GREEK REVOLT

Evening Star, Issue 21993, 1 April 1935, Page 9

GREEK REVOLT

DEALING WITH THE RINGLEADERS HEAVY SENTENCES IMPOSED Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright ATHENS, March 30. M. Autumn, the remaining member of the new' Government, was court raartialled at Athens and sentenced to life imprisonment with ten officers and others involved in the revolt, including Colonel Saraphis, the leader of the rising at the Euelphides Military College and the Evzone barracks, whose death was demanded by the prosecution. Ten others were sentenced to twenty years’ and others to shorter terms. Four were acquitted. VAULTING AMBITION MADAME VENIZELOS DISILLUSIONED LONDON, March 16. A tragic figure in the Greek revoluJution is the millionaire sexagenarian Madame Venizelos, the English-born wife of the veteran insurgent exPremief, states the 4 Daily Mail.’ A woman of soaring ambition, Madame Venizelos has been devoted to her husband since their marriage in 1921, by which she fulfilled a longheld desire to do the utmost for the man she regarded as Greece’s greatest son. She was Helena Sdehilizzij daughter and co-heir of a Greek who made £2,000,000 in business in England.

A popular member of the Greek colony in London, Helena was the most interested in Venizelos’s activities before the war. Helena gave thousands of pounds’ worth of comforts to the Venizelos funds in wartime, and became friendly with him when he visited Paris in connection with peace arrangements. She spent £12,000 buying promises in Grosvenor Square for the Greek Legation, to indicate her admiration for the Venizelos Premiership. When they were married in London she was approaching fifty, it was not a Jove match, but she was never able to do sufficient for her hero, although she had a rude awakening. Venizelos was surrounded by rugged Cretans and Republican polititians belonging to a class that his wife did not understand and disliked, as the older families with which she hitherto had been associated were Royalists. Moreover, she found the glamour with which she had suri'ounded her husband nonexistent in Athens.

Nevertheless, Madame Venizelos’s loyalty never wavered, and she spent a fortune in an attempt to consolidate her husband’s position. She built a magnificent mansion which the Government has now taken over, transforming it into a museum, and gave magnificently to charities, only to sec her hopes finally extinguished by the revolt, into which her friends believe she was dragged against her will.