Assassination of King George I of Greece in 1913 and the instability that followed

On 18 March 1913 King George I of Greece, who had ruled the country for 50 years, was shot dead. He was killed at the height of the military confrontation with Turkey, from which Greece had, over the years of George's reign, succeeded in winning back substantial territories. The assassin was caught, but he took his own life in prison, and those who had commissioned the murder were never identified.

After George's death everything in Greece went wrong. A country that had almost doubled in size, and that had every chance of driving the Turks out of most of the lands of the Byzantine Empire, suddenly plunged into the abyss of instability, fell into the hands of weak rulers, and slid into coups and wars for a period even longer than the stable half-century under George.