Τετάρτη 17 Ιουλίου 2019

Alexandros Zaimis







Alexandros Zaimis                            ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΣ ΖΑΙΜΙΣ
Born 1856, Athens                            Died 1936, Austria
  
Alexandros Zaimis was a true rara avis, a Greek politician  able to  navigate the sharp political divides that characterized the Greek political scene during his 39 year career and somehow be respected (even if grudgingly) by  all sides.


Plaza B/70Γ

The name Zaimis is a well known to anyone who, like myself, lives in Achaia on the North Peloponnese. In Achaia the Zaimis family ruled the roost from the Ottoman period right up until the twentieth century. Based in Kalavryta and the nearby village of Kerpini, many of their family members fought in the War of Independence and the clan could boast an early prime minister. 


The Zaimis family tower in Kerpini

They were big landowners – ‘archondes’ as the Greeks say. In fact, the surname 'Zaimis' was adopted by the family from the Turkish word for  large feudal fiefs: Zaimets. An elderly neighbor of ours once described how, when there was work to be done in the fields around his village of Kalamia, a Zaimis would enter the local café to curtly announce, Σκάβω αύριο!  ( I cultivate tomorrow ), and the men of the village would line up, hoping to be chosen to either earn a pittance or a chance to work off money they already owed to the ‘big’ boss. This system of dependence on large landowners was common in many parts of rural Greece, and persisted well into the 20th century.

As a fellow Achaian, I decided to do a little digging myself and find out more about this  particular Zaimis buried in such a modest plot in an area of the cemetery reserved for the distinguished or the very wealthy. It is a complicated story because he lived through so many changes and because, although  he was so frequently on the political stage, he was never the star. Bear with me...

His Life

Alexandros was born in 1856, studied law in Athens, then Liepzig, Paris, and Berlin. He wore an astonishing number of hats during his long career and that makes any synopsis of his life very difficult.  He first entered  parliament in the mid 1880s  as the member for Kalavryta, taking over the seat left absent by his father’s death.(1) 
During his career, he served in several ministries, as High Commissioner to Crete,  a director of the National Bank,  a leader of the senate (when we had one)  and 6 times as prime minister (1897, 1901, three times between 1915 and 17, and once between 1926-28). Six might seem a lot but it is not a record. Alexandros Koumoundouros, another Peloponnesian, was prime minister 10 times!



Zaimis as President of the Greek Republic



He started out as a moderate conservative and an independent during the heyday of the famous rivalry between liberal Harilaos Trikoupis and conservative  Theodoros Deligiannis.  Zaimis did a fair job as prime minister during his two brief stints in 1897 and in 1901. During his first term he managed to secure a significant loan from the Great Powers,(2) something the bankrupt country desperately needed. During this second term he was able to maintain order in the capital (no small task) after the infamous ‘gospel riots’ (3) when the educated,  pro-katharevousa  ruling elite rioted because the book of Mathew in the New Testament had been printed in demotic Greek, a form of the language easily understood by the ‘oi polloi’. Language was a big issue back then.


Eight people were killed during these riots

Zaimis as Cretan  High Commissioner

1906 saw Zaimis appointed to a five year term as the High Commissioner to Crete. It had been granted a tenuous semi-autonomous status by the Big Powers in 1898 in the hope of maintaining a balance of power in the Mediterranean. Many Cretans (including rebel Eleftherios  Venizelos) had been happy enough with this partial win against the Ottomans in 1898, but were increasingly concerned about future Ottoman designs on the island.  King George's son, Prince  George, had been chosen as High Commissioner. His rule did not suit the Cretans' long term plans for union with Greece.  Moreover, the prince, had become increasingly autocratic during his tenures and indicated in many ways that a status quo on the island suited him just fine; he rather liked ruling Crete as a princedom. For Venizelos, the great unionist, this was anathema. In 1906 Venizlos led a revolt (4) which lasted 8 months. At the very least he wanted any future High Commissioner to be a Greek national, and preferably a former Prime Minister.

The Powers and the Greek king needed a compromise solution. Enter Alexandros Zaimis.
 
 Prince George was brought home and  Zaimis appointed with a clear writ to sooth troubled Cretan waters.


