Introduction: Charismatic Leadership, Historical Reputation and National Memory

In 1945, nearly a year after Greece’s liberation from Axis occupation, Athens’s most central boulevard was renamed in honour of Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936). Twenty-four years later, during the military dictatorship, the capital’s first major statue of him was inaugurated; in 1989, another was placed – this time in the courtyard of the Hellenic Parliament. Finally, in 2001, just a few years before Greece hosted the Olympic Games, the government named the new international airport of Athens after him, branding the country’s main gateway to the world with a name associated with diplomatic skill and modernising ambition.Footnote ¹ These milestones in official memory reflect what has been common knowledge in Greece: nearly every city and town features some form of public commemoration of Venizelos. Hundreds of books, articles, broadcasts, films, political speeches, school lessons and digital media invoke his legacy. As one prominent historian has noted, a ‘Venizelos cult’ has emerged since the 1974 transition to democracy, portraying him as ‘the most important statesman in Greek political history and the creator of contemporary Greece’.Footnote ²

Yet, this was not always the case. During his lifetime, Venizelos was a deeply polarising figure at the heart of a protracted civil conflict. Such was the intensity of this divide – and of Venizelos’s role in it – that the opposing factions frequently referred to themselves as ‘venizelists’ and ‘anti-venizelists’. As we will see, the term ‘venizelism’, already in circulation during Venizelos’s lifetime, evolved from denoting political allegiance to signifying broader ideological positions across the spectrum – republicanism, modernisation or anti-communism – depending on context. Accordingly, the article focuses on the interim period between his death in 1936 and the imposition of the dictatorship in 1967, to examine how and why Venizelos was ultimately transformed into an almost universally celebrated ‘father of the nation’.Footnote ³

This article explores how retroactive perceptions of leaders and statesmen function as mechanisms through which traumatic and divisive pasts can be reinterpreted and integrated into national historical consciousness. Two intertwined concepts are central to this discussion: charisma and reputation. Drawing on Max Weber’s argument that charisma is a relational phenomenon, recent scholarship has shown that its construction involves complex social and cultural processes, serving various agendas and shaping collective aspirations. Political, social and cultural developments shape particular ideals of leadership, which can be embodied by individuals who strive to meet these expectations; at the same time, leaders and their associates often attempt to modify and redefine these ideals. This continuous negotiation between leaders and followers produces shifting standards of what constitutes charisma in each historical era, with modern popular media playing a crucial role.Footnote ⁴ Thus, the meaning of charisma is not fixed but evolves over time, and the solidification of a charismatic image requires long-term processes intimately tied to the second concept: reputation.

Reputation functions as an organising principle, linking a leader’s actions into a coherent framework.Footnote ⁵ In the case of historical reputation – the focus of this article – the central questions are: which social agents commemorate certain aspects of a statesman’s past, through which means and for what purposes? In other words, while the perception of a leader as ‘charismatic’ during their lifetime is a necessary step, their pantheonisation as a ‘father of the nation’ demands active memory work and reputational entrepreneurship.Footnote ⁶ Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such figures were typically associated with wars, revolutions, processes of national unification and other formative milestones of national memory. Consequently, a multitude of narratives – often conflicting – emerged, shaped by both the intensity of the events themselves and the competing interpretations produced by opposing sides. However, these interpretations of a leader’s actions – or of broader divisive past events – are neither wholly fabricated nor simply imposed by elites. For a narrative to be effective, it must be plausible and anchored in some form of historical evidence. The formation, dissemination and contestation of such narratives constitute the core mechanisms in the shaping of a historical reputation.Footnote ⁷

In this light, the multivocality inherent in the memory work surrounding the making of a ‘father of the nation’ is not a paradox but a defining feature.Footnote ⁸ The cases of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte – two major nineteenth-century figures – illustrate this phenomenon in different ways: while both were perceived as ‘charismatic’ during their lifetimes, it was the multivocal commemoration of their achievements that cemented their status. Lincoln led the prevailing faction during the American Civil War, but he was also gradually appropriated by his opponents.Footnote ⁹ After Napoleon’s defeat, his myth provided a platform for his defeated supporters, while the restored Bourbon regime constructed a sanitised version of him as a national symbol stripped of revolutionary and liberal associations.Footnote ¹⁰

Comparable processes unfolded in the context of the Italian and German national unifications: Guiseppe Garibaldi and Otto von Bismarck were similarly pantheonised and commemorated by multiple, often ideologically divergent, factions.Footnote ¹¹ While other cases may also offer insight into the dynamics of reputational entrepreneurship, two contextual factors are particularly salient. First, these examples concern leaders who were not merely prominent political actors, but protagonists in the foundational processes of nation-building or national reconstruction. Second, their legacies transcended partisan boundaries and were appropriated by a range of political factions and regimes, especially during moments of institutional or ideological transition. In this regard, Venizelos’s historical reputation – particularly in the decades leading up to 1967 – bears greater resemblance to that of Lincoln or Napoleon, whose memory was contested, reinterpreted and ultimately nationalised, than to figures such as Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy, whose commemorations, while symbolically powerful, remained more narrowly aligned with specific political traditions.Footnote ¹²

In the Greek context, the evolving image of Venizelos must be understood within a historical landscape shaped by two defining periods of conflict: the Balkan Wars and First World War (1912–22) and the Second World War and Civil War (1940–9). His most significant activity occurred between the eve of the First World War and the inter-war period, yet the reinterpretation of his legacy unfolded over the course of Greece’s version of the ‘short twentieth century’, culminating in the fall of the seven-year military dictatorship in 1974. These turbulent decades witnessed rapid shifts in historical consciousness, driven by overlapping socio-political divisions and competing autobiographical memories. As such, the case of Venizelos offers a valuable contribution to the broader discussion on the formation of national symbols in twentieth-century Europe, illustrating how political myths are reconstructed and legitimised in moments of crisis and transition.Footnote ¹³

