25 June 2015
Who was Ioannis Kapodistrias?
by Neil Tidmarsh
The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras flew to Russia this week to meet with President Putin at the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum. But his first engagement on arrival was to lay a wreath at the monument to Ioannis Kapodistrias in Saint Petersburg’s Grecheskaya Ploshchad (Greek Square) and to address Russians of Greek descent there.
Who was Ioannis Kapodistrias? This is a good question to consider while the relationships between Greece and the Euro, Greece and Europe, Greece and Russia and indeed Europe and Russia hang in the balance.
The University of Athens is named ‘Kapodistrion’ after him; his face appears on the 20 lepta Greek Euro coin; there are statues of him in Switzerland and Slovenia as well as Russia. But the name is not well known in the West. Not many people here would be able to hazard an answer to the question “Who was the first head of state of modern Greece on its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1827, and what was its currency?” Those few who could would probably say “King Otto I, and the modern Drachma.” They’d be wrong on both counts.
Ioannis Kapodistrias was born in 1776, in Corfu, of aristocratic stock. He became a doctor, and when Russia occupied Corfu and the other Ionian Islands in 1799 during the French Revolutionary Wars he came under Russian influence; he was appointed director of the military hospital and became a minister of the new Ionian Islands state. In 1809 he entered the Russian diplomatic service. He became Russian ambassador to Switzerland. In 1815 he was sent to the Congress of Vienna as the Russian minister. Eventually Tsar Alexander I made him Foreign Minister of Russia.
In 1827 the Treaty of London was signed by Britain, France and Russia to support Greece in its struggle for independence against the Ottoman Turks. The three great powers defeated the Ottoman fleet in the naval battle of Navarino later that year; Greece was declared independent and its National Assembly elected Ioannis Kapodistrias as its first head of state, with the title Governor. Yes, the founding father of modern Greece was a Russian politician.
He found a chaotic, backward and impoverished country still fighting the Ottoman Empire and riven with conflicts between different factions which more or less amounted to civil war. He began an energetic programme to modernise and reform the country’s economy, military and politics. He founded a new currency, the Phoenix, for the reborn and newly-risen Greece – with a loan of 1.5 million roubles from Russia.
Greece and Russia shared a religion – Eastern Orthodox Christianity – and many geopolitical interests. At either end of the Ottoman Empire, they had a common cause in its decline. Russia was eager to seize territory from it, and Greece was still at war with it. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russia fought wars against Turkey in support of and supported by Greece: the war of 1828-29 which forced the Ottoman government to recognise Greek autonomy; the Crimean War of 1854-55, with Greece invading Thessaly and Epirus and causing the Epirus revolt and uprisings in Crete; and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, with Greece gaining Thessaly and small parts of Epirus as part of the Treaty of Berlin.
Russia, unlike Britain and France, was willing to help Kapodistrias force recalcitrant Greek factions to bow to his will. He called in Russian troops to restore order when a dispute between the governor of Laconia province and commanders of freedom-fighters broke out in armed conflict. In 1831, a revolutionary attempt to seize the Greek navy was put down by a Russian admiral and Russian forces.
But reforming and modernising Greece was just too tough a job. By 1831, less than four years into the job, Kapodistrias was widely hated. He had refused to call the National Assembly and was reigning as a despot. Many blamed his autocratic measures on the Russian ideas and influences he had embraced. On October 9 he was assassinated on the steps of the church of Saint Spyridon in his capital Nafplion by the brother and son of a rebellious subject he had tried to arrest.
His brother Augustinos succeded him as governor but his rule was brief, ending after six months of deepening chaos. In 1832 Otto I, the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, became the first king of the new Kingdom of Greece, bringing with him German influences and ideas which his regents tried to impose on Greece and which quickly became very unpopular…
And the Phoenix, the Russian-backed and Russian-financed attempt at a new currency? It was a failure. As few as 12,000 coins were struck as Greece lacked precious metals. Only 300,000 paper notes were printed, but, as the country had no underlying assets to back them up, foreign currencies such as the French franc or the British pound or even the Turkish kurus were widely used instead. With the founding of the Greek monarchy, the modern Drachma was established. Subject to runaway inflation, it went through three incarnations – first modern drachma of 1832, second modern drachma of 1944, third modern drachma of 1953 – until it was superseded by the Euro on January 1, 2001. But that’s another story altogether…
Or is it? Perhaps Tsipras found himself muttering “Same old story” as he stood in Grecheskaya Ploshchad contemplating Ioannis Kapodistrias’s life and works. Reforming and modernising Greece is just too tough a job. A currency conjured up out of thin air can just as easily disappear back into thin air. Greeks don’t take to Germanic ideas of efficiency and discipline. Lessons from the past, repeating themselves in the present. And in the future? Tsipras would do well to remind himself that the Greeks took to Kapodistria’s Russian-style autocrasy no better than they took to Otto’s German-style discipline and efficiency. That even those millions of roubles couldn’t make the Phoenix fly for a newly-independent Greece. That Russian soldiers ended up on Greek soil coercing Greek citizens.
And something for President Putin to ask himself as he prepared his offers to Tsipras: that 1.5 million rouble loan to Greece in 1828 – did Greece ever pay it back?
