Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean. It is a country of 10 million people on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, with nine regions and thousands of islands. The native name in Modern Greek is Ελλάδα. The Ancient Greek form Ἑλλάς, or Hellas, survives in English mostly in poetic contexts. The English words Greece and Greek come, by way of Latin, from the Graeci, one of the first Greek tribes to settle southern Italy. This is the place often called the cradle of Western civilisation: the birthplace of democracy, of Western philosophy and literature, of theatre and the Olympic Games. How did a scattering of independent city-states give the world these inheritances? How did a people who once ruled from the Near East to northwestern India spend centuries under Ottoman rule before becoming a modern state in 1830? And how did a country praised for record growth come within a decade to the edge of sovereign default? The answers run from the marble figurines of the Aegean to a debt repaid years ahead of schedule.

• 2. Birth Of A Civilisation

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  The Apidima Cave in Mani, in southern Greece, has been suggested to hold the oldest remains of early modern humans found outside Africa, dated to 200,000 years ago, though some argue the remains are archaic humans. Neolithic settlements here date from the 7th millennium BC and are the oldest in Europe, because Greece lay on the route by which farming spread from the Near East. The Cycladic culture flourished on the Aegean islands from around 3200 BC. It produced an abundance of folded-arm marble figurines. From about 3100 BC to 1100 BC, Crete was home to the Minoan civilisation, known for colourful art, religious figurines, and monumental palaces. The Minoans wrote in scripts called Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs, which remain undeciphered. On the mainland, the Mycenaean civilisation developed around 1750 BC and built large fortifications. The Mycenaeans used Linear B to write the earliest attested form of Greek. Their collapse opened the Greek Dark Ages, an era from which no written records survive. The traditional end of those Dark Ages is 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games.

• 3. City-States And Empire

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  In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens. By 500 BC the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city-states in Asia Minor and Macedonia. Persia invaded mainland Greece in 492 BC but withdrew after defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. A number of Greek city-states formed the Hellenic League in 481 BC, led by Sparta. After the death of Leonidas at Thermopylae, the Persian navy was defeated in 480 BC at Salamis by an allied Greek fleet under Themistocles. The Persian army was finally beaten at Plataea in 479 BC. The 50 years of peace that followed are known as the Golden Age of Athens. That unity did not last. The Peloponnesian War, from 431 to 404 BC, broke the Athenian Empire and brought Spartan and later Theban dominance. Weakened by constant fighting in the 4th century BC, the city-states fell to Macedon under Philip II. After Philip's assassination at Aigai in 336 BC, his son Alexander led a campaign against the Persian Empire and abolished it. Undefeated in battle, Alexander marched to the banks of the Hydaspes before his death in 323 BC in Babylon. His empire then fragmented among his generals.

• 4. Hellenistic World

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  Alexandria and Antioch were among the new cities founded by the kingdoms that rose from Alexander's broken empire, settled by Greeks as a ruling minority. The generals who succeeded him built large personal realms: the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids across Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Iran, and others in Thrace and Greece. A vernacular form of Greek known as koine spread widely, and Greeks adopted Eastern deities and cults. In India, the Indo-Greeks blended Greek and Buddhist practices and gave rise to Greco-Buddhist art. Greek science, technology, and mathematics reached their peak during this Hellenistic period. To keep their autonomy from the Macedonian Antigonid kings, many Greek poleis joined into federations such as the Aetolian and Achaean League. A stratum of wealthy euergetai dominated their internal life. From about 200 BC the Roman Republic grew more involved in Greek affairs. Macedon's defeat at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC ended Antigonid power. In 146 BC Macedonia was annexed as a Roman province, and the rest of Greece became a protectorate. The conquest was completed in 27 BC, when Augustus annexed the rest of Greece as the senatorial province of Achaea. The Romans, for all their military superiority, came to admire and absorb Greek culture.

