Greco-Turkish War of 1897

Greco-Turkish War (1897)
Part of the
Painting of the Battle of Velestino
Date 5 April – 8 May 1897 Location Mainland Greece, mainly Epirus, Thessaly and Crete Result Ottoman military victory, small parts of Thessaly ceded to the Ottoman Empire Greek diplomatic victory (autonomy for Crete) through the intervention of the Great Powers of Europe Treaty of Constantinople
Belligerents
Ottoman Empire	Kingdom of Greece
Commanders and leaders
Abdul Hamid II Edhem Pasha Ahmed Hifzi Pasha Admiral Hasan Rami Pasha Hasan Tahsin Pasha	Crown Prince Constantine Konstantinos Sapountzakis
Strength
120,000 infantry 1,300 cavalry 210 guns	75,000 infantry 500 cavalry 136 guns
Casualties and losses
Unknown	Unknown

Ottoman military victory, small parts of Thessaly ceded to the Ottoman Empire
Greek diplomatic victory (autonomy for Crete) through the intervention of the Great Powers of Europe

The Greco-Turkish War of 1897, also called the Thirty Days' War and known in Greece as the Black '97 (Greek: Μαύρο '97, Mauro '97) or the Unfortunate War (Ατυχής πόλεμος, Atychis polemos), was a war fought between the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Its immediate cause was the question over the status of the Ottoman province of Crete, whose Greek majority long desired union with Greece. Despite a decisive Ottoman military victory, an autonomous Cretan State under Ottoman suzerainty was established the following year (as a result of the intervention of the Great Powers after the war), with Prince George of Greece and Denmark as its first High Commissioner. This was the first war effort in which the military and political personnel of Greece were put to test since the Greek War of Independence in 1821. For the Ottoman Empire, this was also the first war effort in which the reorganized military personnel were put to test. The Ottoman army was under the guidance of a German military mission under Colmar von der Goltz, who had reorganized it after the defeat in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878).

In 1878 the Ottoman Empire, according to the provisions of the Congress of Berlin, signed the Pact of Halepa which entailed the implementation of the organic law of 1868, promised but never implemented by the Ottoman government, which was to give Crete a status of wide-ranging autonomy. The Ottoman commissioners, however, repeatedly ignored the convention, causing three successive rebellions in 1885, 1888 and 1889. In 1894 Sultan Abdul Hamid II re-appointed Alexander Karatheodori Pasha as governor of Crete, but Karatheodori's zeal for the implementation of the agreement was met with fury by the Muslim population of the island and led to renewed clashes between the Greek and Turkish communities there in 1896 (the latter actually tending to be Greek Muslims of Cretan Greek convert origin).

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