Eleutherios Venizelos was the most influential Greek politician of the first half of the twentieth century, and he left a permanent mark on the country's social and economic life. A Cretan lawyer with a brilliant intellect, Venizelos worked tirelessly for reunification of Crete with Greece in the 1890s, then he burst into national politics when the leaders of the Goudi coup, conducted in 1909 by disaffected military officers, chose him to direct a new civilian government away from the military and financial disasters of the 1890s.

Data as of December 1994