• 5. From Byzantium To The Ottomans

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  The New Testament was written in Greek, and Greek-speaking communities of the Hellenised East helped spread Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Ancient Greek religious practices were outlawed by the emperor Theodosius I in 391 to 392. The last recorded Olympic games were held in 393. The closure of the Neoplatonic Academy of Athens by Justinian in 529 is taken as the end of antiquity. The eastern Roman Empire, known later as the Byzantine Empire, kept its capital at Constantinople and its language and culture Greek. Its people called themselves Rhōmaîoi, meaning Romans. In the early 6th century Greece had about 80 cities according to the Synekdemos chronicle. Under the Macedonian dynasty in the late 9th through early 11th centuries, the empire recovered lost territory in a period dubbed the Golden Age of Byzantium. Constantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and became the capital of the Latin Empire. Three Greek rump states resisted: the Despotate of Epirus, the Empire of Nicaea, and the Empire of Trebizond. Nicaea retook Constantinople in 1261. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and by 1460 the conquest of mainland Greece was complete. Venice held out longer: Crete remained Venetian until 1669, and the Ionian Islands until 1797. Under Ottoman rule heavy taxes were enforced and rural Greeks were turned effectively into serfs, while the Greek Orthodox Church was treated as ruling authority over all Orthodox Christians of the empire.

• 6. Forging A Modern State

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  The Filiki Eteria, a secret organisation, formed in 1814 amid the Modern Greek Enlightenment, when Westernised Greek-speaking elites began to imagine a Greek nation. The first revolt began on the 6th of March 1821 in the Danubian Principalities and was crushed. On the 17th of March the Maniots declared war on the Ottomans, and by October 1821 the Greeks had captured Tripolitsa. France, the Russian Empire, and the United Kingdom each sent a navy, and the allied fleet destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino. The Greek state was recognised under the London Protocol in 1830. Ioannis Kapodistrias, chosen as first governor in 1827, was assassinated in 1831, after which Britain, France and Russia installed the Bavarian prince Otto von Wittelsbach as monarch. Otto was deposed in 1862 and replaced by Prince Wilhelm of Denmark, who took the name George I and brought the Ionian Islands as a coronation gift from Britain. Under the Cretan politician Eleftherios Venizelos, who became prime minister in 1910, Greece's territory and population doubled by 1913, annexing Crete, Epirus, and Macedonia. Defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922 brought disaster. Over 1.5 million propertyless refugees from Turkey, more than a quarter of Greece's prior population, had to be absorbed into Greek society.

• 7. Dictatorship War And Recovery

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  Ioannis Metaxas was installed in 1936 as head of a dictatorship called the 4th of August Regime. In October 1940, Fascist Italy demanded the surrender of Greece, but Greece refused and repelled Italian forces into Albania. The country then fell to German forces in the Battle of Greece. Over 100,000 civilians died of starvation during the winter of 1941 to 42. The Germans executed around 21,000 Greeks, the Bulgarians 40,000, and the Italians 9,000, and almost 1 million Greeks were left homeless. After liberation Greece annexed the Dodecanese Islands from Italy and regained Western Thrace from Bulgaria. A civil war between communist and anti-communist forces lasted until 1949, one of the earliest struggles of the Cold War. Rapid growth followed, helped by the U.S. Marshall Plan, and Greece joined NATO in 1952. A coup in 1967 brought the Greek junta under Georgios Papadopoulos, who suspended civil rights. The brutal suppression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising in 1973 began the regime's fall. On the 20th of July 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus in response to a Greek-backed coup, triggering the crisis that collapsed the junta and restored democracy through Metapolitefsi. A republican constitution was adopted in 1975 after a referendum chose not to restore the monarchy. Greece became the tenth member of the European Communities in 1981.

• 8. Crisis And The Sea

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  In 2009 it emerged that Greece's deficits were far higher than official figures had shown, with liabilities kept off the books. The Great Recession contracted Greece's GDP by 2.5% that year, and its debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 127%. To avert default, Greece, other eurozone members, and the International Monetary Fund agreed on a 110 billion euro rescue package in May 2010, with harsh austerity attached. A second bail-out of 130 billion euros followed in 2012. Between 2009 and 2015 Greece's GDP fell by 25%, and the debt ratio climbed to about 170% as the economy shrank. In 2013 the IMF admitted it had underestimated the effects of tax hikes and budget cuts and issued an informal apology. The bailouts ended in 2018. Through all of this, shipping endured as it had since ancient times. The Greek Merchant Navy is the largest in the world at 18% of global capacity, ranking first in tonnage at 384 million deadweight tons. The modern industry was built after World War II, when Greek shipowners bought surplus vessels sold under the U.S. Ship Sales Act. During the 1960s the fleet nearly doubled through the investment of magnates Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. In March 2026 it was reported that Greece would repay a further 7 billion euros from its first bailout package ahead of schedule.