Long before the word 'Greece' existed, the Aegean was the cradle of three of the first civilisations in Europe. The oldest flourished in the Cyclades around 3200–2000 BC: peoples of sailors and shepherds who carved from white marble human figures of pure, abstract lines, the Cycladic idols, whose modernity would fascinate artists such as Brancusi, Modigliani and Picasso millennia later. We know almost nothing of their language or their beliefs, but those islands were already, in full prehistory, a crossroads of trade routes.
The great leap came in Crete. There, around 2000 BC, the Minoan civilisation arose, the first advanced civilisation on European soil, named by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans after the mythical King Minos. The Minoans raised monumental palaces — Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros — genuine administrative and religious complexes of hundreds of rooms, staircases and storerooms, decorated with luminous frescoes of dolphins, crocuses, bull-leaping and elegant court ladies. They were a maritime power, the thalassocracy that dominated the Aegean, traded with Egypt and the Levant and wrote in two systems still partly undeciphered, Cretan hieroglyphic and Linear A. Their religion turned on goddesses, the bull and the double axe (labrys), and from that world of corridors and halls came the legend of the labyrinth and the Minotaur. Around 1600 BC, the colossal eruption of the Thera (Santorini) volcano buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri under ash and shook the whole region; although it did not destroy the Minoans at once, it marked the beginning of the end of their hegemony.
On the mainland, meanwhile, a different and more warlike civilisation was rising: the Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC), that of the Achaean Greeks, already speakers of an early form of Greek that they wrote in Linear B, a script deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris. The Mycenaeans built walled citadels with Cyclopean blocks — Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos — buried their kings with gold masks (the famous 'mask of Agamemnon') and around 1450 BC occupied Knossos and inherited Minoan power in the Aegean. It was almost certainly the Mycenaeans who gave rise to the distant memory of the Trojan War. But around 1200–1100 BC, as part of the great collapse that swept the whole eastern Mediterranean, their palaces burned and their world fell apart, taking writing, trade and memory with it.
With the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, Greece sank into the so-called 'Dark Ages' (c. 1100–800 BC), a period of depopulation, impoverishment and isolation of which barely any material remains survive. Writing was lost entirely: for some four centuries, the Greeks were a people without letters. The great citadels were left deserted, long-distance trade contracted and the population collapsed. In that void, however, the features of classical Greece were quietly taking shape: the Greek language survived, the cults were passed on orally and new populations arrived, such as the Dorians, who reshaped the human map of the peninsula and the islands.
From that world without writing came, paradoxically, the greatest work of Greek literature. Passed down from memory by generations of bards, the traditions about the war against Troy crystallised in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two great epic poems attributed to Homer and composed, as we know them, around the 8th–7th centuries BC, just as the Greeks were adopting the Phoenician alphabet and enriching it with vowels, creating the first complete alphabet in history. Those poems were not only tales of heroes: for centuries they were the moral, religious and educational encyclopaedia of all Greeks, the shared text that defined what it meant to be Hellenic.
Around 800 BC, Greece began to recover. Writing reappeared, the population grew again, trade with East and West resumed, and the panhellenic sanctuaries emerged — Delphi, Olympia — bringing together Greeks from everywhere. On that foundation would rise the institution that would define Greek civilisation: the independent city-state, the polis.
Between the 8th and 6th centuries BC the political form that made Greece unique took shape: the polis, the sovereign city-state. It was not an empire or a unified kingdom but a mosaic of hundreds of small autonomous communities — Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Argos — each with its laws, its patron gods, its army of citizen-soldiers (the hoplites, who fought shoulder to shoulder in the phalanx) and a fierce independence. The Greeks knew themselves to be one people through language, religion and the panhellenic games, but they rarely acted together: rivalry between poleis was the rule.