As High Commissioner in 1906
 
Zaimis Moves the Plot a Little But Then Exits on Cue

He may have been a royalist at heart but Zaimis did admire Venizelos and prophesied even then that he would prove to be the 'maker of Greece'. In fact, he worked so well with Venizelos as first minister that he allowed him to pretty much run the show in Crete while he travelled throughout Europe acting as a kind of Cretan good will ambassador.  Under his gentle auspices, amnesty was granted to the rebels, squabbling Cretan political factions were rendered somewhat less fractious, and a more liberal Cretan constitution came into being. 
Venizelos around 1900
 
One historian has labeled him the ‘emollient Mr Zaimis’, not a term which  normally applies to any Greek politician then or now.(5) It was not really intended as a compliment,  but it was apt and his gentle skills were in demand. Zaimis had a knack for knowing which way the wind was blowing and gracefully bowing in the correct direction.

In 1908 he obligingly absented himself from the island so that a group, led by Venizelos, could declare a de facto union with the Kingdom of Greece. Zaimis had to have known what was planned but his discreet absence lessened the embarrassment of his boss King George during the diplomatic fallout that followed .(6) (Crete did join Greece in 1912, but that is another story.)
           

                   
      Zaimis Becomes a Banker

In the early 1900s, the divide between liberals and conservative leaning royalists continued to plague Greek politics. Liberal-republican sentiment  coalesced behind Cretan Eleftherios Venizelos (who, through a series of adventures and a coup, had left Crete in 1910 to become prime minister of Greece) and the Conservatives  rallied behind the monarchy. 
Meanwhile,  our 'emollient' Zaimis became a director of the National Bank, a post he would continue to hold on and off  between 1914 and 1920. 
(His directorship would be interrupted on three different occasions  (see below) between 1915 and 1917 when  the king called upon him to become prime minister during the turbulent period leading up to and during the famous political schism of 1917. The king had the constitutional right to change his prime ministers pretty much at will.)
  
The Schism of 1917

  King Constantine 1 became king after his father’s assassination in Thessaloniki in 1913. (6)  Venizelos, as his Prime Minister, had successfully led the country through two Balkan wars which greatly increased the area of the kingdom. These successes kept Venizelos' star in the ascendant, but trouble was brewing as World War 1 raged in Europe. The Greek military was becomeing dangerously polarized between  republican minded officers who backed Venizelos and the royalists who had thrown in their chances of advancement with the royal house.


Constantine 1



  The war  made it impossible for even someone as adroit as Venizelos to steer the ship of state. The German Kaiser was  Constantine 1’s  brother-in-law and the Greek heir apparent  had been trained in the Kaiser’s army. The stated position of the king was ‘neutrality’ whereas Venizelos believed that success for farther Greek expansion into Asia minor (always his ultimate goal) lay in an alliance with the Entente (Britain, France, and Russia) against the central powers (Austro-Hungary and Germany with Bulgaria and Turkey ready to join in)  (7)

Differences over policy between Venizelos and the king grew, with Venizelos offering his resignation on more than one occasion. Meanwhile Bulgaria was mobilizing and the king was reluctant to do the same. (Bulgaria was gearing up to join Germany and was promised Kavalla – and outlet to the Aegean - if it did).  Greece had already signed a treaty to aid Serbia in case of Bulgarian aggression but the king was very reluctant to support it.
 
 Venizelos then ‘pushed the envelope’ by allowing British and French troops to land in Salonika, ostensibly to aid Serbia if needed. That was a step too far for the king. Venizelos was forced to resign on October 7, 1915 and the king chose the steady and dependable  Zaimis  as prime minister in his stead.
  
 In office, Zaimis dutifully questioned the Greek obligation to Serbia before losing a vote of confidence and handing the reins over to Stephanos Skouloudis. Venizelos condemned Zaimis’ stand on Serbia,  liked him personally and did not go so far as to accuse him of duplicity. On June 16, 1916, During Skouloudis’ tenure, Bulgaria attacked Fort Rupel on Greek Territory. Skouloudis, with the king’s approval, ordered the Greek troops to surrender. This prompted the French to declare martial law in Salonika and that prompted Skouloudis to resign. Again Zaimis took over the premiership for three months in what had become a thankless task. During his short tenure, Kavalla fell to Bulgaria.  The center could not hold…

At an Athenian mass rally on August 17, 1916, Venizelos, (who still had a majority in parliament), made a final attempt to persuade the king to join the entente. Instead the king clamped down on Venizelists. Shortly after, on September 25, Venizelos left Athens on a French ship to lead a rival government in Thessaloniki.


