[1832 - 1924] Kingdom of Greece and National Schism

In 1832, Greece was a kingdom born not in a palace, but on the blood-soaked soil of a decade-long revolution against the Ottoman Empire. Its people, who had sacrificed everything for freedom, did not get to choose their king. The Great Powers of Europe—Britain, France, and Russia—decided for them. They sent a boy, a 17-year-old Bavarian prince named Otto, to rule over a land he had never seen and a people whose language he did not speak. Imagine the Athens he arrived in. It was not the marble metropolis of antiquity, but a dusty, sun-baked town of perhaps 7,000 souls, a collection of humble houses clustered in the shadow of the Acropolis. Otto’s Bavarian architects, like Theophil Hansen, were tasked with carving a modern European capital out of this ancient landscape. They laid down grand boulevards and erected severe, beautiful neoclassical buildings—the University, the National Library, the Old Royal Palace—imposing a vision of Western order onto a place that ran on an older, more chaotic rhythm. While a new elite in Athens began to adopt Western frock coats and dresses, life for the vast majority of Greeks hadn't changed much. Over 80% of the population were peasants, many of them tenant farmers known as *kolligoi*, working land they didn't own. Their world was the village, their law was tradition, and their uniform was often the *fustanella*, the pleated white kilt for men that had been the garb of the revolutionary fighters. This was the fundamental tension of the new kingdom: a foreign, top-down attempt to build a modern state, clashing with the realities of a poor, rural, and fiercely independent people. The Greeks had fought for a constitution, but Otto ruled as an absolute monarch. The breaking point came on the 3rd of September, 1843. The Athens garrison, led by veteran revolutionaries, surrounded the palace and refused to leave until the King granted a constitution. With no real power of his own, Otto had no choice but to yield. Otto was eventually deposed in 1862, and the Greeks got to have a say in his successor. They overwhelmingly chose a British prince, who declined. Their second choice, a Danish prince, accepted. He became George I, King of the Hellenes, and his 50-year reign would oversee a period of turbulent growth, all of it fueled by a single, intoxicating national dream: the *Megali Idea*, the “Great Idea.” This was more than just a policy; it was an obsession. It was the dream of liberating all the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian populations still living under Ottoman rule—in Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, and across the Aegean in Asia Minor, where cities like Smyrna buzzed with Greek commerce and culture. The *Megali Idea* was a vision of a new Byzantium, with its capital once again in Constantinople. Every political decision, every war, every diplomatic maneuver was aimed at this goal. Progress was slow but tangible. The British ceded the Ionian Islands in 1864 as a coronation gift to the new king. Thessaly was annexed in 1881. The country was being stitched together, literally, by new infrastructure. The brilliant, modernizing Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis championed the building of roads and railways. His crowning achievement was the Corinth Canal, a monumental feat of 19th-century engineering that sliced through six kilometers of solid rock to connect the Ionian and Aegean seas, a dream since ancient times. In 1896, Athens hosted the first modern Olympic Games, a moment of immense national pride that announced Greece’s return to the world stage. But the path of the *Megali Idea* was not smooth. A disastrous war against Turkey in 1897 ended in a humiliating defeat and national bankruptcy. Yet the dream persisted, reaching a fever pitch with the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. A newly confident Greek army, fighting alongside Serbia and Bulgaria, pushed the Ottomans almost completely out of Europe. Greece doubled its territory and population, absorbing southern Epirus, Crete, and the bustling, multi-ethnic port city of Thessaloniki in Macedonia. The Great Idea seemed within reach. And then, it all shattered. The catalyst was World War I. The nation was torn in two, not by a foreign enemy, but by its own leaders. This was the National Schism, the *Ethnikos Dikhasmos*, a wound torn through the soul of the nation. On one side stood King Constantine I, son of George I. A hero of the Balkan Wars and educated in Germany, he was married to the Kaiser’s sister. He believed Greece, exhausted from its recent wars, should remain neutral, though his personal sympathies lay with the Central Powers. On the other side stood the charismatic Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. A revolutionary from Crete, he was a political genius who saw a golden opportunity. He argued passionately that Greece must side with the Entente—Britain and France—to be on the winning side and finally realize the *Megali Idea* by gaining territory in Asia Minor. The clash between these two powerful men was absolute. It was a battle of King versus Prime Minister, neutrality versus intervention, tradition versus ambition. It split the country down the middle. In 1916, Venizelos, with Entente support, established a rival provisional government in Thessaloniki. For a time, there were two Greeces: the King’s royalist government in Athens and Venizelos’s revolutionary government in the north, each with its own army. Families were divided, friendships were broken, and political violence became common. The schism ended only when French and British forces blockaded Athens and forced Constantine into exile, allowing Venizelos to reunite the country and formally enter the war on the Entente side. When the war ended, Venizelos was at the height of his power. At the Paris Peace Conference, he secured a mandate for Greece to occupy Smyrna and its hinterland in Asia Minor. It was the ultimate prize, the heart of Greek culture in the East. In May 1919, Greek troops landed in Smyrna to the cheers of the local Greek population. The *Megali Idea* seemed to be at its moment of triumph. It was, instead, the beginning of the end. The Greek army pushed deep into Anatolia, overstretching its supply lines. But they had not counted on the rise of a new, ferocious Turkish nationalism led by an army officer named Mustafa Kemal. The campaign turned into a bloody, three-year war that drained Greece of its resources and its will to fight. In September 1922, the front collapsed. The Turkish army retook Smyrna. What followed was the Smyrna Catastrophe. A great fire, its origins still disputed, consumed the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city. For days, the waterfront was a scene from hell. Hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians were trapped between the flames and the sea, begging for rescue from Allied ships in the harbor that refused to intervene. The aftermath was a final, brutal redrawing of the map. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne mandated a compulsory population exchange. Nearly 1.5 million Orthodox Christians, whose ancestors had lived in Asia Minor for three millennia, were expelled and sent to Greece. In return, about 500,000 Muslims were forced to leave Greece for Turkey. This flood of destitute refugees swelled Greece’s population by almost 30%, forever changing its social and cultural fabric. The *Megali Idea* was dead, incinerated in the flames of Smyrna. The trauma was so profound that in 1924, the monarchy, so deeply associated with the division and the disaster, was abolished. The kingdom was over, replaced by a fragile republic, left to pick up the pieces of its shattered dream.