Short answers, pulled from the story.
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country of 10 million people on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It has nine regions and thousands of islands and the longest coastline on the Mediterranean. Albania lies to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east.
Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilisation and the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy and literature, historiography, political science, theatre, and the Olympic Games. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.
Greece emerged as a modern nation state in 1830, following a war of independence that began in 1821. The state was recognised under the London Protocol in 1830, and the current parliamentary republic dates to the constitution adopted in 1975.
In 2009 it was revealed that Greece's deficits were far higher than official figures, with liabilities kept off the books. The Great Recession contracted Greece's GDP by 2.5% in 2009, pushing the debt-to-GDP ratio to 127% and triggering a 110 billion euro rescue package in May 2010. The bailouts ended in 2018.
The Greek Merchant Navy is the largest in the world at 18% of global capacity and ranks first in tonnage at 384 million deadweight tons. Shipping accounts for about 5% of GDP and employs roughly 160,000 people, and during the 1960s the fleet nearly doubled through the investment of magnates Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos.
Alexander the Great, son of Philip II of Macedon, conquered much of the known ancient world from the Near East to northwestern India. Undefeated in battle, he marched to the banks of the Hydaspes before his death in 323 BC in Babylon, after which his empire fragmented into Hellenistic kingdoms.