Cretan Revolt of 1897-1898 | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the Greco-Turkish War (1897) and the Cretan revolts | |||||||
Cretan rebel leaders in early 1897 | |||||||
| |||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
Cretan revolutionaries Contents
France Italy Russian Empire Austria-Hungary (until March 1898) [4] German Empire (until November 1897) [4] | Ottoman Empire | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Eleftherios Venizelos Prince George Theódoros Deligiánnis Timoléon Vassos Robert Harris | Abdul Hamid II George Berovich Turhan Pasha Përmeti Edhem Pasha |
The Cretan Revolt of 1897–1898 was a successful insurrection by the Greek Orthodox population of Crete against the rule of the Ottoman Empire after decades of rising tensions. The Greek insurrectionists received supplies and armed support first from the Kingdom of Greece; then later from the Great Powers: the United Kingdom, [3] France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. The conflict ended in 1898 with Cretan-allied victory and Ottoman retreat when the Great Powers cut their funding and proposed a resolution which stipulated:
The conquest of Crete by the Ottoman Empire ended in 1669 with the capture of Candia. Crete then became an Ottoman province.
In 1821, the Greek War of Independence in 1821 resulted in Greece achieving independence from the Ottoman Empire. The majority Greek Christian population of Crete now began aspiring to a union with the new Greek nation. The Greek Cretans revolted from 1866 to 1869, in 1878, but were crushed by Ottoman forces.
On February 3, 1895 (Julian), representatives of the Cretan provinces (Apokoronas, Kydoniai, Sphakia, Rethymno and Agios Vasileios) met in Klema, near Chania. They drafted a memorandum to the Government of Greece and several of the so-called Great Powers in Western Europe. The representatives called for the Ottomans to appoint a Christian governor for Crete. They requested that the European powers put Crete under their protection. After the mass killing of Christian Armenians in Anatolia by Ottoman forces in 1895, public opinion in Europe became concerned that a similar catastrophe could happen to the Christian Greek population of Crete, forcing their governments to get involved in the Crete conflict.
To show goodwill to the European powers, the Ottomans replaced the Muslim governor with a Christian, Alexander Karatheodoris. However, the Karathodoris appointment alarmed Muslim Turkish Cretans, who feared rule under the Christian Greek Cretans. A pan-Cretan rebel group emerged that massacred Greeks to force his resignation. In response, Greek groups organized guerrilla warfare and retaliated against Turks.
The Cretan assembly also called for the reinstatement of the clauses of the Halepa Pact of 1878, which were favourable to Christians. In response, Karatheodoris dissolved the Cretan assembly on June 18, 1895. [5]
In September 1895, the Greek Cretans formed a revolutionary assembly at the instigation of the Consul General of Greece. It met in Krapi on 10 September. The revolutionary assembly demanded the declaration of Crete as an autonomous entity, paying an annual tribute to the Ottomans. This autonomous Crete was to be governed by a Christian governor, appointed for five years, without the Ottomans having the right to replace him. The rights granted by the Halepa Pact were to be restored and improved.
In response, Karatheodoris ordered the arrest of the revolutionary assembly members. On November 27, 1895, armed conflict broke out at Vryses between Greek Cretan members of the "Transition Committee" and 3,000 Ottoman troops commanded by Tayyar Pasha. After a day long battle, the Greek Cretans forced the Ottoman troops to retreat after losing 200 men and failing to capture any assembly members.
In March 1896, Karatheodoris was replaced by Turhan Pasha Përmeti as governor of Crete. [6] Përmeti declared a general amnesty as part of a peace initiative, but the revolutionary assembly rejected it. [7]
On May 4, 1896, Greek Cretans laid siege to the Ottoman garrison at Vamos, capturing it on May 18. [7] On May 11, Turkish Cretens starting robbing and killing Christians in Chania, later extending the violence to Kydonia and Kissamos.
In November 1866, a large Ottoman force besieged the Arkadi Monastery, which was the headquarters of the rebellion. In addition to its 259 defenders, over 700 women and children had taken refuge there. After a few days of hard fighting, the Ottomans broke into the monastery. At that point, the abbot set fire to the gunpowder stored in the monastery's vaults. The explosion killed most of the rebels and the women and children.
In response to the Arkadi attack, the Greek government sent volunteer fighters to Crete to protect the Greek communities. In May 1896, France and the United Kingdom moved a naval force to Cretan waters.
