希土战争

The Greco-Turkish War of 1897 or the Ottoman-Greek War of 1897 was fought between the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Its immediate cause involved the status of the Ottoman province of Crete, whose Greek-majority population had long desired union with Greece. Despite the Ottoman victory on the field, an autonomous Cretan State under Ottoman suzerainty was established the following year (as a result of the intervention of the Great Powers after the war), with Prince George of Greece and Denmark as its first High Commissioner.

The war put the military and political personnel of Greece to test in an official open war for the first time since the Greek War of Independence in 1821. For the Ottoman Empire, this was also the first war-effort to test a re-organized military system. The Ottoman army operated under the guidance of a German military mission led (1883–1895) by Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, who had reorganized the Ottoman military after its defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.

The conflict proved that Greece was wholly unprepared for war. Plans, fortifications and weapons were non-existent, the mass of the officer corps was unsuited to its tasks, and training was inadequate. As a result, the numerically superior, better-organized, -equipped, and -led Ottoman forces, heavily composed of Albanian troop levies with combat experience, pushed the Greek forces south out of Thessaly and threatened Athens, only to cease fighting when the Great Powers persuaded the Sultan to agree to an armistice. The war was the first to be filmed on camera, though the footage has since been lost.

Background

In 1878 the Ottoman Empire, according to the provisions of the Congress of Berlin, signed the Pact of Halepa which entailed the implementation of the organic law of 1868, promised but never implemented by the Ottoman government, which was to give Crete a status of wide-ranging autonomy. The Ottoman commissioners, however, repeatedly ignored the convention, causing three successive rebellions in 1885, 1888 and 1889. In 1894 Sultan Abdul Hamid II re-appointed Alexander Karatheodori Pasha as governor of Crete, but Karatheodori's zeal for the implementation of the agreement was met with fury by the Muslim population of the island and led to renewed clashes between the Greek and Muslim communities there in 1896.

Prelude to war

On 6 February 1897 (according to the modern Gregorian calendar;……

War

On 24th March, about 2,600 irregulars crossed the Greek border into Ottoman Macedonia in order to provoke disarray behind enemy lines by rousing locals against Ottoman administration. As a result, on 6 April Edhem Pasha mobilised his forces. His plan was to surround Greek forces and by using river Pineios as a natural barrier to push them back to central Greece. Nevertheless, his rear forces were halted while the center of his formation gained ground, altering his initial plans. The Greek plan called for a wider open field combat, which ultimately would cost heavy casualties against an already superior opponent.

There was no serious force left to prevent the Ottoman Army from entering the Greek capital, Athens. Halil Rifat Pasha, asked Abdul Hamid for permission to enter Athens.……

Thessalian front

Officially, war was declared on 18 April when the Ottoman ambassador in Athens, Asim Bey, met with the Greek foreign minister announcing the cutting of diplomatic ties.……

Aftermath

Despite the end of the war, the uprising on Crete continued – although with no further organized combat – until November 1898, when the Great Powers evicted Ottoman forces from the island to make way for an autonomous Cretan State under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Officially founded in December 1898 when Prince George of Greece and Denmark arrived on Crete to take up his duties as High Commissioner, the Cretan State survived until 1913, when Greece formally annexed the island.

In Greece, the public awareness of the country's unpreparedness for war in pursuit of its national aspirations laid the seeds for the Goudi coup of 1909, which called for immediate reforms in the Greek Army, economy, and society.……