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”