from "Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility"

 

A few words on Greek history are in order. The Greek national memory is replete with foreign occupations, humiliations and diktats. The Ottoman Turks ruled Greece from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth. Greece declared independence in 1821, a cause broadly supported by European public opinion, though it took six years and the intervention of a French, British, and Russian armada in 1827 to finally oust the Turks. The nascent Greek state took advantage of the broad support for its revolt against the Turks and floated an independence loan. The government defaulted in 1826, even before Greece had fully expelled the Turks, shutting Greece out of European capital markets for the next fifty-three years. The European powers selected a king for newly independent Greece, seventeen-year-old Prince Otto of Bavaria, who spoke little Greek. Otto was expelled in 1862 and replaced by a Dane, George I of Schleswig-Holstein, who reigned until 1913, when he was assassinated.
In World War I, Greece fought on the Allied side against Germany, Austria, and Turkey. After the war, the victorious powers awarded Greece several islands that had been under Turkish control, as well as the predominantly Greek city of Smyrna on the Turkish mainland and a surrounding Greek-speaking enclave. But when the Turks invaded in 1922, the Allies did not come to the aid of the Smyrna Greeks. Hundreds of thousands died, and over a million ethnic Greeks from ancestral homelands in the Asia Minor regions of Ionia, Pontus, and Eastern Thrace were deported to European Greece, where they had never lived. The massacre at Smyrna was second only to the genocide of the Armenians in the catalog of World War I-era Turkish atrocities.


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“Greece has a certain sensitivity to foreign ultimatums and occupations, most notably on the part of Germans”