Anyone who has not read the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, do not comprehend the context of the Pact of Halepa¹ and grant great significance to the Revolutionary Assembly of Kretans², while this was but a geopolitical pawn on a new chessboard created after the Russo-Turkish War³ . The arbitration of Germany and the alliance of the players England, Austria, France, Italy and Russia against the Ottoman Empire obliged her to move towards a direction it did not wish and which gave complete rights to the Christians. Amongst them were the Kretans. For this reason, the Pact of Halepa was signed three months after the Congress of Berlin. It has no relation to anything else but as a result of high strategy and not some local movements. Therefore, strategic history overturns the arbitrary dogmatic elements which have no historic substance, because they are not concerned with details. Indeed, the secret agreement of England with the Ottoman Empire for the secession of Cyprus explains the intervention of England in the developments on Krete, not considering it was appropriate to give Krete to Hellas⁴. This point is important to be comprehended in order to explain the choice of Governor of Krete who would be appointed for a five-year period, who if a Christian, would have a Muslim adviser and vice-versa. As this compromise is still relevant to other regions and cases, it is not the result of movements, but of strategic selection by England, which follows the known conceptual scheme of the kingdom of disunity. With this method we avoid regional traps and examine the strategy of the pieces on the chessboard and not only a pawn.

1. 3 October 1878
2. Held in a suburb of Chania, Krete, on 15 October 2015.
3. 24 April 1877 – 3 March 1878
4. The Cyprus Convention of 4 June 1878 was a secret agreement reached between the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire which granted control of Cyprus to Great Britain in exchange for its support of the Ottomans during the Congress of Berlin.