Population growth and a thirst for land and trade launched the Greeks into a great colonial expansion (8th–6th centuries BC). They founded cities across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea: Syracuse and much of Sicily and southern Italy ('Magna Graecia'), Massalia in Gaul, Cyrene in Africa, Byzantium at the gates of the Black Sea. So Greek language and culture were sown from Spain to the Caucasus centuries before Alexander.
Two poleis embodied two opposing models. Sparta, in the Peloponnese, became a military and oligarchic state: it subdued neighbouring Messenia and reduced its population to the servitude of the helots, an enslaved peasantry so numerous that it forced the Spartans to live permanently under arms. Under the laws attributed to Lycurgus, Spartiate males devoted themselves from childhood to a brutally hard training (the agoge) and to communal life, scorning luxury and trade. Athens, in Attica, took the opposite path: after the reforms of Solon (594 BC), who abolished debt slavery, and of Cleisthenes (508–507 BC), who reorganised the people and laid the foundations of isonomia — equality before the law — it moved towards an ever broader government by its citizens. From that tension between warlike Sparta and commercial, democratic Athens would come much of classical Greek history.
At the start of the 5th century BC, the world of the small Greek poleis collided with the greatest empire of its time: Achaemenid Persia, which stretched from Egypt to India. The conflict began when the Greek cities of Ionia (the coast of present-day Turkey), subject to Persia, rebelled with Athenian support. Once the revolt was crushed, King Darius I wanted to punish Athens. In 490 BC a Persian army landed on the plain of Marathon, in Attica, and was defeated there by the Athenian hoplites under Miltiades: the victory, celebrated by the legend of the runner who died after announcing it in Athens, gave its name to the athletic event and was carved forever into Greek memory.
Ten years later, Darius's son Xerxes I returned with a colossal force to conquer the whole of Greece. In 480 BC, in the pass of Thermopylae, a small Greek contingent led by the Spartan king Leonidas and his three hundred Spartiates held out for days against an immensely superior army until the last man fell, betrayed by a mountain path. Their sacrifice, though a defeat, became the eternal symbol of the resistance of the free few against the subjected many. That same year the Persians took and burned an evacuated Athens, setting the Acropolis alight.
But the war was decided at sea. Following the strategy of the Athenian Themistocles, the Greek fleet lured the huge Persian armada into the strait of Salamis, off Athens, where the heavy enemy ships, crowded together with no room to manoeuvre, were destroyed by the nimble Greek triremes (480 BC). Xerxes, who watched the battle from a throne on the shore, returned to Asia. The following year, the land victory at Plataea (479 BC) drove the Persians out of Greece for good. Against all odds, a handful of divided cities had defeated the greatest empire in the world, and from that feat came a new consciousness of themselves: that of a free people who had saved themselves.
The victory over Persia propelled Athens forward. At the head of the Delian League, an alliance of cities formed to continue the war, Athens gradually turned its allies into subjects and converted the league into a maritime empire whose treasury it moved to its own Acropolis. With that power and that wealth, the city lived under the leadership of Pericles (c. 461–429 BC) its golden age, the so-called 'Age of Pericles'. The Acropolis razed by the Persians was rebuilt and the Parthenon was raised, the marble temple dedicated to Athena that remains the symbol of the classical genius. The tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished, along with the comedy of Aristophanes, the history of Herodotus and Thucydides, the sculpture of Phidias, the philosophy of Socrates: never before had so much creation been concentrated in so little space and so little time.
Politically, Athens took democracy (dēmokratía, 'power of the people') to its most radical and direct form. There were no representatives or elected parliament: the citizens gathered in person in the Assembly (Ekklesia), on the Pnyx hill, to debate and vote on laws, war and peace. Offices were allotted by lot among the citizens, the courts were made up of hundreds of popular jurors and there was ostracism, exile by vote for anyone judged dangerous. It was an astonishing experiment in collective government, without precedent in the ancient world.
