United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His Bavarian staff belonged to that reactionary generation that followed the overthrow of Napoleon in Europe, and attempted, heedless of Kapodistrias' fiasco, to impose on Greece the bureaucracy of the ancien régime. The Bavarians' work was entirely destructive.
After that, he attempted to rule as a military dictator, and fell foul of the Mavromichalis of Maina. The Mainates knew better how to deal with the 'police-state' than the Hydhriots; and on October 9, 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated in Nauplia, at the church door, by two representatives of the Mavromichalis clan. The country lapsed into utter anarchy.
Kapodistrias was a Corfiote count, with a Venetian education and a career in the Russian diplomatic service, and no one could have been more fantastically unsuitable for the task of reconstructing the country to which he was called.
Kapodistrias' ideal was the fin-de-siècle 'police-state'; but 'official circles' did not exist in Greece, and he had no acquaintance with the peasants and sailors whom he hoped to redeem by bureaucracy.
In the spring of 1827, when they committed themselves into the hands of their foreign patrons, the Greeks had found a new president for the republic in John Kapodistrias, an intimate of Alexander the tsar.
Word Of The Day