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Maritime Squabble Risks Most Unfortunate War

Jamie Dettmer

   It was the Greeks' first military clash with their onetime colonial
   overlords, the Turks, since they had secured their independence from
   the Ottoman Empire half a century earlier.

   For thirty days in 1897, the eastern Mediterranean rivals skirmished
   over the status of Crete, whose Greek majority population also wanted
   independence. The conflict came to be known as "the unfortunate war,"
   and drew in alarmed great Western powers, threatening a much wider
   conflict in a part of the world where nationalist aspirations,
   historical grievances and great-power rivalry sparked 17 years later
   the First World War.

   Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, the Russians as well as the
   British sent warships to Crete in a bid to maintain peace. Although
   largely sympathetic to the Greeks -- with the exception of the Germans
   -- they warned the ill-prepared Greeks not to engage in hostilities.
   Their warnings fell on deaf ears -- the Greeks got a drubbing.

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