But that democracy had limits that seem brutal today and that must be stated without decoration. Citizenship — the right to take part — was reserved for adult males born of an Athenian father and mother, barely a fraction of the population. Women, even those of citizen families, were entirely excluded from political life and confined to the domestic sphere. Metics — resident foreigners, many of them traders and craftsmen the city could not do without — paid taxes and served in the army but could never vote or own land. And beneath everyone were the slaves, tens of thousands of people — prisoners of war, bought or born in captivity — who worked in the houses, the workshops and, above all, in the deadly silver mines of Laurion, and on whose forced labour the leisure and freedom of the citizens largely rested. Athenian democracy was an extraordinary achievement, but it was the democracy of a minority of free men over a majority with no rights.
Athenian imperialism and the growing power of Pericles's city alarmed Sparta and its allies. In 431 BC the Peloponnesian War broke out, a long and devastating conflict that for almost thirty years set two blocs against each other: democratic, maritime Athens, master of the sea with its fleet, and oligarchic, land-based Sparta, invincible on land with its army of hoplites. It was, in the words of its great chronicler Thucydides — whose history of the war founded rigorous political and military analysis — a total war that dragged in almost the whole Greek world and bled it dry.
The first years were an exhausting stalemate: the Spartans laid waste to the Attic countryside every summer while the Athenians, sheltering behind their walls and supplied by sea, punished the coasts of the Peloponnese. In that overcrowding, a terrible plague swept Athens in 430–429 BC and carried off an enormous share of its population, including Pericles himself. After an unstable truce, Athens made its greatest mistake: in 415 BC it launched an outsized expedition to conquer Sicily and wealthy Syracuse. The venture ended in 413 BC in absolute catastrophe, with the fleet destroyed and the army wiped out or enslaved.
Weakened, Athens held out for more years, but Sparta — which went as far as allying with Persia and building its own fleet — eventually prevailed. In 405 BC the Athenian fleet was destroyed at Aegospotami, and in 404 BC Athens, besieged and starving, surrendered: it had to pull down its walls, hand over its fleet and accept a puppet government. Sparta was left as the hegemonic power of Greece, but its rule was brief and hated; Thebes would soon defeat it (Leuctra, 371 BC). The long war left the poleis exhausted, impoverished and set against each other, unable to unite. Into that spent and divided Greece a hitherto despised kingdom was about to burst from the north: Macedon.
North of Greece, in Macedon, a kingdom the Athenians considered half barbarian became a power under Philip II (359–336 BC). Philip reorganised the army with the fearsome Macedonian phalanx of long pikes (sarissas) and the companion cavalry, and with a mixture of war, gold and diplomacy he subdued the Greek poleis one by one. In 338 BC, at the battle of Chaeronea, he defeated the coalition of Athens and Thebes and put an end to the freedom of the city-states: Greece came under Macedonian hegemony. Philip was preparing a great invasion of Persia when he was assassinated in 336 BC.
He was succeeded by his twenty-year-old son, educated by the philosopher Aristotle: Alexander III, Alexander the Great. In barely thirteen years he carried out one of the most astonishing campaigns in history. He crossed into Asia in 334 BC, defeated the Persians at the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, conquered Egypt — where he founded Alexandria — destroyed the Achaemenid Empire, took Babylon and Persepolis and pushed on to the Punjab, in India, before his exhausted troops forced him to turn back. He died in Babylon in 323 BC, at thirty-two, master of the largest empire the world had seen up to then.
Alexander left no capable heir, and his empire was torn apart in wars between his generals, the Diadochi, who founded great kingdoms: the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Asia, the Antigonids in Macedon. But his real legacy was cultural. From his conquests came Hellenism: the spread of the common Greek language (koine), of Greek art, the Greek city and Greek thought across the East, from Egypt to Afghanistan, for three centuries. Alexandria in Egypt, with its Lighthouse and its legendary Library, became the intellectual capital of the world. Greek culture ceased to be that of a handful of cities and became universal: it was Greek, not Latin, that was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean for almost a thousand years, the language in which the New Testament would later be written.
