Venizelos arrives in Salonika

On 9 October 1916, or 26 September by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos arrived in Salonika. This date is given by two British journalists who were then in the city or close to events: G. Ward Price, the official correspondent of the British press with the army at Salonika, and Crawfurd Price, an ardent supporter of Venizelos, and also by the British chronology of the war. Some modern studies, citing a Greek military encyclopaedia of 1929, give 7 October. Meanwhile a dispatch from Athens, which the London Times published only on 9 October, says that Venizelos had sailed from Crete to Samos and was to go on from there to Chios and Lesbos.

Through the islands to Macedonia

After a few days in Chania, where a provisional government had been formed, Venizelos set out northwards. According to the British publicist George F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to the king, he left Souda Bay on 5 October, cheered by the crews of the Allied warships. The Athens correspondent of The Times reported that the politician was to have sailed in the Greek steamer Atromitos, but at the last moment changed to the Hesperia. The Atromitos, which put to sea a little later, was reportedly chased by a German submarine and was saved only by Allied destroyers called to help. On Samos, as the Daily Telegraph reported on 7 October, the commander of a British warship paid Venizelos an official visit on orders from above. The islands annexed to Greece during the Balkan Wars welcomed him as a hero. At the end of September Chios and Mytilene had declared for National Defence.

Salonika was not an obvious choice. Ward Price wrote that Venizelos’s arrival was in a sense a surprise, and that the politician himself, as he stepped ashore, did not yet know whether he would stay or return to Mytilene. That depended on the Allies, who might not want a Macedonian government in the very middle of their main military base. Since the coup at the end of August the city had been ruled by the Committee of National Defence, and the first battalion of volunteers had already gone to the front on the Struma. According to reports from Athens, General Panagiotis Danglis, a former chief of the general staff, had also arrived there at the end of September.

The welcome

The crowds received Venizelos enthusiastically. There was, however, no official welcome on the part of the Allies. Crawfurd Price stressed bitterly that not a single British officer appeared at the harbour. General Maurice Sarrail, the commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in the Balkans, did, however, appear unofficially on the quay for a moment, pushed his way through the crowd and shook Venizelos’s hand. There was no objection, so the politician stayed. The seat of government became a villa that had hitherto served as King Constantine’s palace in Salonika. Ward Price, making no secret of his dislike, described it as an ugly house, like an exhibition pavilion and furnished in bad taste imitating German models.

Leadership of the movement was taken over by the so-called triumvirate of National Defence: Venizelos, Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis and General Danglis. In the following days they appointed ministers, although the sources date these appointments differently. The Minister of War was Emmanouil Zymvrakakis, who had led the coup in August, and foreign affairs were taken over by the diplomat Nikolaos Politis. Venizelos did not formally break with the Crown. The decrees of the new authority kept the heading “Kingdom of Greece”. “We regard Greece as a kingdom with two governments, as is the case with all countries in the grip of civil war, though it is precisely a real civil war that we are trying to avoid,” he told Ward Price the day after his arrival. In an interview with him, published a few days later in the London press, he announced that the government would collect taxes, levy recruits and put an army corps into the field to fight the Bulgarians.

A government without recognition

Venizelos at once asked the Entente powers for official recognition. He did not get it. The British official history of the war at sea writes that London was unanimous that the provisional government had to be financed and supplied, but the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, feared that open recognition would enrage the king, deprive the Allies of what remained of their influence in Athens and deepen the rift. Italian diplomacy asked outright where the limits of the new government’s authority were to run, since recognising it in some regions but not in others would mean the partition of Greece. In the end the consuls were to treat the government in Salonika as a de facto authority. From then on Greece had two centres of power: the next day the government of Professor Spyridon Lambros was sworn in in Athens, and the National Schism turned into an open division of the state.