May 22

Events

• 1453: A lunar eclipse occurs while Constantinople is under siege by the Ottoman Turks. The Byzantines take it as a bad omen since an old legend stated that Constantinople would never fall while the Moon was waxing.
• 1825: Laskarina Bouboulina, heroine of the Greek War of Independence, is shot dead after a family dispute with in-laws.
• 1922: Petros Protopapadakis forms a government.
• 1925: Constantine VI resigns as Patriarch of Constantinople.
• 1947: The Truman Doctrine was enacted as US Congress appropriated military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey.
• 1963: MP Grigoris Lambrakis is run down by a delivery truck driven by two right-wing extremists (Emmanouil Emmanouilidis and Spyros Gotzamanis) after delivering the keynote speech at a pacifist meeting in Thessaloniki. He will die five days later.
• 2006: The 19th century painting The Naughty Grandchild by Nikiforos Lytras became the most expensively sold piece of artwork by a Greek painter, going for 1.08 million euros at an auction at Sotheby's in London.

Sports

• 1960: Kostas Sfikas breaks the Greek record in the triple jump with 15.45m.

Births

• 1907: Ploutis Servas, Cypriot politician, founder of AKEL.
• 1927: Michael Constantine, Greek-American actor.
• 1950: Alekos Alavanos, politician
• 1965: Fanis Christodoulou, basketball player.

Deaths

• 337: Constantine the Great, emperor of Byzantium.
• 1825: Laskarina Bouboulina, heroine of the Greek War of Independence.
• 1948: Georgios Tsolakoglou, general and quisling PM of Greece
• 1958: Sir Herbert Richmond Palmer, colonial governor of Cyprus in the 1930s.
• 2005: Charilaos Florakis, chairman of the Communist Party of Greece
• 2006: Kazimierz Gorski, football coach.