Massacre of Venizelists in Athens

On 2 December 1916, or 19 November by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, Athens belonged to the royalists. In the night after the fighting of 1 December the Entente detachments had withdrawn to their ships, and in the morning the last detachment left the Zappeion. Soldiers and armed reservists loyal to King Constantine I then fell upon the supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos. The British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt) and Greek authors agree that bloody clashes went on throughout 2 December and that mass arrests began the next day. The British chronology of the war records the “massacre of Venizelists in Athens” only under 6 December, when the American minister in Athens, Garrett Droppers, reported that the persecution was still going on.

The fight for Venizelos’s house

Newbolt describes how throughout the day soldiers and reservists looted the houses of Venizelists and clubbed anyone who resisted. The British writer George F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to the King, writes of real battles in many parts of the city: suspect houses, hotels, offices and shops were stormed and defended. The centre of the fighting was the house of Venizelos himself, who had been in Salonika since the autumn. A handful of Cretans, twenty according to Abbott, barricaded themselves inside and held out for most of the day, until they surrendered under machine-gun fire. The royalists claimed to have found an arsenal in the house: rifles, revolvers, grenades and dynamite, some of it still in French packaging. Abbott considered this proof that the Venizelists had been preparing a rising, and judged the shots from windows and roofs on 1 December “more than probable”.

That same day Droppers telegraphed to Washington that Venizelists were being hunted by government patrols and that shots could still be heard in the city, describing the situation as “very critical”. He asked for the American cruiser Des Moines to be sent to Athens for a time.

The round-up

On 3 December, as Newbolt writes, the royalists were already masters of the city and began a systematic round-up. Those arrested were led in fours with their hands tied, while the crowd followed them, hurling curses and spitting. The prisons soon filled up, so schools and theatres were taken over. The houses of those arrested were plundered from cellar to attic, and their families were mistreated. Among those detained was the mayor of Athens, Emmanouil Benakis. The British biographer of Venizelos, S. B. Chester, a determined opponent of the King, also names the former minister Konstantinos Raktivan and General Korakas. The Venizelist newspapers ceased to appear. The government presented the whole affair as the suppression of a conspiracy that was to have broken out under cover of the landing and delivered the city into Venizelos’s hands. Droppers later wrote that people believed in this conspiracy or not according to their political sympathies.

How many died

The figures for the victims vary widely, because each side had an interest in them. The government in Athens stated in a telegram that it passed to the State Department a few days later that the “suppression of the Venizelist rising” on 1 and 2 December had cost the army 13 killed and 24 wounded, and civilians helping the authorities 6 killed and 6 wounded, while five more people, including three women, had been killed accidentally by the insurgents. The Venizelists were said to have lost only three killed and two wounded because, it was explained, they had fired from behind barricades in their own houses, while the soldiers had fired volleys into the air. The historian George B. Leon, on the other hand, writes of 35 murdered and 980 people expelled from Athens by the reservists within two or three days. The Greek historian Yannis Mourelos puts the number of civilians killed at 14, with as many wounded, and estimates that about 922 people were imprisoned across royalist Greece. Chester writes of one to two thousand arrests within a week. It is therefore safer to speak of a dozen or so to several dozen killed and of hundreds arrested.

What came next

The violence was so open that on 4 December Droppers, together with the Spanish and Dutch ministers, handed the government a written protest against the “reckless and lawless methods” of suppressing the Venizelists. They cited, among other things, the firing on the hotel where the American military attaché was staying and the looting of the office of a Spanish association. The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, according to Newbolt, considered the persecution of the Entente’s supporters more humiliating for the Allies than the withdrawal of the landing force. The events in Athens also dashed the hopes of the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, of an understanding with the King. The imprisoned Venizelists were released, according to some sources, only a month and a half later, in January 1917, when the Allies demanded their release. The rift between the supporters of the King and of Venizelos, which in December 1916 turned into open violence, poisoned Greek political life for a long time.