A New ‘Messiah’ for a New Century: Revisiting Eleftherios Venizelos

To understand Venizelos’s enduring imprint on Greek historical consciousness, one must understand both his policies and the turbulent historical context in which they emerged. Beginning his career as a politician, minister and revolutionary on the island of Crete – then under Ottoman rule – Venizelos entered national politics after the 1909–10 pronunciamiento. With the support of the Crown, he quickly rose to power, founded the Liberal Party (Komma Fileleftheron; KF) and united diverse forces – from bourgeois entrepreneurs to socialist intellectuals – under the shared goals of revitalising Greek nationalism, advancing irredentism and modernising the state.Footnote ¹⁴ From the outset, Venizelos and his associates demonstrated a sophisticated grasp of reputational management and mass media, but it was the impact of a major event that significantly bolstered his reputation: during the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which greatly expanded Greek territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, Venizelos and King George I were widely celebrated as national heroes.Footnote ¹⁵

However, Venizelos’s myth as a charismatic leader was shaped above all through his dramatic confrontation with another figure cast in similarly heroic terms: King Constantine I, crowned in 1913. Although his military reputation had been tainted by Greece’s defeat in the Ottoman–Greek War of 1897, Constantine was celebrated as commander-in-chief during the Balkan Wars and venerated as a modern heir to the Byzantine emperors.Footnote ¹⁶ As militaristic nationalism surged across Europe in the lead-up to the First World War, both men came to personify competing visions for fulfilling the dominant Greek irredentist ideology in Greece, known since the mid-nineteenth century as the ‘Great Idea’. While Venizelos advocated for aligning with the Entente, Constantine favoured a stance of ‘benevolent neutrality’ toward the Central Powers.Footnote ¹⁷

This clash sparked the ‘National Schism’ (Εθνικός Διχασμός), a deep political, social and cultural divide that quickly escalated into civil conflict. After being forced to resign twice in 1915, Venizelos formed a provisional government in Thessaloniki (National Defence Movement; Kinima Ethnikis Amynis), while the Entente intervened to reinstate him and oust Constantine. Upon returning, Venizelos imposed martial law, launched the Asia Minor campaign and called elections to consolidate his authority following the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres – only to suffer a major electoral defeat in 1920.Footnote ¹⁸ The monarchist government prolonged the war, leading to Greece’s crushing 1922 defeat – known as the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’. In the aftermath, pro-venizelist officers led a military coup and executed six prominent anti-venizelist leaders on charges of high treason (‘Trial of the Six’). The monarchy was abolished in 1924, further embedding the monarchy–republic divide at the centre of political conflict.Footnote ¹⁹

By the early 1920s, the Schism had become not just a partisan rivalry but also a foundational fraction marked by violence and collective trauma. From 1915 until 1940, nearly every political, social, cultural, regional, ethnic and religious cleavage in Greece was interpreted through its lens.Footnote ²⁰ The divide shaped distinct autobiographical memories, political identities and cultural expressions – from quasi-religious partisan songs and slogans to a prolific body of popular historiography.Footnote ²¹

After years in self-imposed exile, Venizelos returned in 1928 and secured a landslide victory. During his final premiership (1928–33), he shifted focus away from irredentism toward modernisation, state intervention and reconciliation with Turkey. He also enacted the 1929 ‘idionymo’ law, which intensified the persecution of communism.Footnote ²² At the same time, he attempted to (re)shape his image. His most ambitious reputational project was commissioning Georgios Ventiris – a prominent journalist and close associate – to author a comprehensive historical account. Greece in 1910–1920 (Η Ελλάς του 1910–1920), serialised in Eleftheron Vima newspaper in 1931 and later published in two volumes, became a touchstone of venizelist memory. It framed Venizelos as the leader of the Greek bourgeoisie and helped set the interpretative template for subsequent historiography.Footnote ²³

In the final years of his life and after surviving an assassination attempt in 1933, Venizelos remained fiercely oppositional, especially on the regime question – even though the governing anti-venizelist Popular Party (Laikon Komma; LK) had accepted the republican status quo. In 1934, he engaged in a public debate with General Ioannis Metaxas, a prominent anti-venizelist and former confidant of King Constantine. Through dozens of newspaper articles, both men advanced their interpretations of the Schism and the 1922 defeat. Beyond justifying his past policies, Venizelos repeatedly cited Ventiris’s work and openly aimed to shape the historical consciousness of younger generations unfamiliar with the conflict.Footnote ²⁴

In 1935, Venizelos supported a failed coup aimed at preventing the monarchy’s restoration, presenting it as a reprise of his 1916–17 wartime efforts.Footnote ²⁵ The monarchy was reinstated months later and the ensuing instability was utilised by Metaxas and King George II – Constantine’s son – to impose a dictatorship in 1936. Despite its predominantly anti-venizelist origins, the Metaxas regime claimed to transcend the Schism, as Venizelos had died a few months earlier.Footnote ²⁶ This rhetoric reached its peak in October 1940, when, in response to an Italian ultimatum that brought Greece into the Second World War, Metaxas publicly invoked the legacy of Venizelos and pledged to follow his foreign policy example by aligning the country with the Allies.Footnote ²⁷

Realigning the Schisms throughout the 1940s

To this day, Greek historical consciousness is primarily shaped by the 1940s, including milestone events like the triple occupation by Germany, Italy and Bulgaria, the resistance movement against the occupiers and the Civil War of 1946–9.Footnote ²⁸ In relation to the subject of this article, the most significant issue was the re-alignment of socio-political divisions – and, consequently, of collective memory and historical consciousness. The National Schism was not simply forgotten due to the emergence of new divisions; rather, its conflicts were absorbed into these new divides and recontextualised through their lens.Footnote ²⁹

A key factor in this process was the rise of the left as a major political pole. During the Occupation, the Greek Communist Party (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas; KKE) – which had been relatively marginal during the inter-war period – became the main driving force behind the largest resistance organisation, the National Liberation Front (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo; EAM). In line with the anti-fascist front policy declared internationally since the mid-1930s, EAM incorporated various forces, including many of venizelist origin – among them military officers who served in EAM’s army. Other venizelist forces joined either bourgeois resistance groups or the Greek government and army in exile. A smaller, but strategically significant, fraction of venizelist officers collaborated with Axis powers in order to supress the communist-led resistance.Footnote ³⁰