To end the fighting in Crete, the consuls of the European powers proposed a new constitution for Crete to the Ottomans and the revolutionary assembly. The constitution called for the Ottomans to:
Both sides accepted the new constitution and fighting in Crete ended in August 1896. In September, the Ottomans appointed George Berovich Pasha, former governor of Samos, as the new wāli (governor-general) of Crete. [8]
Within a month of Verovich Pasha's appointment, sectarian violence began increasing in Crete. The public prosecutor Kriaris was murdered in Chania and threats were made against the Christian community. [8]
In January 1897, Turkish rebels burned the residence of the Bishop of Chania along with the Christian neighborhoods in that city. Eleftherios Venizelos, reportedly said: "I saw Chania in flames. It was set on fire by the Muslims who thus triggered the great revolt."
Venizelos organized a camp in the Akrotiri peninsula establishing an Assembly of Crete and a provisional government. He located the camp near the Bay of Souda so that he could communicate easily with the admirals of the European fleets. Akrotiri's insurgents quickly hoisted the Greek flag and proclaimed the annexation of the island by Greece.
In early 1897, an international expeditionary force was sent to Crete on ships from France, the United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy.
In February 1897, prime minister of Greece Theodoros Diligiannis ordered a military intervention in Crete. Yielding to pressure from the opposition and public opinion, he placed Prince George of Greece at the head of a fleet tasked with blockading Ottoman ships from supplying Crete. On February 11, 1897, 300 Greek volunteers and 800 boxes of ammunition arrived from Greece at the Greek Cretan camp on Akrotiri. On February 13, Cretan insurgents attacked Chania from the heights of Halepa. That same day, British Admiral Harris, suspecting the Greeks of supplying the insurgents, forced Prince George to return to Greece.
Deligiánnis also sent a force of 1,500 men, led by colonel Timoleon Vassos, to take military control of Crete. [8] This army landed at Kolymbari [8] on February 16, and immediately declared the union of Crete with Greece. Vassos established his headquarters in Platania Alikianos.
On February 19, a group of 600 men, composed of Cretan rebels and volunteers along with Greek soldiers, stormed and captured the Turkish fortress of Voukolias.
After the capture of Voukolias, the European Powers demanded a ceasefire. To back up their demands, they threatened to stop resupply of Vasso's army from Greece. Vassos said that he would not enter the four cities where the European fleets were present, but that his intention was to occupy the rest of Crete.
On 21 February, the Akrotiri camp was shelled by the European fleets. Their exact target was Venizelos' headquarters hill of the Prophet Elijah. These ships included the British HMS Revenge, HMS Dryad and HMS Harrier, the Russian ship Imperator Aleksandr II, the German SMS Kaiserin Augusta and the Austro-Hungarian SMS Kaiserin und Königin Maria Theresia
According to Kerofilas, the purpose of this bombing was to shoot down the Greek flag flying over Akrotiri. The fleet sent the rebels received a final ultimatum to remove the flag. Venizelos himself replied: "You have cannons. Pull! But our flag will not fall." According to account, a young Greek Cretan threw himself in front of the bombs and raised the banner, provoking the admiration even of the European admirals.
In March 1897, the French and British fleets settled in positions opposite Akrotiri, making the blockade even stricter. On 10 March, Venizelos received the French, Italian and British admirals. [9] [10]
Faced with the Cretan problem, the European powers had three solutions:
Germany initially proposed to blockade the port of Piraeus, thus forcing the Greek army in Crete to withdraw, a solution rejected by Great Britain.
The British formulated the idea of autonomy, which would prevent the annexation of the island by Greece and thus preserve the principle of Turkey's integrity. On March 15 the European powers sent Greece their proposal for autonomy for the island. The Greek Government, driven by public opinion, categorically rejected this solution.
On March 20, the European powers declared the autonomy of Crete, placed under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire and, with their fleets, blockaded the island from the 21st. The admirals learned that the occupants of an Ottoman fort in Malaxa were on the verge of starvation after they had found themselves surrounded by the Cretans, despite the white flag hoisted for several days. Two days later, the admirals sent the Greek Cretans request for withdrawal on pain of bombardment. Faced with a new refusal by the Cretans, the admirals had difficulty, this time, to go on the offensive.
On April 17, 1897, the Ottoman Empire officially declared war on Greece. On hearing the news, many of the Greek volunteers at Akrotiri' wanted to return to face a possible Ottoman invasion. On 9 May, Vassos returned to Greece with them. A few days later, Greece defused the crisis with the Ottoman Empire by renouncing any plans to annex Crete.
On 13 May, Venizelos declared that he and his forces would not lay down their arms until the last Ottomon soldier had left the island, so the conflict continued. .
On July 10, 1897, in Armeni, Sphakiannakis was elected president of the revolutionary assembly. His plan was to organize a government for the island, headed by a prince of a European royal family, chosen by the European powers and approved by the Ottomans. In August, Eleftherios Venizelos took the lead of the assembly, now meeting in Archanes. In November, the revolutionary assembly became the Cretan Assembly.
