Ε. VENIZELOS
He was born in 1863 in Mournies, near Chania. He studied law in Athens and returned to Crete to work as a lawyer.
In 1887 he became a member of the Parliament of Kydonia. Later, in 1897, he played an important role in the Cretan uprising. His vision was to unite Greece and Crete to prevent the Turks from having ambitions for his homeland, and he achieved this at the Cretan Assembly of 1905, where he announced the union of Crete with Greece.
His influence was such that in 1909 he was invited to Athens to help end the military administration of Greece. A year later, he was appointed Prime Minister of Greece by King George I. In the next years of his presidency he completed the revision of the constitution (1911), undertook military and economic reform, and signed the Balkan alliance. This move proved decisive for Greece’s course in the Balkan wars that followed, first against the Turks (1912) and later against the Bulgarians (1913).
Greece’s economic and financial reform, the constitution and the constitution of the Greek army, and the constitution of the Balkan League.
During World War I Venizelos was forced to resign twice from the premiership, both because of internal and external political influences, but each time he managed to be re-elected. In 1924, after a failed attempt to work with the military leaders, he resigned for a third time. However, in 1928 he managed to be re-elected for the last time as Prime Minister of Greece.
He died in 1936 in Paris of a stroke. Today Venizelos is considered one of the most brilliant political leaders of modern Greece.