These new political alignments also reshaped the ways Venizelos and venizelism were commemorated and politically utilised. In the complicated reality of the war, the ‘regime question’ – whether Greece should be a monarchy or a republic after the war – was reignited and served as a signifier of affiliations. Although Venizelos’s stance on the matter varied throughout his lifetime, he was primarily associated with republicanism, due to his conflict with the king during the National Schism. However, during the Second World War both royalists and republicans invoked his legacy as a source of legitimacy, as regime preferences were fluid.Footnote ³¹ Thus, Venizelos was commemorated by bourgeois politicians in exile as the exemplary Greek leader of the First World War, while EAM officials portrayed him as the forefather of progressive social reforms that needed to be fulfilled.Footnote ³² The state of historical consciousness was so fluid that even the Greek collaborators commemorated Venizelos; for instance, in an unsigned series of articles, the collaborationists’ regime blamed Metaxas because he had sided with the United Kingdom rather than Italy, claiming that Venizelos had, supposedly, foreseen the advantages of fascism and nazism.Footnote ³³

These fluent affiliations became even more complex after Greece’s liberation in late 1944, particularly following the Battle of Athens (Dekemvriana), in which EAM clashed with government forces supported by British troops. In the post-liberation political landscape, three factions emerged: the right, the centre and the left. The centre – broadly encompassing various offshoots of the Liberal Party and segments of the bourgeois resistance – was a novel force. However, its claim over Venizelos’s legacy was not automatically granted, but rather contested. The regime question further complicated matters, as multiple layers of division overlapped: the most significant divide was between the largely communist left and its opponents, while the Crown had become a unifying symbol for anti-communist forces, leading many former republicans to align with it.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, Venizelos’s legacy was now fractured across all political factions, serving as both a foundational reference and a navigational tool for post-war political alignments. Communist politicians like Petros Roussos, a senior cadre of the KKE and prominent intellectual of the left, argued that, if Venizelos were alive, he would instantly disavow his so-called successors, while royalist former anti-venizelist journalists like Georgios Vlachos proclaimed the end of the National Schism through a newfound unity against the communist common enemy.Footnote ³⁵

This fluidity persisted until the Civil War (1946–9), during which the communist Democratic Army of Greece (Dimokratikos Stratos Elladas; DSE) fought against government forces, which ultimately prevailed with American support under the Truman Doctrine. The onset of the Cold War had a profound impact on Greece, crystallising the second major political divide of the twentieth century: the, now banned, Communist Party and its allies versus a coalition of right-wing and centrist forces under the banner of ‘national-mindedness’ (ethnikofrosyni).Footnote ³⁶

During the Civil War, Venizelos’s legacy was instrumental in shaping this new dividing line. On the one hand, the Communist Party invoked Venizelos’s decision to partition Greece during the First World War as a necessity, in order to legitimise its plans for territorial control in northern Greece.Footnote ³⁷ After a series of outraged responses from right-wing and centrist newspapers,Footnote ³⁸ this discourse culminated in a public debate between G. Ventiris and author Giorgis Labrinos, a key figure in the Communist Party’s post-war historiographical efforts. Ventiris fulminated against the communists for referencing his earlier work, Greece in 1910–1920, in the newspaper serial ‘The Two States: Greece in 1916–Greece in 1947’ authored by Giannis Katris and Stratis Dromazos. Ventiris argued that Venizelos had been compelled to partition Greece in the nation’s best interest, unlike the communists. Labrinos countered by accusing Ventiris of contradicting his earlier writings and of failing to distinguish between progressive and reactionary forces, equating his stance with that of the anti-venizelists during the First World War.Footnote ³⁹ This debate exemplified how political divisions overlapped and how the National Schism was recontextualised through the lens of the Civil War.

On the other hand, as the two dominant inter-war parties – the Liberal Party and the People’s Party – formed a coalition government in 1947, the former rivals advanced the rhetoric of ‘national unity against the communist threat’ and the ‘overcoming of the thirty-year Schism’. It was during this period that Venizelos’s anti-communist policies of the 1930s began to feature prominently in his commemoration.Footnote ⁴⁰ An extreme example illustrates this rhetoric of ‘national unity’: during a parliamentary session in 1948, former anti-venizelist MP Aristeides Basiakos told his colleague, Venizelos’s son Sophocles, that his father had been justified in persecuting his opponents in 1918, because, at the time, Venizelos ‘was the state and we were the rebellion, the anarchy’.Footnote ⁴¹ This image of Venizelos as a strong leader who, when necessary, could rule in an almost autocratic manner became a cornerstone of his historical reputation as national-mindedness was formulated, and it remained as such for right-wing parties during the post-Civil War semi-authoritarian democracy until 1967. The commemoration of ‘strong’ leaders as an example in establishing (quasi)autocratic regimes has been a recurring theme in European right-wing politics, as exemplified by the glorification of figures such as Otto von Bismarck.Footnote ⁴²

Re-writing the Origin Story of a National Hero in the 1950s

The issue of ‘strong’ leadership pertains to the relationship of Greek society with its pre-war past and the memories of the latter. From 1952 to 1963, the governing right-wing political parties – the Greek Rally (Ellinikos Synagermos; ES) led by Alexandros Papagos and its successor, the National Radical Union (Ethniki Rizospastiki Enosis; ERE) led by Konstantinos Karamanlis – sought to present themselves as the true heirs of Venizelos in the context of constructing a heroic narrative as victors of the Civil War, simultaneously dismissing the small centrist parties as unworthy of such a great legacy.Footnote ⁴³ The profiles of the right-wing leaders are of particular interest in this discussion: Papagos, commander-in-chief of the Greek forces during the Second World War and Field Marshal of the government forces during the Civil War, had been a staunch anti-venizelist military officer during the inter-war period; Karamanlis, who emerged as the principal post-war conservative leader, was also of anti-venizelist origin.Footnote ⁴⁴

During the electoral campaigns of 1951 and 1952, many centrist politicians defected to the Greek Rally, while even the traditional newspapers owned by Dimitrios Lambrakis, a powerful publisher and media magnate with long-standing venizelist affiliations, supported Papagos. As To Vima argued, ‘it is not sufficient that someone bears the inherited title “venizelist” [. . .] the true venizelists are those who, without bearing the title, keep on being inspired by the teachings of the great political school [of thought] that Venizelos founded and by his political testaments’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Beyond political and economic interests, we have to consider the broader context: at the time, much of the non-left political spectrum desperately sought a unifying platform in the post-Civil War and Cold War landscape. The right-wing national-mindedness, spearheaded by Papagos and then by Karamanlis, provided this platform, promising national reconstruction, modernisation, the ‘overcoming of the National Schism’ and the safeguarding against the ‘communist threat’ – that is, a security state aimed against citizens suspected of leftist actions, affiliations or tendencies – under the auspices of the United States and the Crown.Footnote ⁴⁶

