GreeceΕλλάδα

Greece's first palace civilisation grew on Crete: the Minoans built Knossos, Phaistos and Malia around 2000 BCE, traded across the eastern Mediterranean and painted frescoes of dolphins, bull-leapers and processions. On the mainland the warlike Mycenaeans raised citadels with massive walls at Mycenae and Tiryns, wrote an early form of Greek in the Linear B script, and eventually took over Crete. Around 1200 BCE the palace world collapsed, and writing was lost for several centuries.

Greek society re-formed around the polis, the independent city-state with its own laws, gods and army. Cities founded colonies from southern Italy to the Black Sea, adopted an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians, and met at shared sanctuaries: Olympia for the games that began in 776 BCE by tradition, Delphi for Apollo's oracle. Homer's epics fixed a common past that every Greek knew.

In the 5th century BCE, after beating back two Persian invasions at Marathon and Salamis, Athens used the treasury of its naval alliance to rebuild the Acropolis. The Parthenon was finished in 432 BCE. The same city ran a direct democracy for its male citizens, staged tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and argued philosophy in the Agora with Socrates. Its long war with Sparta (431–404 BCE) exhausted both.

Philip II of Macedon united the Greek cities by force, and his son Alexander carried Greek language and culture as far as Egypt and India before dying in 323 BCE. Rome absorbed Greece in 146 BCE but adopted its art, gods and philosophy; wealthy Romans studied in Athens, and emperors such as Hadrian paid for new buildings there. When Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople in 330 CE, the eastern empire became Greek-speaking and Christian — the Byzantine Empire.

For a thousand years Greek speakers were 'Romans' (Romioi) of the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople. Their Orthodox Christianity, icons and domed churches spread across the Balkans and Russia. The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 and carved Greece into Frankish lordships and Venetian colonies; Venice held Crete until 1669 and the Ionian islands until 1797, which is why Chania, Rethymno, Naxos and Corfu look Italian.

The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 and most of Greece within a few decades. Under the millet system the Orthodox Church ran the affairs of Christians, keeping Greek language and identity alive in villages and monasteries. Greek merchants and shipowners grew rich in Ottoman trade and in the diaspora, and it was they who funded the ideas of the Enlightenment and nationalism that reached Greek schools.

The War of Independence began in 1821. After years of massacres on both sides, Britain, France and Russia destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827, and a small Greek state was recognised in 1830 with Nafplio as its first capital and a Bavarian prince, Otto, as king. Athens, then a small town under the Acropolis, became the capital in 1834 and was replanned with neoclassical streets.

The 'Great Idea' of uniting all Greeks drove expansion: the Ionian islands, Thessaly, Macedonia, Crete and the Dodecanese joined over the next century. The drive ended in disaster in Asia Minor in 1922, followed by the 1923 population exchange with Turkey that brought about 1.2 million refugees to Greece and sent Muslims the other way. Refugee neighbourhoods such as Nea Smyrni in Athens and much of Thessaloniki's character date from that moment.

About nine in ten Greeks are Orthodox by tradition, and the Church of Greece is written into the constitution. Many people rarely attend services but still mark name days, fast before Easter, kiss icons on entering a church and cross themselves passing one on the bus. Easter, not Christmas, is the great festival: candlelit processions on Good Friday, the midnight 'Christos Anesti' with fireworks, and lamb turning on spits on Sunday.

Family is the organising unit of life. Adult children often live near or with parents, grandparents raise grandchildren, and village houses are kept for summers and holidays. Name days (the feast of the saint you are named after) are celebrated more than birthdays. Summer panigyria — village feasts for a saint — bring music, dancing and long tables open to anyone who turns up.

Philoxenia (hospitality to strangers) and philotimo (a sense of honour and duty) are words Greeks use about themselves, and visitors meet them as a free dessert, a glass of raki or an invitation to coffee. Public life is louder: politics is argued in cafés, trust in the state is low after the debt crisis, and informal networks still matter.

Greece is also more varied than its national story. A Muslim minority of Turkish, Pomak and Roma background lives in Thrace; Arvanites, Vlachs and Sephardic Jewish history (Thessaloniki was majority Jewish until the Holocaust) are part of the country's past; and Albanians, Georgians, South Asians and Africans now make up a large share of workers.

