Kingdom of Greece (Part Two)
The Second Balkan War began on June 29th, 1913, and lasted only a little under two months, ending on August 10th, 1913. The war, fought between an alliance of Serbia, Romania, Greece, Montenegro and (ironically) the Ottoman Empire against Bulgaria, proved a victory for the aforementioned alliance and a defeat for Bulgaria. As a result, Bulgaria lost a good amount of territory to its neighbors. It was this defeat and subsequent loss of territory which would turn Bulgaria into a revanchist local power and send it drifting towards the camp of the Quadruple Alliance. Meanwhile, Greece, through its victory, had gained the lands of southern Epirus, the southern half of Macedonia, Crete and the Aegean islands, save for the Dodecanese Islands, which were occupied by Italy as a result of the Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912). These gains nearly doubled Greece's area and population, proving to the Greek people and government that the Venizelist reforms had been a great success.
Sadly, King George I never lived to see either Greece's success in the First or Second Balkans Wars. On March 18th, 1913, two months before the end of the First Balkan War, King George I of Greece was assassinated by Greek anarchist Alexandros Schinas. As a result, he was succeeded by his son Constantine, who became King Constantine I of Greece. Interestingly enough, George, reaching his fiftieth year as King, had already planned to abdicate after his Golden Jubilee celebrations in October of 1913 and give the throne to Constantine as a result.
In July of 1914, the First Great War broke out after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. A year earlier in 1913, Greece had signed a defense pact with Serbia, stating that if Serbia was attacked by Bulgaria, Greece would come to their aid. When Bulgaria, diplomatically close though not yet allied to the Central Powers, began mobilizing, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos believed that if Bulgaria did indeed join the Central Powers and proceeded to invade their ally of Serbia, Greece would be obliged to assist Serbia and as a result join the Entente. Venizelos also promised to the Entente nations that Greece would join their alliance if the Entente nations agreed to land 150,000 troops in the city of Salonika, which would be used as the launching point for an invasion against Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, Venizelos proved unsuccessful in getting Greece to join the Entente due to King Constantine. King Constantine, the brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II through his marriage to Wilhelm II's sister Sophie of Prussia, was a known Germanophile due to his aforementioned family ties and that fact that he had undergone military training in Germany many years previously. As a reuslt, King Constantine would not allow Greece to join the Entente Powers. However, he would not allow Greece to join the Central Powers either, as being allied to the Ottoman Empire, a long time enemy, was too much to stomach for not only Constantine, but the Greek government and people as well. Not to mention, Greece had nothing to gain from joining the Central Powers. Thus, Constantine decided that Greece would remain neutral in the Great War. Prime Minister Venizelos strongly disagreed with the King. In his eyes, not only was Greece obligated to join the Entente through the Serbo-Greek Treaty, but joining on the side of the Entente would allow Greece to fulfill the "Megali Idea" and annex Greek lands in Anatolia. King Constantine and the Anti-Venizelists argued that the Serbo-Greek treaty would be null and void if Serbia was invaded by a great power, rendering any other arguments irrelevant. Nevertheless, perhaps to appease the Venizelists in some way, King Constantine allowed British and ANZAC troops to use the island of Lemnos as a base to mount their (disastrous) attack on Gallipoli.
In October 3rd, 1915, Prime Minister Venizelos took this measure one step further and invited a Franco-British expeditionary force to land at Salonika. This proved the final straw for King Constantine, and on October 5th, 1915, King Constantine removed Venizelos from office, dissolving the Liberal-dominated Parliament and calling for new elections. On Constantine's orders, the Franco-British expeditionary force was refused entry into Salinoka, or any Greek land for that matter, firmly cementing Greece's status as a neutral nation. To add insult to injury for Venizelos, on October 14th, 1915, nine days after he was forced from power and fled to his native home of Crete, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers. Venizelos was outraged. As a result, while in exile in Crete, Venizelos had began planning a coup against the Greek government of King Constantine I and his supporters. He would spend the next seven months planning said coup, and was even in contact with British, French and Russian agents, whose respective governments supported putting Venizelos back in power and having an ally with which to attack Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire along with.
