Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration; Abbreviations
- Introduction: Perspectives on a Leader
- I Setting the Stage
- 1 A Century of Revolutions: The Cretan Question between European and Near Eastern Politics
- Map
- 2 Venizelos' Early Life and Political Career in Crete, 1864–1910
- II The Drama of High Politics
- III The Content of Political Action
- IV Offstage
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Plate section
2 - Venizelos' Early Life and Political Career in Crete, 1864–1910
from I - Setting the Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration; Abbreviations
- Introduction: Perspectives on a Leader
- I Setting the Stage
- 1 A Century of Revolutions: The Cretan Question between European and Near Eastern Politics
- Map
- 2 Venizelos' Early Life and Political Career in Crete, 1864–1910
- II The Drama of High Politics
- III The Content of Political Action
- IV Offstage
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
ORIGINS
There is little consensus among historians on the ancestry of Eleftherios Venizelos. The document most relied on by Venizelos' biographers is an extract from a letter sent by Venizelos to the Cretan chieftain Constantinos Diyenakis or Daskaloyannis, who had asked him (on 19 August 1899) to recount his origins. Of his father Kyriakos, Venizelos wrote:
While still very young, he participated in the great struggle of 1821 as the secretary of Koumis, the chieftain of Selino, with whom he endured the siege of Monemvasia. He was later awarded the medal of the revolutionary struggle. Three of his brothers were killed during the revolution, while another, Hadji Nikolos Venizelos, was sent with two other Cretans to negotiate with the chieftains in Greece at the start of the Greek Revolution … Exiled in 1843 by the Turkish government, which confiscated his shop and his land, Kyriakos remained outlawed but was again exiled during the 1886 revolution; he finally received permission to return to Chania in 1874.
Kyriakos was a remarkable young man, bright, ambitious and resilient. Born in poverty during the most bloody upheaval in Greek history, he survived deportations, exiles, bankruptcies and persecutions to become a man of importance and distinction in his native country.
The Venizelos family is first recorded in the village of Mournies; later they moved to Chania, where Kyriakos carried on his father's business, touring the province of Chania selling household goods. He was known as a dependable merchant to the peasants of the Chania area and soon built up a modest personal fortune.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Eleftherios VenizelosThe Trials of Statesmanship, pp. 37 - 84Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006