Although right-wing forces mainly originated from anti-venizelism, their claim on Venizelos’s legacy during the 1950s was both effective and plausible – especially after the integration of former venizelist politicians into their ranks – because they selectively emphasised aspects of Venizelos that aligned with their own narrative: the image of a strong leader who combined modernisation and anti-communism. In this narrative, Venizelos was depicted as the forefather of post-war right-wing leaders in two key ways. First, he was credited with revitalising the Greek political system; Akropolis, one of the leading right-wing newspapers, drew a direct parallel between Papagos’s entry into politics and the pronunciamiento that had brought Venizelos to power, proclaiming that Papagos’s leadership would mark ‘a new 1909’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, Venizelos was portrayed as having foreseen the danger of communism and having attempted to suppress it; again, Akropolis summarised the narrative accordingly: ‘[Read] how the great Venizelos struck communism and what his petty successors do nowadays’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This reinterpretation exemplifies a broader phenomenon, in which historical figures are actively reinterpreted to align with a new political programme – akin to Theodor Roosevelt’s commemoration of Abraham Lincoln as the ‘first Progressive’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Another strong indication of this rationale appeared in the 1956 ERE manifesto, which declared that the two major inter-war political factions had ‘fulfilled their historical mission by 1922’ and that the Greek people now demanded the overcoming of the National Schism – thus, the manifesto concluded, ERE wished to unite all those who were not ‘prisoners of the dead past’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the following weeks, leading right-wing newspapers argued that Greece’s regeneration had started with Venizelos’s policies, continued under Papagos – who had died in 1955 – and would now be completed by Karamanlis.Footnote ⁵¹ Furthermore, Karamanlis compared himself to Venizelos on numerous occasions throughout the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ⁵²

This perception of Venizelos as the primogenitor of national-mindedness, combined with the systematic condemnation of the National Schism, essentially meant that, in right-wing discourse, Venizelos was detached from venizelism; this rhetorical detachment was mainly due to venizelism’s historical clashes with the Crown and to the anti-venizelist origins of many right-wing politicians. In this way, a direct lineage was constructed from Venizelos to Papagos and then to Karamanlis, allowing national-mindedness to claim a prestigious forefather and integrate traditional nationalism with Cold-War ideology. As Benedict Anderson aptly put it, this was an effort to accommodate ‘pearls strung along a thread of narrative’Footnote ⁵³ – in this case, a continuous chain of great national leaders.

On the other hand, centrist parties, eager to identify themselves as the true heirs of Venizelos, continually labelled their right-wing opponents as the successors of anti-venizelism – that is, the culprits of all national tragedies, from the Asia Minor Catastrophe to the Axis Occupation. Notably, the leader of the National Radical Centre Union party (Ethiniki Rizospastiki Enosis Kentrou; EPEK) during the first half of the 1950s was Nikolaos Plastiras, the former military general who had led the 1922 venizelist coup. To this end, centrist newspapers such as Progressive Liberal (Proodeftikos Fileleftheros) sought to evoke venizelist loyalties and memories among voters by drawing historical parallels, even comparing their opponents to the notorious bandit Karathanassis, who had attempted to assassinate Venizelos in 1933 on orders from the state.Footnote ⁵⁴

After briefly aligning with the left in the mid-1950s, the numerous small centrist parties attempted to reinvent their identity by emphasising Venizelos’s internal reforms, rather than his diplomatic achievements. The new 1958 manifesto of the Liberal Party, for example, focused on the agrarian and educational reforms of his founder, as well as on his role in modernising the Greek state.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, contrary to the political mythology that would prevail in later decades, Venizelos’s legacy was contested during the 1950s and venizelism was not yet considered the ‘natural’ predecessor of the centre. The main problem was that, despite their participation in the defeat of the communists during the Civil War and their brief time in government (1950–2), centrist parties struggled to establish a clear political identity and lacked significant political capital.Footnote ⁵⁶

Alongside these political contestations, historiographical narratives evolved through parallel, though not always aligned, dynamics. While the political uses of Venizelos were largely a power struggle between non-left forces – ultimately dominated by the right during the 1950s – the historiographical perceptions of Venizelos followed a different trajectory, as they entailed longer-term commitment and constant interest. Historiography, particularly in relation to recent events, often interacts with politics, yet it retains a degree of ‘relative autonomy’. In other words, in order to answer the questions of when, how and why a historiographical field is formed, we should not reduce the political context’s influence over historiographical trends to a simple cause-and-effect relationship.Footnote ⁵⁷

Although works such as Ventiris’s Greece in 1910–1920 remained relevant, the events of Venizelos’s era needed to be historicised in light of recent historical developments. For example, in 1949, Konstantinos Amantos – a prominent professor of Byzantine history at the University of Athens and member of the Academy of Athens – and Konstantinos Tsatsos – Minister of Education and Religious Affairs and important conservative intellectual – both called for more extensive archival research and historiographical accounts on Venizelos. In the context of annual commemorative events, they stressed that contemporary Greeks lacked a comprehensive understanding of Venizelos because they had ‘focused too much on his diplomatic feats’, as Amantos wrote.Footnote ⁵⁸

As the turbulent 1940s ended, Greek society sought to recontextualise its pre-war past and Venizelos served as the perfect metonymy in this process. However, academic historians generally regarded the early twentieth century as too recent for scholarly study;Footnote ⁵⁹ this historisation was mainly carried out by actors in the field of popular historiography, that is, journalists, authors and former colleagues of Venizelos – politicians, diplomats and military officers – who sought to narrate their own participation in past events and vindicate their choices. From 1945 until 1967, approximately forty serialised historical narratives on Venizelos and his era were published, contributing to a broader nexus of venizelist memory that encompassed dozens of books, school textbooks, standalone articles, various commemorative texts or essays, annual speeches, lectures and radio broadcasts.Footnote ⁶⁰

