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 …read more
Source:: Voice of America
