GREECE’S PRIME MINISTER

Evening Star, Issue 22252, 1 February 1936, Page 15

GREECE’S PRIME MINISTER

DEATH OF CENERAL KOHDYLIS Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright ATHENS, January 31, (Received February 1, at 11 a.ra.) The death is announced of General Kondylis.' Georges Kondylis began his military career as a soldier in the Greek army at the beginning of the century. In 1905 he left the army to fight with irregulars against the Bulgarian bands in Macedonia. He had the daring, cunning, aggressiveness, and reckless bravery', as well as the jingoisb bombast, that are typical of the average comitadji chief. With the defeat of Venizelos in the elections of November, 1920, and the subsequent return of King Constantine to Athens, Kondylis

left the Asia Minor army and retired to Constantinople, then occupied by the Allied armies. Here he began conspiring to overthrow the Constantinists and to put the Venizelists back in power. This was Kondylis’s first appearance on the Greek political scene—albeit under cover. In 1923 -Kondylis resigned from the army t'o participate as a candidate in the elections. Kondylis became Minister of War in'the first Republican Government in April, 1924, but resigned four months later over a question of army discipline. In Parliament lie gathered about him a small but loyal group of followers, and after a number of changes of the end of 1924' found Kondylis Minister of Interior in .the Michalacopoulos Government'. In May, 1925, Kondylis resigned after a dispute with the Refugee Settlement Commission of the League of Nations. Since the rise to power of Pangalos, Kondylis waited patiently for his opportunity. He found it when the erstwhile dictator left Athens to spend a short vacation on the Island of Spetsai. Kondylis. like his predecessor, took over the Government in the name of constitutionalism. Since then he had a chequered political career, and last year became once more Prime Minister, pending the plebiscite for the return of the monarchy. He was in office at the time of his death.