From the late nineteenth century, print media were the most widespread and authoritative platforms of popular historiography and, more generally, public history in various European countries, including Greece.Footnote ⁶¹ In the context of a broader rise in newspapers’ volume, quantity of content, country-wide distribution and readership, a surge of such publications occurred in the country after the Second World War, mainly in the form of newspaper-serialised historical narratives. Apart from the publication of content regarding world history and other periods like ancient Greece, the Byzantine Empire and the Greek War of Independence, the recent past was mainly historicised through popular historiography in newspapers.Footnote ⁶²

Notable examples on our subject include the memoirs of Venizelos’s widow, Helena, the accounts of General Dimitrios Vakas about the military feats of Venizelos and the historical works of former minister Alexandros Zannas and former secretary of Venizelos Potis Tsimpidaros about the failed coup of 1935 and about the National Schism respectively. At the same time, traditional authoritative sources of general knowledge like the Great Greek Encyclopedia (Megali Elliniki Egkyklopedia) enriched their entries about Venizelos, focusing not so much on diplomacy as on his internal reforms.Footnote ⁶³ These works, widely read and debated, were not merely expressions of interest in recent history but also deliberate ventures of reputational entrepreneurship – efforts by a network of influential political and cultural actors to actively shape and promote Venizelos’s historical image, much like the posthumous legacy-building surrounding John Kennedy.Footnote ⁶⁴

The most influential work of the time was Greece between Two Wars, 1923–1940 (I Ellas metaxy dyo polemon, 1923–1940), authored by journalist Grigorios Dafnis. Originally published as a newspaper serial in the centrist Eleftheria (1953–4) before being released as a two-volume book by Ikaros publishing house, Dafnis’s work was both a political and historiographical statement. Drawing on extensive research, it served as both a response to the extensive political uses of Venizelos by the right-wing parties – particularly by Alexandros Papagos’s party – and the first attempt to contextualise the Greek inter-war period as a distinct historical era beginning with the Asia Minor Catastrophe. At a time when centrist forces were undergoing restructuring, Dafnis provided the first reflective account on Venizelos, moving away from the heroic tone of Ventiris, while still maintaining a clear pro-venizelist stance.Footnote ⁶⁵

Beyond these largely centrist efforts, other historiographical accounts emerged. Some popular authors sought to capitalise on the growing interest in Venizelos, such as Spyros Melas, who published a trilogy on his early years and aligned with the right-wing narrative of separating Venizelos from venizelism.Footnote ⁶⁶ On the other hand, popular leftist historians like Yanis Kordatos argued that Venizelos’s early policies were initially progressive, but, as he were a bourgeois politician, his conflicts with the Crown were driven more by necessity than ideological conviction.Footnote ⁶⁷

By the late 1950s, a popular historiographical corpus on Venizelos, primarily shaped by centrist authors and former associates, had emerged. Amid government efforts to suppress perceived ‘enemies of the state’ following the rise of the United Democratic Left (Eniaia Dimokratiki Aristera; EDA) – a legal political party associated with the banned Communist Party – as the official opposition in the 1958 elections, right-wing government officials grew concerned about the increasing prevalence of newspaper serial narratives on the National Schism and sought to restrict them.Footnote ⁶⁸ Their fears were seemingly validated in November 1960, when the centrist newspaper To Vima began publishing Polychronis Enepekidis’s serial narrative ‘The Secret Archives of Vienna’, which accused the royal family of conspiring with the German Empire during the First World War against the Entente, Venizelos and the Greek people.Footnote ⁶⁹ This series marked a turning point, bridging the growing historiographical interest in Venizelos and the National Schism of the 1950s with the militant political uses of the venizelist past in the 1960s.

A ‘Glorious Schism’: Constructing a Republican Myth in the Volatile 1960s

Although some initiatives had been taken during the 1950s, it was after the manipulated elections of 1961 that a new socio-political coalition began to emerge. National-mindedness did not disappear, but it was increasingly challenged by the rise of the ‘anti-right-wing’ ideology (antidexia), a reaction against the semi-authoritarian democracy of the time. Politically, this movement was led primarily by the Centre Union (Enosis Kentrou; EK) party, founded in 1961 and headed by Georgios Papandreou. Papandreou had a long-standing affiliation with both venizelism and anti-communism: a veteran politician, he had served in many positions, including being political advisor to the 1922 venizelist coup, Education Minister in the last Venizelos government, Prime Minister in exile during the Second World War and during Greece’s liberation from the Axis in 1944, handling the initial phase of the Battle of Athens and co-leader of the Liberal Party during the second half of the 1950s. While Papandreou was not a centre-left politician, his opposition to right-wing dominance resonated with large segments of Greek population, particularly those – leftist or suspected as such – who had endured constant persecution by the semi-authoritarian national-minded state, as well as various progressive forces and younger generations. Thus, this new party brought together centrist, reformist and centre-left forces and governed from 1963 to 1965.Footnote ⁷⁰

Following the 1961 elections, Papandreou and his associates launched the ‘Relentless Struggle’ (Anendotos Agonas), a campaign aimed at undermining the ERE right-wing governing party. In the context of the deepening divide within Greek society, the centrists sought to distinguish themselves from ERE by invoking the National Schism. This strategy led to the most intense invocation of the venizelist past in the post-war era, as the Centre Union and ERE clashed over which political faction was the true heir to the ‘national triumphs’ of the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷¹ While similar debates had taken place in the 1950s, the history and memory war of the 1960s was marked by two key differences: increased intensity and broad social support, as well as a new level of transmedial engagement.

From March 1962 to the end of 1963, the centrists and their allies orchestrated a coordinated effort combining political discourse, popular historiography and public commemorations to claim the venizelist legacy. Their core narrative asserted that the right-wing faction’s monopoly on national-mindedness was a fabrication. The Centre Union argued that a lineage of progressive national forces had shaped twentieth-century Greece, tracing a direct line from Venizelos and his party – where Papandreou had been active – to Papandreou’s role in vanquishing the communists in 1944 and culminating in the Centre Union.Footnote ⁷² At the same time, this narrative cast the right-wing forces as the successors of every major national failure: the ‘oligarchic’ opposition to Venizelos in his early career, King Constantine I’s collaboration with the German Empire during the First World War, the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the Metaxas dictatorship and collaborationism during the Second World War.Footnote ⁷³