Greek cooking is built on olive oil, bread, pulses, vegetables, cheese and wine, with meat for feasts and fish near the sea. Much of it is ladera, vegetables slow-cooked in oil and tomato, and pies wrapped in thin filo. The Orthodox fasting calendar — about half the days of the year for the devout — shaped a large repertoire of dishes without meat, eggs or dairy, which is why vegans find more on Greek menus than they expect.

The meal is shared. Mezedes, small plates for the table, come with ouzo or tsipouro in the ouzeri and tsipouradiko; the taverna serves grilled meat and oven dishes; the psarotaverna serves fish priced by the kilo. Moussaka and pastitsio in their béchamel form date only from the 1920s, when the chef Nikolaos Tselementes brought French technique into Greek home cooking.

Regional food is strong. Crete has its own world of wild greens, graviera cheese, snails and raki; Thessaloniki mixes Balkan and Anatolian traditions brought by the 1923 refugees; Epirus makes the best pies; the Cyclades grow capers, fava and tomatoes on dry terraces. Feta is a protected product that must be made in Greece from sheep's milk, with up to 30% goat's milk.

Greek wine has revived since the 1990s around native grapes: Assyrtiko on Santorini, grown in basket-shaped vines against the wind; Agiorgitiko at Nemea; Xinomavro in Naoussa. Retsina, flavoured with pine resin, survives from antiquity. Coffee is its own culture — Greek coffee boiled in a briki, and the iced freddo espresso that fills every café terrace in summer.

Mainland Greece is mostly mountains: the Pindus range runs down the spine from Albania to the Gulf of Corinth, Mount Olympus rises to 2,918 m, and flat farmland is limited to Thessaly, Macedonia and a few coastal plains. That terrain kept villages isolated and explains why the sea, not the road, was the old highway between places.

The coastline is about 13,700 km, and some 6,000 islands and islets lie in the Aegean and Ionian seas; around 200 are inhabited. The Cyclades are dry, windswept and cubic-white; the Dodecanese, near Türkiye, show Knights', Ottoman and Italian layers; the Ionian islands on the west are green and Venetian; Crete is a mountain range in the sea with gorges running to the Libyan Sea.

Greece sits on an active plate boundary. Santorini is the rim of a volcano that erupted around 1600 BCE and buried the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri; earthquakes are frequent and a swarm of tremors near Santorini and Amorgos in early 2025 emptied the island for weeks. Building codes are strict and most quakes cause little damage.

Climate change is visible. Summer heatwaves above 40 °C now come most years, closing the Acropolis at midday; wildfires in 2021, 2023 and 2024 burned large areas of Evia, Rhodes and Attica; and droughts strain island water supplies. The meltemi, the dry north wind of July and August, still decides whether small ferries sail.

Greece's recent history is framed by the 1967–74 military junta, whose fall brought a parliamentary republic and the abolition of the monarchy by referendum. Two parties, the centre-right New Democracy and the socialist PASOK, alternated for decades. Greece joined the European Community in 1981 and the euro in 2001, and hosted the 2004 Olympics.

The debt crisis from 2009 changed the country: three bailouts, deep austerity, unemployment above 27% and the emigration of hundreds of thousands of young, educated Greeks. The left-wing Syriza government of 2015 fought the lenders in a referendum and then accepted a third programme. Bailouts ended in 2018; since then the economy has grown, debt has fallen as a share of output, and New Democracy under Kyriakos Mitsotakis has won successive elections — the next is due by 2027.

Tourism is now the engine, with well over 30 million foreign visitors a year, and the strain is visible: Santorini and Mykonos crowding, housing shortages in Athens as flats turn into short-term rentals, and water shortages on islands. The state has answered with the cruise passenger fee, a higher per-night hotel fee, a freeze on new rentals in central Athens, and timed tickets at the Acropolis.

Other live issues show up in the news: the 2023 Tempi rail crash that killed 57 people and brought mass protests about accountability; migration across the Aegean and the land border with Türkiye; relations with Ankara over sea borders; and the long campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.