Towards the end of 1897, the Ottomans decided to send 5,000 reinforcements to Crete, but they were blocked by the European powers,
At the same time, Russia proposed that Prince George of Greece be named governor of Crete. Great Britain and France supported George, but Germany and Austria-Hungary rejected him.
On March 16, 1898, Germany announced that it was withdrawing from Crete and would not oppose or approve the choice of Prince George as governor. The next day, the ship Oldenburg left Chania. On April 12 Austria-Hungary also dropped opposition to Prince George,
The remaining European powers now organized an administrative council on Crete and asked for the gathering of Ottoman troops in certain points of the island. The admirals in turn asked their respective governments for the withdrawal of these troops. On 1 July, the administrative council of admirals gave the Cretan Assembly the power to elect an executive committee. On the 28th, a committee of five members was elected, including Venizelos. The seat of government, also chosen by the admirals in Halepa,
In September 1898, the European admirals decided to collect taxes to support the new administration in Crete. On September 15, the Turkish governor of Candia refused to accept the collection without having received the order from Constantinople.
After three days of talks, a detachment of British troops tried to take the governor's premises by force. They were besieged inside the palace and massacred. The Turkish population then went to the residence of the British vice-consul, set it on fire, and killed him. During this riot, fourteen Britons and 500 Cretans were killed, and many others wounded.
On 17 October 1898, Great Britain and the other European allies issued an ultimatum to the Ottoman government to withdraw Its troops and citizens from Crete within 30 days.
The majority of Cretan Turks left Crete at 1898. [11]
On 25 November the representatives in Athens of France, Italy, Great Britain and Russia proposed to King George I of Greece the appointment of his son Prince George as High Commissioner of Crete. [12] The proposal was for an appointment for three years, during which the prince must pacify the island and provide it with an administration. He had to recognize the Ottoman sovereignty over the island and let the Ottoman banners float over the fortresses. Each of the four protecting nations granted a loan of one million francs to the new High Commissioner to carry out his task.
Prince George arrived in Crete on 9 December, welcomed by the admirals of the European fleets. At this point, the revolt was over.
Prince George's government appointed a sixteen-member committee (twelve Christians and four Muslims) to draft a constitution, the first on the island. The Constitution of the Cretan Assembly was adopted on 9 January 1899. Elections were held for 138 Christian deputies and 50 Muslim deputies.
In the spring of 1905, an insurrection broke out against the Cretan government. It was led by Venizelos, who denounced the corruption of Prince George's entourage and the latter's inability to make the great powers accept the idea of annexation of Crete by Greece.
The beginning of the First Balkan War in 1912 opened the doors of the Greek Parliament to Cretan deputies, but did not yet mean formal union. On December 1, 1913, Crete received international recognition as a province of Greece.
Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and Corsica. Crete is located about 100 km (62 mi) south of the Peloponnese, and about 300 km (190 mi) southwest of Anatolia. Crete has an area of 8,450 km2 (3,260 sq mi) and a coastline of 1,046 km (650 mi). It bounds the southern border of the Aegean Sea, with the Sea of Crete to the north and the Libyan Sea to the south. Crete covers 260 km from west to east but is narrow from north to south, spanning three longitudes but only half a latitude.
Chania, also sometimes romanized as Hania, is a city in Greece and the capital of the Chania regional unit. It lies along the north west coast of the island Crete, about 70 km (43 mi) west of Rethymno and 145 km (90 mi) west of Heraklion.
The history of Crete goes back to the 7th millennium BC, preceding the ancient Minoan civilization by more than four millennia. The Minoan civilization was the first civilization in Europe.
George I was King of Greece from 30 March 1863 until his assassination on 18 March 1913.
Eleftherios Kyriakou Venizelos was a Cretan Greek statesman and prominent leader of the Greek national liberation movement. He is noted for his contribution to the expansion of Greece and promotion of liberal-democratic policies. As leader of the Liberal Party, he held office as prime minister of Greece for over 12 years, spanning eight terms between 1910 and 1933. During his governance, Venizelos entered in diplomatic cooperation with the Great Powers and had profound influence on the internal and external affairs of Greece. He has therefore been labelled as "The Maker of Modern Greece" and is still widely known as the "Ethnarch".
The Megali Idea is a nationalist and irredentist concept that expresses the goal of reviving the Byzantine Empire, by establishing a Greek state, which would include the large Greek populations that were still under Ottoman rule after the end of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) and all the regions that had large Greek populations.