This powerful narrative, framed as a battle between ‘light and darkness’, was propagated through multiple media and discourses. An illustrative example can be found in the 20 March 1962 issue of the centrist newspaper Eleftheria, which linked two seemingly separate events: a controversial statement by King Paul I – who reigned from 1947 to 1964 – that echoed the autocratic tendencies of his grandfather, King Constantine I, and Papandreou’s tour of Crete, where he attended the annual memorial service at Venizelos’s funerary monument. These events were connected through the venizelist myth: the newspaper’s front page featured a photograph of a massive crowd at a centrist rally, where a torch lit from Venizelos’s vigil lamp was presented and a Cretan-style popular song about freedom was sung. The front page also featured the latest instalment of the serial narrative ‘The File of the Schism’, strategically timed so that the memorial service date would coincide with the beginning of the chapter about the National Schism.Footnote ⁷⁴

Beyond this particular serial, centrist newspapers had begun publishing many others since the launch of the ‘Relentless Struggle’, or continued older ones, combining political messaging with great commercial success; for example, in the first week of March 1962 alone, newspapers Ta Nea and Eleftheria each saw a daily increase of 5,000 readers.Footnote ⁷⁵ The interplay between politics and popular historiography was mutually reinforcing: serialised narratives provided the Centre Union with historical arguments against the government and the Crown, while political debates further amplified public interest in these publications. Through this fusion of politics and historiography, the ‘anti-right-wing’ ideology incorporated core elements, such as the claim that the royal family of Greece had consistently acted against national progress. This political mythology centred on the clash between Venizelos and King Constantine I, portraying Venizelos as the embodiment of all progressive forces in Greek history. This theme was most evident in ‘Venizelos and His Era’, the longest serial of the time, authored by journalist and playwright Georgios Roussos. In this work, he sought both to embed this new militant anti-royalist venizelism within a broader historical narrative and to provide the Centre Union with ‘irrefutable’ evidence of King Constantine I’s incompetence versus Venizelos’s strategic brilliance.Footnote ⁷⁶

The right-wing response to these initiatives was largely defensive. Since this was fundamentally a history and memory war, the government attempted to discredit the multiple and simultaneously published serials on the National Schism, dismissing them as politically motivated rather than objective historical research.Footnote ⁷⁷ Ministers, members of parliament and right-wing newspapers also participated in this debate, accusing Papandreou of being a ‘tomb raider’ and highlighting his disagreements with Venizelos during the inter-war period.Footnote ⁷⁸ Their central argument was that, since many of Venizelos’s former associates had joined right-wing parties in the 1950s, the true heirs to his legacy were within their ranks. As in the previous decade, the mainstream right-wing commemoration of Venizelos focused almost exclusively on his status as a national hero, while omitting almost any other aspect of the venizelist myth – particularly this faction’s clashes with the Crown. Such attempts to retroactively detach a historical personality from their factional environment are a hallmark of political uses of historical figures and of the processes of nationalising them, as exemplified in the case of Napoleon.Footnote ⁷⁹

Notably, amid this history war, the right-wing claims to Venizelos’s legacy co-existed with a resurgence of anti-venizelist and royalist memory, particularly regarding the traumatic events of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In his New Year address for 1963, King Paul I emphasised his dynasty’s contributions to Greece, highlighting the ‘military genius’ of Constantine I – an assertion directly contradicted by anti-right-wing popular historiography and political discourse.Footnote ⁸⁰ Shortly thereafter, Papandreou engaged in a heated parliamentary exchange with right-wing MPs Aristeides Protopapadakis and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, the son and nephew, respectively, of two anti-venizelist leaders executed in the 1922 ‘Trial of the Six’. While both politicians distanced Venizelos from the full blame of venizelism for the executions, Protopapadakis criticised the late statesman for his quasi-dictatorial rule in 1917–20 and for his failure to recognise that he never truly had the Entente’s support during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22.Footnote ⁸¹

This line of reasoning was common among authors of anti-venizelist origin in the post-war era, including former diplomats like Konstantinos Sakellaropoulos and Panagiotis Pipinelis, as well as former military officers like Victor Dousmanis and Panagiotis Panagakos.Footnote ⁸² Overall, while the leading elites of the right-wing faction sought to claim Venizelos’s legacy, scepticism, or even hostile sentiments, persisted among portions of these parties. These anti-venizelist reflexes resurfaced in times of political crises, as illustrated by a comment in the leading right-wing newspaper Kathimerini, which, responding to complaints about the absence of a Venizelos statue in Athens, suggested that those who wished to see one should erect it themselves, since he was, after all, ‘one of their own’.Footnote ⁸³

The ‘Relentless Struggle’ was a success, leading to the Centre Union’s rise to power in late 1963. Rather than seeking to overthrow the semi-authoritarian democracy of the time, the party aimed to implementing moderate reforms. During this period, the new governing party actively promoted the historical reputation of Venizelos as its primogenitor. Among these efforts, one stood out as a unifying framework: the ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Year’ (1964–5), which celebrated the centenary of his birth. To fully grasp the significance of this initiative, two key factors should be considered: transmediality and the scaling of memory.Footnote ⁸⁴ A similar celebration had been attempted in 1945–6, during a brief centrist government, though not on a large scale.Footnote ⁸⁵ In contrast, during the 1964–5 celebration, the government collaborated with local authorities, associations and state institutions to further disseminate its message: that the true heirs of Venizelos had finally assumed power to carry on his legacy after more than a decade of authoritarianism.Footnote ⁸⁶ Celebrations were held in nearly every large Greek city – with particular emphasis on Crete – and in Paris; the Greek Army organised sports events and demonstrations across the country, while various cultural institutions hosted exhibitions, concerts and lectures series.Footnote ⁸⁷

At the same time, all available media were mobilised. Newspapers and magazines were filled with relevant features, debates, book reviews and serialised historical narratives;Footnote ⁸⁸ the government funded the publication of a lavish multi-volume book titled The Bible of Eleftherios Venizelos (Vivlos Eleftheriou Venizelou); the National Radio Foundation broadcasted numerous fiction and non-fiction shows, discussions and interviews with former colleagues of Venizelos, authors, historians and artists;Footnote ⁸⁹ additionally, the government sponsored the production of a full-length documentary film, Eleftherios Venizelos, directed by Lila Kourkoulakou, and appointed a committee to ensure its historical accuracy.Footnote ⁹⁰

