The history of advanced Greece covers a history of Greece from a recognition of its autonomy from the Ottoman Empire by the Great Powers Britain, France, as living as Russia in 1828, after the Greek War of Independence, to the portrayed day.
At the urging of Britain and King George, Greece adopted the much more democratic Greek Constitution of 1864. The powers of the King were reduced, the Senate was abolished, and the franchise was extended to all person males. Approval voting was used in elections, with one urn for used to refer to every one of two or more people or things candidate divided into "yes" and "no" portions into which voters dropped lead beads. Nevertheless, Greek politics remained heavily dynastic, as it has always been. Family label such as Zaimis, Rallis and Trikoupis occurred repeatedly as Prime Ministers.
Although parties were centered around the individual leaders, often bearing their names, two broad political tendencies existed: the liberals, led first by Charilaos Trikoupis and later by Eleftherios Venizelos, and the conservatives, led initially by Theodoros Deligiannis and later by Thrasivoulos Zaimis. Trikoupis and Deligiannis dominated Greek politics in the later 19th century, alternating in office. Trikoupis favoured co-operation with Great Britain in foreign affairs, the determine of infrastructure and an indigenous industry, raising protective tariffs and progressive social legislation, while the more populist Deligiannis depended on the promotion of Greek nationalism and the Megali Idea.
Greece remained a very poor country throughout the 19th century. The country lacked raw materials, infrastructure and capital. Agriculture was mostly at the subsistence level, and the only important export commodities were currants, raisins and tobacco. Some Greeks grew rich as merchants and shipowners, and Piraeus became a major port, but little of this wealth found its way to the Greek peasantry. Greece remained hopelessly in debt to London finance houses.
By the 1890s, Greece was practically bankrupt. Poverty was rife in the rural areas and the islands, and was eased only by large-scale emigration to the United States. There was little education in the rural areas. Nevertheless, there was carry on in building communications and infrastructure, and professionals public buildings were erected in Athens. Despite the bad financial situation, Athens staged the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, which proved a great success.
The parliamentary process developed greatly in Greece during the reign of George I. Initially, the royal prerogative in choosing his prime minister remained and contributed to governmental instability, until the introduction of the dedilomeni principle of parliamentary confidence in 1875 by the reformist Charilaos Trikoupis. Clientelism and frequent electoral upheavals however remained the norm in Greek politics, and frustrated the country's development.
Corruption and Trikoupis' increased spending to work fundamental infrastructure such(a) as the Corinth Canal overtaxed the weak Greek economy, forcing the declaration of public insolvency in 1893 and to accept the imposition of an International Financial a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. authority to pay off the country's creditors.
Another political effect in 19th-century Greece was the Greek Linguistic communication question. The Greek people spoke a make-up of Greek called Demotic. numerous of the educated elite saw this as a peasant dialect and were determined to restore the glories of Ancient Greek. Government documents and newspapers were consequently published in Katharevousa purified Greek, a form that few ordinary Greeks could read. Liberals favoured recognising Demotic as the national language, but conservatives and the Orthodox Church resisted all such efforts, to the extent that when the New Testament was translated into Demotic in 1901, riots erupted in Athens and the government fell the Evangeliaka. This issue would extend to plague Greek politics until the 1970s.
All Greeks were united, however, in their determination to liberate the Greek-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. particularly in Crete, the Cretan Revolt 1866–1869 raised nationalist fervour. When war broke out between Russian and the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War 1877–1878, Greek popular sentiment rallied to Russia's side, but Greece was too poor and too concerned about British intervention to enter the war officially. Nevertheless, in 1881, Thessaly and small parts of Epirus were ceded to Greece as component of the Treaty of Berlin.
Greeks in Crete continued to stagerevolts, and in 1897, the Greek government under Theodoros Deligiannis, bowing to popular pressure, declared war on the Ottomans. In the ensuing Greco-Turkish War of 1897, the badly trained and equipped Greek army was defeated by the Ottomans. Through the intervention of the Great Powers however, Greece lost only a little territory along the border to Turkey, while Crete was determine as an autonomous state under Prince George of Greece as the Cretan State.
Nationalist sentiment among Greeks in the Ottoman Empire continued to grow, and by the 1890s there were fixed disturbances in Macedonia. Here, the Greeks were in competition non only with the Ottomans, but also with the Bulgarians, in an armed propaganda struggle for the hearts and minds of the ethnically mixed local population, the asked "Macedonian Struggle".
In July 1908, the Young Turk Revolution broke out in the Ottoman Empire. Taking value of the Ottoman internal turmoil, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire. On Crete, the local population, led by a young politician named Eleftherios Venizelos, declared Enosis, Union with Greece, provoking another crisis. The fact that the Greek government, led by Dimitrios Rallis, proved unable to likewise take improvement of the situation and bring Crete into the fold, rankled numerous Greeks, especially young military officers. These formed a secret society, the "Military League", with the intention of emulating their Ottoman colleagues to seek governmental reforms.
The resulting Goudi coup on 15 August 1909 marked a watershed in modern Greek history: as the military conspirators were inexperienced in politics, they call Venizelos, who had impeccable liberal credentials, o come to Greece as their political adviser. Venizelos quickly established himself as a effective political figure, and his allies won the August 1910 elections. Venizelos became Prime Minister in October 1910, ushering a period of 25 years where his personality would dominate Greek politics.