[1924 - 1940] Second Hellenic Republic and Interwar Period

The year is 1924, and the kingdom of Greece is no more. A referendum, held in the long shadow of military defeat and national trauma, has just abolished the monarchy. What rises in its place is the Second Hellenic Republic, a republic born not in triumph, but in the ashes of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The very air in Athens and Piraeus is thick with the human cost of that disaster. A nation of five million souls has been forced to absorb nearly one and a half million refugees, Orthodox Greeks expelled from their ancestral homes in Turkey. They are everywhere. In the ports, on the streets, huddled in makeshift camps that spring up like bitter fungi on the outskirts of the cities. These shantytowns, the *prosfygika*, are a testament to desperation, cobbled together from scrap wood, tin, and canvas. The sound is a cacophony of different dialects, of weeping, and of the coughs that betray the damp and crowded conditions. The newcomers, the *prosfiges*, are often educated and urban, yet they arrive with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They are viewed with a mixture of pity and suspicion by the locals, the *palioi Ellines*, who fear these destitute strangers will take their jobs and strain their already meagre resources. This deep social fissure—between refugee and native—will define the nation for a generation. Politically, the Republic is a ship in a perpetual storm. The anchor of the monarchy is gone, and the vessel of state is tossed about by the ambitions of powerful men and the turmoil of the masses. The political landscape is a battlefield dominated by two titans: Eleftherios Venizelos, the charismatic Cretan liberal and architect of a "Greater Greece," and his opponents, the staunchly anti-Venizelist Royalists. For the next decade, power will swing violently between them. Governments form and collapse with breathtaking speed; between 1924 and 1928 alone, Greece saw ten different governments and no fewer than thirteen military coups, most of them failing but each one further destabilizing the fragile republic. Life for the average citizen is a state of constant uncertainty. You might go to bed under one prime minister and wake up to find the army has installed another. Yet, amid this chaos, there are glimmers of a determined push towards modernity. When Venizelos returns to power in 1928, he unleashes a wave of construction. His government embarks on an ambitious plan, building over 3,000 new schools to combat an illiteracy rate that still hovered around 40%. The goal is to forge a new, educated Greek citizen from the fractured population. Major infrastructure projects, like the draining of Lake Kopais in central Greece, reclaim vast tracts of fertile land for agriculture, desperately needed to feed the swollen population. In Athens, the city’s face begins to change. While donkey carts still clatter down dusty lanes, they now share the road with the occasional rumbling motorcar. New apartment buildings, some hinting at the sleek lines of Art Deco, rise to house the burgeoning middle class. In these urban centres, Western fashion takes hold. Men in sharp suits and fedoras and women in shorter hemlines and cloche hats signify a break from the traditional, heavy folk costumes still worn in the villages. Then, in 1929, a shockwave from across the Atlantic hits the fragile Greek economy: the Great Depression. Greece, heavily reliant on the export of luxury agricultural goods like tobacco and currants, is devastated. The price of currants collapses by 75%. Thousands of farmers face ruin. In the cities, the fledgling industries sputter and die. Unemployment soars, and the simmering social tensions boil over. Strikes, riots, and political violence become commonplace. The democratic experiment, already faltering, is pushed to the brink of total failure. The Republic stumbles through the early 1930s, wounded and exhausted. Another failed Venizelist coup in 1935 is the final straw. It discredits the liberals and paves the way for the restoration of the monarchy. King George II returns, but the political paralysis continues. The old divisions run too deep. The fear of a communist takeover, fanned by the widespread poverty, grips the establishment. In this atmosphere of fear and exhaustion, a new figure steps from the shadows: Ioannis Metaxas. A quiet, stern, German-educated general with an undisguised contempt for the messiness of parliamentary democracy. On August 4th, 1936, with the King’s consent, Metaxas dissolves parliament, suspends the constitution, and declares a state of emergency. The "Fourth of August Regime" is born. It is a dictatorship. Metaxas imposes strict censorship; the press is muzzled, and even the lyrics of traditional *rebetiko* music are scoured for subversive content. Political opponents are arrested and exiled to the barren Aegean islands. A national youth organization, the EON, is created to instill the values of discipline, nationalism, and obedience, its members marching in blue uniforms that bear an unsettling resemblance to those in other authoritarian European states. Yet, for many Greeks, Metaxas also brings something they haven't known for years: order. He crushes the endless cycle of strikes and political infighting. He also introduces progressive social policies, establishing the first social insurance fund (IKA), setting a minimum wage, and decreeing the eight-hour workday. He brings a brutal, suffocating stability. As the 1930s draw to a close, Greece is a nation transformed. It is a country of paradoxes: a place of ancient ruins and new concrete, of deep poverty and a determined drive for progress, of a people who have overthrown a king only to find themselves under the heel of a dictator. The internal battles have ceased, but a new shadow stretches across the continent, cast by the ambitions of Mussolini and Hitler. The fragile peace that Metaxas has imposed is about to be tested, not by a political rival at home, but by an ultimatum from a fascist empire. The knock on the door is coming.