The Pontian Admiral Who Became a Spy in the Macedonian Struggle
Georgios Kakoulidis lived several lives inside one. Born in Athens in 1871 to a family with roots in Kerasounta in Pontos, his grandfather had been secretary to Alexandros Ypsilantis and a member of the Filiki Etaireia, the secret society that sparked the Greek Revolution. His father was a public prosecutor. The family carried history in its blood.
Against his father's wishes, Kakoulidis joined the Hellenic Navy, graduated at the top of his class, and secured a scholarship to serve aboard the Russian battleship Admiral Nakhimov, sailing between Siberia, China and Japan. He returned to Greece before the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, then went back to Russia for artillery training at Kronstadt, facilitated by Queen Olga herself. By the time he was done, he spoke Russian, French and Turkish, and possessed the kind of calm, multilingual intelligence that made him suited for something far more dangerous than naval gunnery.
The muleteer was wearing the uniform of a Greek admiral.
In 1904, as Macedonia burned with competing Bulgarian, Ottoman and Greek ambitions, Kakoulidis left his uniform behind. Under the alias Konstantinos Stavropoulos, he toured Eastern Rumelia and Adrianople on a government mission to study Bulgarian operational plans. He was then placed at the Greek consulate in Thessaloniki under a second alias, Michail Aristeidou, helping organize the Greek resistance network. On the ground, he dressed as a peasant, a muleteer, a servant, a guide, moving through villages and mountain passes collecting intelligence, moving weapons, monitoring Bulgarian organizations and reporting back to the Greek command structure.
In March 1905 he organized an armed guerrilla unit and operated as Captain Dragas in the areas of Axioupolis and Gevgelija. He was captured by Ottoman forces during a battle that year, released through the intervention of the Thessaloniki Center, and smuggled back to Athens. His fluency in languages and his ability to inhabit other identities made him an invaluable collaborator of Kostas Mazarakis, the supreme commander of Greek guerrilla forces in Macedonia.
The most famous episode from this period came in 1905 when French newspaper Le Temps sent correspondent Michel Paillares to Macedonia to study the Macedonian Question. Paillares needed a local guide for his travels through the mountains. The man introduced to him as a muleteer named Dragas was Georgios Kakoulidis. Years later the two men met again. This time the muleteer was wearing the uniform of a Greek admiral. Paillares's astonishment when he recognized his old mountain guide in the face of the senior officer was, by all accounts, considerable.
Kakoulidis returned to the Navy and fought in the Balkan Wars as executive officer of the battleship Hydra, taking part in the naval battles of Elli and Lemnos and in the liberation of Lemnos, Thasos and Lesbos. During the National Schism he sided with Venizelos, boldly sailing the battleship Hydra out of Piraeus with ten men to join the National Defense movement in Thessaloniki.
His crowning moment came on November 13, 1918. Aboard the battleship Georgios Averof, Kakoulidis sailed into Constantinople at the head of the Greek naval squadron alongside the Allied victory fleet, following the end of the First World War. For a man of Pontic roots, the symbolism of entering the city that had defined Greek civilization for a thousand years was immense.
He went on to serve as Chief of the Hellenic Navy General Staff during the Asia Minor Campaign, represented Greece at the League of Nations naval committee, and entered politics after retirement, serving as a member of parliament and senator under Venizelos, and later as minister and governor-general of Thrace. He died on May 30, 1946, in Mykonos.
