Farewell to Venizelos

The back door of Greece opens on the mountainous Balkan hinterland, its front door on the Mediterranean. By the sea, greatness as well as grief have come to Greece. Three weeks ago from the sea, from Greece's greatest island. Crete, came Revolution, led by that greatest of modern Greeks, sly, old Eleutherios Venizelos, against the "Balkan policy" and the monarchist intrigues of Premier Panayoti Tsaldaris.

Old Venizelos had planned merely a show of force and a quick coup d'etat. Instinctively he seized first the key war boats in Greece's Navy. But the thing turned into a civil war on land (TIME, March 18). Seventy thousand loyalists and some airplanes crumpled the rebel army of 30,000 planeless Greeks from the islands, from Macedonia and Thrace. Venizelos had no stomach for civil war. For all the shooting, the revolt ended with only 100 dead on both sides. The Government, however, promised to execute three times as many. Last week Venizelos, his second wife and a score of the high command fled from Crete to the nearby Italian island of Kasos, then on to the bigger Italian island of Rhodes off the coast of Turkey. Though he was still alive and safe, the world was last week writing Venizelos' political obituary. In Athens the crowd cheered winning General Kondylis and Premier Tsaldaris to the echo. They had won a great victory, but for what?

As recently as 1821 Greece was a servile Turkish province. It was largely with Russian backing that a few Greek Christians won freedom for the barren lower tip of the Greek peninsula. For the rest of the 19th Century the Greeks acquired a shameful record of defeat in battle. They acquired more territory only through the benevolence of the Great Powers, chiefly Britain. Then green currants from the Ionian Islands were the main economic support of the dismal little nation.

Venizelos changed all that. Born on Crete, equipped with an Athens law degree, he soon developed an extraordinary flair for leadership, a marvelous sense of situation, a nearly perfect aim with a revolver and one of the greatest poker faces in Europe. Crete was then still Turkish. Venizelos rapidly led two revolts, won Cretan autonomy, the first step toward union with Greece. The Greek Crown sent a chuckleheaded prince as Commissioner to Crete. With another revolt, Venizelos kicked him out because the prince looked on Cretans as a subject race. His local fame as a Cretan established. Venizelos moved to Athens and proceeded to take charge of all Greece.

Starting as an ordinary member of the Greek Assembly, Venizelos brought into being a national assembly to revise the Constitution, from which he emerged as Premier. After reorganizing the Army and Navy, he sized up Greek military pretensions as a hollow bluff, saw that Greece's future depended on the good will of the Powers, proceeded to play the future that way. He broke with previous Greek policy by joining the Balkan League of Bulgaria and Serbia and ganging on Turkey in the first Balkan War. This time Greece won. In the squabble over the spoils, alert Venizelos formed another alliance with Serbia and ganged on Bulgaria. Spoils: most of Macedonia and the Aegean Islands, the most productive lands in the realm and 100% more people.

When the World War broke, Venizelos brought up against the Danish stubbornness of Greece's Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg King Constantine I, who favored Germany. He hypocritically maintained "a very benevolent neutrality" toward the Allies. Pro-ally Venizelos was anathematized by an Archbishop of the Greek Church:

"Against this traitor Venizelos we have invoked the following injuries: the ulcers of Job, the whale of Jonah, the leprosy of Naaman, the bite of Death, the shivering of the dying, the thunderbolt of Hell, and the malediction of God and man. We shall call for the same injuries upon those who at the coming elections shall vote for the Traitor Venizelos, and we shall further pray for their hands to wither and for them to become deaf and blind."

Unimpressed, Venizelos seceded from the kingdom, forced Constantine to abdicate in favor of his son and declared war against the Central Powers. Though Greece did not do much in war, Venizelos had earned a place at the Peace Conference table. His "enticing, almost ethereal, charm," and the fact that he knew more about the map of Europe than anyone else, did the rest. Spoils: most of Thrace and part of Asiatic Turkey.

At home, however, the Greeks were losing part of Venizelos' plunder to a resuscitated Turkey under Mustapha Kemal Pasha. When Venizelos rushed home the Greek electorate, with one of the world's worst non sequiturs, repudiated Venizelos and called back King Constantine. Once again Venizelos turned his hand to revolution. Back as Prime Minister, he deposed Constantine's son George and resigned just before Greece turned Republic in 1924.

Greece had improved its economic situation (tobacco, wine, textiles, leather goods) but it was still "the poorest nation in Europe.'' Partial cause of this was the unprecedented importation of 1,400,000 indigent Greeks from Turkey and Bulgaria in exchange for deported Turks and Bulgars. Without Venizelos, Greece entered a typical Balkan shambles of dictatorships and coups d'etat, with the royalists always gaining. The old split between the Balkan interests of the repopulated peninsula and the world-trading Mediterranean interests of the islands began to widen, complicated by the unreconciled Macedonians of the north. Finally, in 1928, Venizelos cashed in his popularity for one more Premiership, made alliances with Mussolini and Mustapha Kemal, reasserted the Mediterranean policy of a true island Greek, and got out.

Last year he was struck with dismay when his successor, Premier Tsaldaris, concluded the Balkan Pact with Yugoslavia, Rumania and Turkey. Venizelos saw that Yugoslavia was bound to get into trouble with Italy and Albania, that Greece might have to fight to pull Yugoslavia's chestnuts out of the fire. He objected also to the fact that Italy had not been consulted. Himself nobody's cat's-paw, he could not help feeling that no Greek but himself could ever do anything right.

All his life Venizelos had worked to consolidate Greeks in Greece. The desperate adventure this month of his last revolution between the peninsula on the one hand, the islands and Macedonia on the other, marked the first time he had ever fought to split Greeks. And for the first time he failed. Once more ''the shivering of the dying and the malediction of man'' fell upon Venizelos. The 71-year-old man, who fled last week to a swank Italian hotel in Rhodes with a private beach, groaned, "I am tired by the hardships and disappointments of the last few days."

Last week the Greek Government sealed up seven Venizelos houses, including the great Athens mansion-fort with its $5,000,000 (reputed) library, preparatory to confiscating them. As Mussolini turned a cold shoulder to all Greek attempts to extradite the person of the rebel leader, old Venizelos prepared to end his days in exile with his second wife* and the two sons of his first wife, a beautiful Cretan girl dead these 40 years. He smiled sourly when he heard that his opponent. General Kondylis. who was once his ally and fellow-conspirator, had said, "When conditions become normal, the people will be given the opportunity to decide whether to restore the monarchy."

Said Venizelos, who had doubled the area of Greece, deposed its Kings and given it a place in world politics far out of proportion to its real importance: "All my life with all my heart I wanted the union of Crete and Greece. I wanted it to be sustained by profound mutual affection. I swear that was my only desire. . . . Greece will never see me again."

* His second wife is the daughter of the late Greek-British textile exporter, John Schilizzi, who left her $15,000,000 in 1908.

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