In 1920, King Alexander of Greece died from a monkey bite.
His sudden, untimely death was one of the first in a series of disasters that ultimately led to the Greek Catastrophe in Asia Minor of 1922.
Who cares? Well, in this piece I wanted to make the point that history is full of strange, absurd events. There is always the element of chaos underneath everything. In Greece, there are innumerable nationalist documentaries exploring the actions of men like Eleftherios Venizelos (women are notably absent, of course) but there is no acknowledgement of chance as a determining factor in history. There are even conspiracy theories about Alexander's death that point to his doctors; people find it truly unthinkable that a king - especially a Bavarian/Danish import - could die from the infected bite of a monkey.