This centrist mobilisation also influenced the long-standing issue of Venizelos statues. Since his death in 1936, only a few had been erected, all in Crete, despite repeated proposals by various officials for a statue in Athens.Footnote ⁹¹ As part of the centenary celebrations, numerous cities, towns and municipalities inaugurated statues and busts, while also renaming streets in his honour.Footnote ⁹² However, all attempts to establish a ‘monument’ to Venizelos in Athens failed. A comparison may help illuminate this issue: in 1938, the Metaxas dictatorship inaugurated the colossal statue of King Constantine I in the ‘Pedion tou Areos’ public park of Athens.Footnote ⁹³ This was a part of Metaxas’s reputational politics concerning the late king, of whom he had been a close associate. The largest statue of Venizelos in Athens was eventually inaugurated in 1969, also under a dictatorship, but the colonels merely executed an idea that dated decades back. It was the result of multiple layers of Venizelos’s evolving historical reputation, with the dictatorship’s version being just one of many.Footnote ⁹⁴

The ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Year’ was abruptly interrupted in the summer of 1965 by the dramatic political events known as ‘Iouliana’: a part of the Centre Union defected, forming three successive governments under the guidance of the Crown, from mid-1965 until late 1966.Footnote ⁹⁵ This defection, known as ‘the apostasy’, was perceived by both the Centre Union leadership and the left as a royalist coup, igniting a fierce intra-centrist conflict that added another layer to Venizelos’s reputational trajectory. The stage was set for what was perceived to be an exact re-enactment of the National Schism, an image that key political actors, particularly Papandreou, deliberately emphasised. Fifty years after 1915, King Constantine II – who had ascended the throne in 1964 – forced Prime Minister G. Papandreou to resign, mirroring his grandfather King Constantine I’s dismissal of Venizelos. Further reinforcing this historical parallel, Papandreou sent three letters to the king in order to resolve the crisis, just as Venizelos had done in 1915. This was a textbook case of how collective memory and historical consciousness function as both political tools and as navigational frameworks.Footnote ⁹⁶

Within this dynamic, where the king and prime minister had their historical counterparts, the ‘apostates’ – that is, the Centre Union’s MPs who defected – remained a contested variable. To Papandreou and his followers, they were the descendants of anti-venizelist ‘puppets’ of the Crown; to themselves, they were the true defenders of Venizelos’s legacy through prudent actions. Panos Kokkas, publisher of the newspaper Eleftheria, which sided with the ‘apostates’, summarised their position: ‘when [Venizelos] gave the cue for the Schism [. . .] he had previously sought compromise and, as leader of the [parliamentary] majority, supported governments formed not by his friends, but by his adversaries’.Footnote ⁹⁷

The governing apostates leveraged all available venizelist symbolic resources to legitimise their actions, attempting to secure favourable statements from members of the Venizelos family,Footnote ⁹⁸ issuing public letters to voters – especially in CreteFootnote ⁹⁹ – holding political rallies where they invoked the late statesman,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ delivering parliamentary speeches and publishing popular historiographical accounts in newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Their narrative added a new layer to the memory of Venizelos, that of the prudent politician who constantly warned the Greek people against national divisions. As Konstantinos Mitsotakis, Minister of Government Coordination and the most prominent of the ‘apostates’, argued during a parliamentary speech, Venizelos had died with a sense of bitterness, because his achievements, despite being great, had left Greece divided.Footnote ¹⁰²

However, this narrative failed to gain traction, as the ‘apostates’ lacked social support. Two notable incidents of censorship highlight their struggle: first, photographs of Venizelos were removed from retail stores in Crete;Footnote ¹⁰³ second, government committees initially banned and later censored the aforementioned documentary film by Kourkoulakou, citing technical reasons, though, in reality, the cuts targeted its negative portrayal of the royal family, the anti-venizelists and Metaxas.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Both actions were ultimately reversed following intense public backlash from the Centre Union, the left and even Eleftheria, despite the newspaper’s support for the ‘apostates’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is important to stress out that, while most ‘apostates’ originated from venizelism, their dependence on the Crown led them to inconsistent actions. In fact, the intense anti-right-wing and anti-royalist mobilisation provoked a counter-reaction from certain reactionary branches of the state, triggering another resurgence of anti-venizelist and royalist reflexes and memories.

Conversely, the Centre Union and, to a lesser extent, the left, promoted a militant interpretation of Venizelos as a committed freedom fighter whose primary adversary had always been the Crown. While this staunchly republican image of Venizelos was not new, its intensity reached unprecedented levels, even surpassing that of the ‘Relentless Struggle’. Centrist newspapers continuously revisited the events of the National Schism, particularly one of its most contentious phases: the territorial partition of Greece and the Venizelos-led Provisional Government of Thessaloniki during the First World War.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Papandreou explicitly linked himself to this narrative, quoting Venizelos’s plea to King Constantine I: ‘king, relinquish the party leader position [. . .] and ascend again to your throne’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Meanwhile, leftist newspapers emphasised the monarchy’s repeated constitutional violations, portraying Venizelos as a defender of democratic principles, while simultaneously criticising him for not taking a more radical stance against the Crown.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the context of the documentary’s censorship, the leading left-wing newspaper I Avgi remarked that the royalists could not ‘erase from history’ the fact that ‘[in 1915] Venizelos had stood against the royalist coup instigators and had defended the Constitution and the will of the people’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Simultaneously, the momentum of the ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Year’ and the ongoing political crisis fuelled the publication or republication of influential works of popular historiography, further entrenching this republican venizelist narrative. In 1965, prominent leftist journalist Spyros Linardatos published his mid-1950s serial narrative as a book, titled How Did We Arrive at the 4th of August? (Πώς φτάσαμε στην 4η Αυγούστου), which chronicled the events leading to the Metaxas dictatorship. Centrist General Dimitrios Vakas, a key figure in venizelist commemoration, encapsulated the narrative of Venizelos’s greatness from a nationalist standpoint in his pocket-sized book Eleftherios Venizelos: His Life and Work (Ελευθέριος Βενιζελος. Η ζωή και το έργο του). Stefanos Stefanou, Venizelos’s former secretary, edited a two-volume collection of Venizelos quotes, titled Political Testaments of Eleftherios Venizelos (Ελευθερίου Βενιζέλου πολιτικαί υποθήκαι). Whether explicitly endorsing the militant republican image of Venizelos or not, these works provided key reference points for the venizelist mythology of the time, shaping a corpus that would remain influential for decades.

