Greece rejects the offer of Cyprus

The British chronology of the war records under 20 October 1915 that the Greek government rejected the British offer to cede Cyprus to it. Four days earlier the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, had promised the Greeks the island on one condition: that the Greek army be sent immediately to the aid of Serbia. Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis replied in the negative. According to Greek works, the reply was delivered in London by the Greek minister, Ioannis Gennadius, on 8 October by the Julian calendar, that is 21 October, and on the evening of the same day the Athens newspapers published a lengthy communiqué in which the government explained its position. The decision was therefore taken at the turn of those two days.

The arguments of Athens

The communiqué, reprinted by the foreign press in the following weeks, repeated the arguments with which Zaimis had already turned the Serbs away. The government expressed surprise that the powers were interfering in Greek–Serbian relations. The interpretation of the alliance of 1913 belonged exclusively to its two signatories, since it had been concluded without the participation or guarantee of any third party, and Greece was an independent state that decided its own fate. The attack by Germany and Austria-Hungary released it from the obligation of armed assistance. Quite apart from that, Serbia was not in a position to field 150,000 soldiers against Bulgaria, as the treaty required, and the Entente powers had not sent an equivalent contingent.

According to the best experts, the communiqué went on, an expedition in the Balkans would require at least 400,000 men. In these conditions Greece would ruin itself without even saving Serbia. Athens offered something else: free passage for the Allied troops across Greek territory to the Serbian front and the maintenance of its own army in readiness. The government thanked the powers for their proposals, although these “were not yet concrete”, and Britain separately for the offer of Cyprus. It recalled the Greeks’ sympathy for the Entente and the benevolent character of Greek neutrality. According to Venizelos’s American biographer Herbert Gibbons, Zaimis himself put it briefly: Greece thanked Britain but could not give up its neutrality, which was nevertheless most benevolent towards the Entente.

An island that could not be accepted

Behind the refusal stood above all King Constantine I and the General Staff. They were convinced that the Central Powers would crush Serbia and that the small Entente army at Salonika would be unable to stop the Bulgarians. The British author G.F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to the King, wrote a year later that in other circumstances the offer would have been very tempting, but Constantine asked himself what good Cyprus would do Greece if it lost Athens. John Buchan took a similar view in Nelson’s History of the War, then being published: there was no sense in bribing the Greeks with Cyprus or with promises of Turkish lands, because before these gifts could materialise the enemy had to be defeated, and there was no sign of who was to do it.

The island did not convince even some of the Entente’s supporters. Eleftherios Venizelos, although he condemned the King’s policy, later admitted in conversation with a British journalist that most Greeks considered accepting Cyprus too great a risk, because cooperation with the Entente on those terms could cost them the loss of a larger part of their own country. The Zaimis government survived barely two weeks longer. At the beginning of November it lost a vote in parliament, in which Venizelos’s Liberals still had the majority, and the King entrusted power to Stefanos Skouloudis and dissolved the chamber. Britain did not renew its offer, and Cyprus remained British until it gained independence in 1960.