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Pilot Accidentally Lands in Enemy Airfield and Other Historic Mistakes

Khalid Elhassan October 5, 2020 31 min

Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Würger - Focke-Wulf — Fw 190 dogfighting a Spitfire over the English Channel. Pintrest

8. Grand Ambitions

The envisioned Great Greece. New York Times

After the war, Premier Venizelos and his puppet king were committed to a political platform called Great Greece. It consisted of capturing from the defeated Ottoman Empire, now reduced to modern Turkey, all the lands that had once been inhabited by Greeks, dating back millennia. So in 1919, with tacit French and British support, Greek armies were sent to invade Turkey and seize the Ionian coast.

The king never got to see the end of that adventure, however, because his own undignified end intervened. It began with a visit to the Royal Gardens on September 30^th, 1920 – a turning point in Greek history. While walking his dog through the Gardens that day, king and pooch came across somebody’s pet Barbary macaque monkey. The dog attacked the monkey, which fought back. Alexander rushed in to separate the brawling animals. Unbeknownst to the king, however, the monkey had friends. King Alexander was about to have a great oops moment, and rue his decision to jump into the fight.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.