Immediately after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, power was seized by Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras, a legendary figure from the Balkan Wars, known as the “Black Rider.” Plastiras did not assume public office at the time — he would become Prime Minister much later — but took on the title of Head of the Revolutionary Committee, demanding the abdication of King Constantine in favor of his son, George II, which eventually occurred.

Plastiras invited Venizelos to represent Greece in the lengthy 1923 negotiations for the Treaty of Lausanne, which defined the borders of modern Turkey as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire. Despite Greece having been the losing side in the war, Venizelos once again managed to shine, securing significant concessions from Turkey. For example, by officially acknowledging that Greece had committed war crimes during the Asia Minor campaign, he persuaded Turkey to drop its demand for reparations — which had initially included half of Greece’s commercial fleet.

Venizelos returned to Greece much later, in 1927, and won the 1928 elections with ease, returning to the premiership. He governed for four years, pushing through major institutional reforms and large-scale infrastructure projects, which were primarily financed through foreign loans, especially from British capitalists.

As Georgios Kafantaris, who played a key role in stabilizing the drachma after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, put it:

“He wanted to be Pericles without the Golden Age.”

Indeed, excessive borrowing became a noose around the neck of the Greek economy following the global turmoil caused by the 1929 Wall Street crash. This was followed by Germany’s debt default in 1931, which prompted the U.S. to freeze war debt payments, aiming to avoid further losses for American investors involved in rebuilding Germany — as there was a looming risk of the financial crisis cycling back into the U.S.

The collapse in Greek exports due to the economic downturn across Europe was the final blow — leading to Greece’s fourth bankruptcy in 1932.

Before that, in 1930, Venizelos signed the Friendship Pact with Turkey, which cost him politically, as it was poorly received by the refugees — once the core of his electoral base. Nonetheless, the pact secured years of calm relations with the neighboring country.

In 1933, Venizelos survived a second assassination attempt, plotted by anti-Venizelists. Two years later, he was involved in what historians now consider his greatest mistake: the 1935 coup, which quickly failed. Although Venizelist forces seized parts of the Navy, the Air Force remained loyal to the government and bombed cities with a strong refugee presence. Venizelos fled through Turkey and eventually settled in Paris, where he died a year later.