Venizelos' planning came to an abrupt end in May of 1916. It was in this month and year, specifically on May 5th, 1916, that the Battle of Verdun had ended in a crushing defeat for France at the hands of the Germans. It this that signaled to many, including Venizelos, that France would ultimately be defeated in the Great War. With France crushed by the Germans by 1917 at the earliest, this left only the British and the Russians to assist Greece against Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. Venizelos knew that without the French to assist Greece, any war against the Central Powers would most likely be unsuccessful. After a few months of pondering the issue over, in July of 1916, Venizelos sent a letter to King Constantine, telling the King that, based on the events of Verdun, that he felt Greece would be better of remaining neutral in the Great War. His reasoning in his letter was that with France facing defeat, they would not be able to assist the Greeks as they could before, and as a result, Entente assistance to Greece against the Central Powers would not be up to satisfactory levels. King Constantine forgave Venizelos and personally invited him back to Athens to participate in the next elections. It is unknown if King Constantine knew of Venizelos' conspiring with Entente agents, but if he did, it seems he was willing to let sleeping dogs lie.
Venizelos returned to Athens that August and won a new series of elections in May, 1917, running on a platform of Greek neutrality and upholding the previous Venizelan reforms. By 1917, Greek neutrality in the Great War had become a much more favorable option to the Greek people, due the withdraw of Russia from the Great War and the mutinies in the French armies. As a result, Greece would remain neutral throughout the rest of the Great War, just as it always had been.
The Interwar Period proved to be a quite time for Greece [1]. Nevertheless, relations remained tense between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, which, during the 1920s, was becoming stronger and in wake of a number of internal reforms. It was also during the Interwar Period that many Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Pontic Greeks for example, moved to Greece proper, something which was supported by many in the Greek governments of the time. About 40% of Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire left to Greece, Russia, the United States or other places. The rest stayed, wanting to preserve their culture and cooperate with the Ottoman government. As a result, a sort of detente began between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, with most in Greece knowing war against the Ottomans would be a fools errand.
in 1923, King Constantine I died in Athens and was succeed by his son Prince George, who became King George II of Greece. It would be during the reign of King George that, in 1929, the Great Depression began. Much like the rest of the world, the Depression economically devastated Greece, a country which had already known bankruptcy back in the 1890s. As a result, many people in Greece began to look for radical solutions to their problems, both to the left, with the Greek Communist Party, and to the right, with the Freethinkers' Party led by Greek General Ioannis Metaxas. Metaxas, a veteran of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Balkan Wars, modeled his Freethinkers' Party on Benito Mussolini's ill-fated National Fascist Party in Italy and Oswald Mosley's British National Party in Great Britain. Like the aforementioned parties in Italy and Great Britain, Metaxas' Freethinkers' Party was nationalist, revanchist and staunchly monarchist. Nevertheless, Metaxas would never come to power, as Greece's government was able to remain stable during the Depression. Metaxas died in 1941, his party dying with him.
During the Second Great War, Greece, under the rule of Prime Minister Themistoklis Sofoulis since the 1936 elections, once again, decided to remain neutral. This was so for a number of reasons. First of all, Greece did not have much to gain from joining either Alliance, though they were courted on numerous occasions by the Entente, especially Britain, France and Russia, who appealed to Greece on the grounds that they had won Greece independence in 1821 and were their major allies for several decades afterwards. In addition, Greece have the satisfactory manpower to fight against the Central Powers, in particular, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. Thus, just as before Greece sat out the Second Great War, though, modeled on the Italian, Brazilian and Swedish policies of neutrality, traded actively with both the Entente and Central Powers, becoming very wealthy in the process.
In the years after the Second Great War, Greece continued to be a stable and relatively prosperous nation. Greece expanded its territory once again on July 30th, 1952, when Greece purchased the Dodecanese islands from the Kingdom of Italy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[1] Without the National Schism, Greco-Turkish War, and other events that began as a result of said events, Greece is much more stable ITTL.