Konstantinos Mitsotakis was a Greek politician who was Prime Minister of Greece from 1990 to 1993. He graduated in law and economics from the University of Athens. His son, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was elected as the Prime Minister of Greece following the 2019 Greek legislative election.
The Greco-Turkish War of 1897 or the Ottoman-Greek War of 1897, also called the Thirty Days' War and known in Greece as the Black '97 or the Unfortunate War, was a war fought between the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Its immediate cause involved the status of the Ottoman province of Crete, whose Greek-majority population had long desired union with Greece. Despite the Ottoman victory on the field, an autonomous Cretan State under Ottoman suzerainty was established the following year, with Prince George of Greece and Denmark as its first High Commissioner.
The Cretan Gendarmerie was a gendarmerie force created under the Cretan State, after the island of Crete gained autonomy from Ottoman rule in the late 19th century. It later played a major role in the coup that toppled the government of King Constantine in 1916, and also in the World War II Battle of Crete and the Greek Resistance that followed.
Prince George of Greece and Denmark was the second son and child of George I of Greece and Olga Konstantinovna of Russia, and is remembered chiefly for having once saved the life of his cousin the future Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II in 1891 during their visit to Japan together. He served as high commissioner of the Cretan State during its transition towards independence from Ottoman rule and union with Greece.
The Cretan Muslims or Cretan Turks were the Muslim inhabitants of the island of Crete. Their descendants settled principally in Turkey, the Dodecanese Islands under Italian administration, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, and Egypt, as well as in the larger Turkish diaspora.
The Pact of Halepa or Halepa Charter was an agreement made in 1878 between the Ottoman Empire and the representatives of the Cretan Revolutionary Committee, which secured wide-ranging autonomy for the island of Crete. It was named after the place where it was signed, Halepa.
Sir Alfred Biliotti was a Levantine Italian, born on Rhodes, who became a British consular official and amateur archaeologist. Biliotti probably received little formal education, and followed his father, who had carried out consular work for the governments of Britain, Spain and Tuscany, into the British consular service in 1849. He accompanied Charles Newton, an archaeologist then working for the British Foreign Service, on an archaeological tour in 1853, beginning a relationship of patronage by which Newton supported Biliotti in a twofold career, in the consulate and in archaeology.
The Cretan State was established in 1898, following the intervention by the Great Powers on the island of Crete. In 1897, the Cretan Revolt led the Ottoman Empire to declare war on Greece, which led the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Russia to intervene on the grounds that the Ottoman Empire could no longer maintain control. It was the prelude to the island's final annexation to the Kingdom of Greece, which occurred de facto in 1908 and de jure in 1913 after the First Balkan War.
The Goudi coup was a military coup d'état that took place in Greece on the night of 28 August [O.S. 15 August] 1909, starting at the barracks in Goudi, a neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Athens. The coup was a pivotal event in modern Greek history, as it led to the arrival of Eleftherios Venizelos in Greece and his eventual appointment as prime minister. At one stroke, this put an end to the old political system, and ushered in a new period. Henceforth and for several decades, Greek political life was dominated by two opposing forces: liberal, republican Venizelism and conservative, monarchist anti-Venizelism.
The Theriso revolt was an insurrection that broke out in March 1905 against the government of Crete, then an autonomous state under Ottoman suzerainty. The revolt was led by the Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos, and is named after his mother's native village, Theriso, the focal point of the revolt.
The island of Crete was declared an Ottoman province (eyalet) in 1646, after the Ottomans managed to conquer the western part of the island as part of the Cretan War, but the Venetians maintained their hold on the capital Candia, until 1669, when Francesco Morosini surrendered the keys of the town. The offshore island fortresses of Souda, Grambousa, and Spinalonga would remain under Venetian rule until 1715, when they were also captured by the Ottomans.
The International Squadron was a naval squadron formed by a number of Great Powers in early 1897, just before the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, to intervene in a native Greek rebellion on Crete against rule by the Ottoman Empire. Warships from Austria-Hungary, France, the German Empire, Italy, the Russian Empire, and the United Kingdom made up the squadron, which operated in Cretan waters from February 1897 to December 1898.
The Cretan revolt of 1878 was an insurrection of the Cretan people against the Ottoman occupation of the island. This insurrection is part of a larger movement for independence from the Ottoman Empire, which Crete was part of since the middle of the 17th century.
The Candia massacre occurred on 6 September 1898, on Crete, then part of the Ottoman Empire. It occurred as a reaction by armed Muslim irregular groups (Bashi-bazouks) to the offer to the Christian community of a series of civil rights by foreign powers. They attacked the British security force in Candia, which was part of an international security force on the island.
{{cite book}}
: |work=
ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)