The intensity of this anti-right-wing and anti-royalist perception of Venizelos was further solidified during the colonels’ dictatorship (1967–74), particularly given King Constantine II’s failure to effectively oppose the coup. A telling indication of this phenomenon was that, despite the regime’s efforts to appropriate Venizelos’s legacy, it imposed a prolonged ban on Kourkoulakou’s documentary. When the ban was lifted in 1973, thousands of people – primarily university students – flocked to screenings.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thus, after the abolition of monarchy in the 1974 referendum, Venizelos was established as a ‘father’ of not only the nation but also republicanism.Footnote ¹¹¹

Conclusion: Who Does a ‘Father of the Nation’ Belong to?

Eleftherios Venizelos is widely regarded as the most important Greek statesman of the twentieth century, despite his central role in the National Schism – a fierce civil conflict that shaped nearly every divide in Greek society until the Second World War. This article traced his historical reputation and the trajectory through which he was established as a ‘father of the nation’ from his death in 1936 until the imposition of the colonels’ dictatorship in 1967. A key aspect of this trajectory is that Venizelos’s gradual pantheonisation occurred in the context of – and was deeply influenced by – the overlap between the two major socio-political divisions of twentieth-century Greece, each stemming from a world war and its aftermath: the National Schism and the Civil War. His posthumous image played a central role in realigning autobiographical memories and political agendas, symbolising Greek society’s relationship with its contested pre-war past.

Three main themes emerged. First, Venizelos’s pantheonisation was not a linear process. His posthumous celebration was not simply a retrospective acknowledgement of his ‘greatness’, but the result of specific historical contexts and shifting socio-political agendas, shaped by the interplay of memory work and public reception. Second, political and social actors selectively emphasised particular aspects of Venizelos’s past to align with their narratives. Yet, these commemorations were not purely fictional or propagandistic: to be effective, a historical narrative must be plausible. Thus, no fixed or authoritative ‘venizelist’ past existed; it was continuously reconstructed through documentary practices and strategic emphasis. Third, this process unfolded across interconnected domains – politics, historiography and public commemoration – each reinforcing the others.

However, not all uses of the past had equal resonance. Some commemorations were more frequent, intense and influential. This question of ‘ownership’ can be addressed through four sub-questions. First, who commemorated Venizelos? Nearly every major political and social force did, from the 1940s onward. Second, which version did they commemorate? Right-wing forces portrayed Venizelos as a national-minded moderniser who foresaw the communist threat, while distancing him from the venizelist factional legacy. The centre presented him as its predecessor – an anti-right-wing and republican figure and the architect of modern Greece. The left, ambivalent, critiqued his bourgeois, imperialist and anti-communist policies, but praised his opposition to the monarchy and some of his progressive reforms.

Third, how did these commemorations occur? The right employed parliamentary rhetoric, press discourse and the incorporation of former venizelists. The left utilised similar tools, alongside historiographical works and participation in public events. The centre commemorated Venizelos most consistently, especially in the 1960s, through political discourse, publications, newspaper serials, commemorative rituals and other media. Fourth, why did these commemorations occur? For the right, Venizelos provided both a bridge to centrist constituencies and prestigious national figure to place alongside the monarchy, giving historical depth to the ideology of national-mindedness. For the centre, he embodied continuity with a glorified past and distinction from the right. For the left he was not an ancestor, but a republican touchstone and critique tool against both the right and the centre.

These images of Venizelos, though distinct, emerged from overlapping political, historiographical and commemorative processes. They were contextualised by two broader developments: the gradual historicisation of Greece’s pre-war past in the post-war period and the reframing of the National Schism’s memory through the lens of the Cold War’s binary between communism and national-mindedness. As a result, some versions proved more durable. The two dominant ones were the ‘national-minded’ Venizelos of the 1950s and the ‘anti-right-wing’ Venizelos of the 1960s – shaped by the respective socio-political demands of their time and exemplified by initiatives such as the historiographical surge of the early 1960s and the 1964–5 ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Year’.

While the question of reputational ownership should not be framed in essentialist terms – such as ‘who did Venizelos truly belong to?’ – these two dominant interpretations did not have equal longevity. The ‘anti-right-wing’ Venizelos was ultimately cemented by two critical developments: the sustained centrist memory work until 1967 and the establishment of the Third Hellenic Republic in 1974. Until 1967, although both the right and the left commemorated Venizelos and had former venizelists in their ranks, neither faction fully embraced or systematically cultivated the venizelist mythos as the centre did. Comparing political discourse, historiographical production and commemorative culture shows that the centre – in its many variations – consistently invoked him across media and time, while the right and left did so selectively.

This does not imply that the centrist version prevailed uncontested or that Venizelos’s ‘natural successors’ were ultimately vindicated. Rather, its core elements were reinforced by overlapping interpretations, creating a durable shared framework. These elements remain foundational until today: Venizelos as the preeminent political figure of his era, the architect of national unification, the moderniser of the Greek state and the republican opponent of monarchy.

The aim of this research was to uncover the historical processes through which these now self-evident interpretations were constructed and ascribed to Venizelos. Through such processes, political figures like Lincoln, Napoleon, Garibaldi or Venizelos are elevated not simply as important leaders but also as protagonists of nation-building or national unification. In such cases, the notion of charismatic leadership becomes a key interpretative lens for understanding how their reputations consolidate over time. They are venerated for not just their deeds but also their apparent ability to bend the arc of history – a perception constructed and reproduced by allies and opponents alike. Accordingly, the wars, revolutions and civil conflicts in which they participated are not erased from public memory, but reframed as necessary or ‘correct’ steps in a nation’s development. If such central involvement in foundational events is followed by posthumous multivocal commemoration and cross-partisan appropriation, charismatic leaders may be elevated in the national imaginary to the status of ‘father of the nation’.

Venizelos exemplifies this international phenomenon in a relatively short time span. Through the intersection of Greece’s two major twentieth-century socio-political divides, his image was transformed into that of a bourgeois revolutionary and unifying national figure. The period examined here, from 1936 to 1967, laid the foundations for this transformation. It was during these three decades that the key elements of his historical reputation were constructed, debated and disseminated – paving the way for his later consolidation as a ‘father of the nation’ (εθνάρχης).