Eleftherios Venizelos

Eleftherios Venizelos doubled the size of Greece in two years, split it in two over which side to take in the World War, won it Smyrna and Thrace at the peace and lost an election three months later, and spent the rest of his life as the man half the country would die for and the other half tried to shoot. He was born in Crete in 1864 under Ottoman rule, the son of a merchant exiled for the rising of 1866, read law at Athens, and led the Cretan revolts that got the island autonomy in 1898 and, in 1905, his own rebellion at Theriso against the prince who governed it. The Greek officers who made the coup of 1909 at Goudi sent for him because he was nobody's, and he was prime minister in October 1910 with a new constitution, a reformed army under French officers and a navy under British ones, and the alliance with Serbia and Bulgaria that in 1912 took Salonika, Epirus, Macedonia and the islands from the Ottomans in seven weeks and, in 1913, held them against Bulgaria. In 1915 he wanted Greece in the war beside the Entente for what it would bring; King Constantine, the Kaiser's brother-in-law, wanted neutrality and dismissed him twice. The National Schism began. In 1916 he set up a rival government at Salonika with the Allied army that had landed there, and in June 1917 the Allies deposed the king and brought him back to Athens, and Greece fought. At Paris he was the most admired negotiator at the conference, and the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920 gave Greece eastern Thrace, the Aegean islands and the administration of Smyrna. Two royalist officers shot him at the Gare de Lyon and missed, and in November the electorate, exhausted, threw him out and brought Constantine back. The army in Anatolia was destroyed at the Sakarya and driven into the sea at Smyrna in 1922. It was Venizelos who signed the Lausanne treaty of 1923 that exchanged the populations. He governed again from 1928 to 1932, made peace with Turkey and Italy, backed a failed military coup in 1935, and died in Paris in March 1936; the crowds at his funeral in Chania were the last thing Greece agreed on before Metaxas.

• Lived: 1864 CE – 1936 CE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: prime_minister, politician