Venizelos (center) with Daglis and Koundouriotis, as head  of the  Provisional Government of National Defense

Both governments claimed legitimacy. The entente supported Venizelos by harassing Greek shipping and by condemning the king in the press. The king was left fulminating and the Church, ever royalists, excommunicated Venizelos  and his effigy (a bull’s head) was stoned in a public park in Athens.


The Bull’s head under thousands of ‘curse’ stones in the center of Athens
  
Subsequent events favoured Venizelos and the Entente. After a 10 month stalemate,  a triumphant Venizlos was returned to Athens on a French  gunship and  Zaimis  who was the king's prime minister (yet again and ever accommodating) immediately resigned so Venizelos could resume his old premiership without having to call elections.(8).

 Before he left office, Zaimis had the unenviable task of telling King Constantine that he must cede the throne – not to the heir apparent Prince george (considered too pro German), but to his younger son Alexander who was deemed more pliable (9)



A fancy inauguration for a puppet prince

Venizelos now had a biddable king, a writ to enter the war on the side of the entente, and a list of some 30 royalist enemies he wanted expelled along with the king. Zaimis was not among them. Skouloudis was tried for treason and sent to jail;  Mr Zaimis was not. Apparently Venizelos thought that Zaimis, ‘meant well.’

Then:
The victory of the allies led to more Greek expansion, this time into Asia Minor. Meanwhile, Venizelos lost the elections of 1920, and the debacle that was Smyrna in 1922 ended their foothold in Asia Minor and the Great Idea of farther expansion 
forever.

And yet…

As so often in modern Greek history, certain principle actors keep reappearing, as seemingly indestructible as puppets in the shadow theatre or a Punch and Judy show.  King Constantine reappeared only to be vanquished yet again as Greece became a republic from 1924 to 1935. Venizelos rose to the premiership yet again and for 2 years worked together with Zaimis as prime minister in a coalition government in a republican parliament. Not only that, former royalist  Alexandros Zaimis became President of Republican Greece from  1929 until 1935, -  until the pendulum swung yet again and the royalists (with their own list of Venizelists to root out) placed a king  on the throne of Greece once more.

As for Zaimis, He died a year later in 1936 in Vienna where he was seeking medical treatment for his failing sight. His body was brought back to the First cemetery.

 A Man for all Seasons, or Just Fifth Business? 

History has not been kind to Alexandros Zaimis. Historian G.F. Abbot in Greece and the Allies 1914-22 gives him a left-handed compliment by calling him an unambitious man in a country where ambition is an endemic disease and as a man who was reluctantly called upon to adjudicate thankless tasks that he performed several times -  to everybody’s temporary satisfaction.

Faint praise indeed.

It is true that among the political giants of his day, he may have been ‘fifth business’, a Prufrock to Venizelos’ Hamlet, an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince But he was trusted by all sides in an era when political enemies routinely suffered exile, incarceration or execution. King George 11 of Greece once famously remarked that the most important tool in the arsenal of a Greek king was a suitcase. The same could be said of Greek politicians during this era when ascendancy meant eliminating political enemies as a prelude to power and loss meant exile or worse. I suspect that if a conciliatory figure like Zaimis had not actually existed, he would have had to be invented.

The Grave

He is in the ‘distinguished section’ of the First Cemetery, although his grave is now weed choked and tucked away between the more imposing monument to George Averoff  and Athens’ archbishops with their splendid marble pillowed crowns. 


Plaza B/70Γ

Footnotes

(1)  There was a time when I considered hereditary political careers as suspect but I have been in Greece far too long to find it at all unusual.
(2)  Modern Greece has never been free of the influence of “The Powers” even if the composition of that group has altered somewhat over time. Nothing happened if they did not want it to happen.
(3) It is remarkable how many demonstrations and riots have occurred in Greece when the object was not so much ‘change’ as to preserve the status quo.
(4)  At Theriso
(5) Passionate intensity has always been the preferred norm in parliamentary debates.
(6)  After ruling for 50 years, King George was assassinated by an apparent nonentity while walking in Thessaloniki.
(7) The Powers again. These were the countries which held the keys to the Greek future in 1914.
(8)  Venizelos would later say that he would not have won an election in 1917 if it had been held, so he felt fortunate that a formula was devised for him to ‘resume’ power. His loss in 1920, proves that he was correct.
(9) King Alexander was pretty much immured in the Palace. He did anger Venizelos by marrying a commoner and not a British princess. His rather sad few years in the throne was ended in 1920 when a pet monkey bite became septic and he died.








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