While the Hellenistic kingdoms wore themselves out in wars, a new power was rising in the West: Rome. Drawn into the Aegean by its conflicts with Macedon, Rome intervened again and again in Greece through the 2nd century BC. It defeated Macedon at Pydna (168 BC) and, after a final rebellion, razed and sacked wealthy Corinth in 146 BC, the same year it destroyed Carthage: it was a bloody warning. Greece was reduced to a Roman province under the name of Achaea. The Hellenistic kingdoms fell one after another until Egypt, the last, surrendered with the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.
And yet conquered Greece culturally conquered its conqueror. The poet Horace summed it up in a famous line: 'Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror'. Roman elites learned Greek, copied Greek art, hired Greek teachers and philosophers, and sent their sons to study in Athens, which remained for centuries the great university of the ancient world. Under the Roman peace (Pax Romana), Greece enjoyed relative calm; philhellene emperors such as Hadrian embellished Athens with new monuments. The culture of the Roman Empire was, in its eastern half, profoundly Greek.
That Greco-Roman world was also the setting for the spread of Christianity. The apostle Paul preached in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth and in the Areopagus of Athens itself in the middle of the 1st century, and his letters to those communities — written in Greek — are part of the New Testament. When in 330 the emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Empire to Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople, and the Empire was then definitively divided between East and West (395), the eastern half — Greek-speaking, Greek in culture and increasingly Christian — was destined to survive the fall of Rome by a thousand years. From that continuity Byzantium would be born.
When the last Roman emperor of the West fell in the year 476, the Roman Empire did not disappear: it lived on in its eastern half for another thousand years. Historians call it the Byzantine Empire, but its inhabitants always called themselves rhomaioi, 'Romans', even though their language was Greek and their faith Orthodox Christianity. With its capital at Constantinople — today's Istanbul, refounded by Constantine over ancient Byzantium in 330 — it was the longest-lasting state and one of the most brilliant civilisations of the Middle Ages, and the bridge that passed on to posterity the heritage of Greco-Latin antiquity.
The empire knew its first great splendour under Justinian I (527–565), who reconquered Italy and North Africa for a time, codified all of Roman law in the monumental Corpus Iuris Civilis — the basis of the law of half of Europe — and raised in Constantinople Hagia Sophia, the largest church in Christendom for almost a thousand years, whose immense dome still astonishes today. Byzantium developed an art of its own and a sublime one — the gold mosaic, the icon, domed architecture — and a religious culture that would mark the Slavic world forever: it was Byzantine missionaries, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who evangelised the Slavs, created an alphabet for them (Cyrillic) and took the Orthodox faith to Bulgaria, Serbia and, above all, to Kievan Rus, which from 988 became the spiritual heir of Constantinople.
Eleven hundred years were not a still time. The empire fought endless wars against Persians, Avars, Bulgars, Arabs and Turks; it survived the Arab sieges of Constantinople thanks to the legendary 'Greek fire'; it tore itself apart internally in the iconoclast crisis (8th–9th centuries) over the legitimacy of sacred images; and in 1054 it lived through the Great Schism that finally separated the Orthodox Church of the East from the Catholic Church of Rome, a fracture that lasts to this day. After a new peak under the Macedonian dynasty (9th–11th centuries), the empire began to decline: defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert (1071) cost it much of Asia Minor, its demographic heartland. The most treacherous blow, however, came from fellow Christians: in 1204 the Fourth Crusade, diverted by Venetian interests, instead of going to the Holy Land stormed and savagely sacked Constantinople, shared out the empire among Latin and Venetian lords and came close to finishing it off. Although the Byzantines recovered their capital in 1261, the empire never put itself back together: it was reduced to little more than the city and its surroundings, a dying state ringed by the rising power of the Ottoman Turks.
On 29 May 1453, after a siege of almost two months, the troops of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II — Mehmed 'the Conqueror' — broke through the walls of Constantinople. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting among his soldiers, sword in hand, and his body was never identified. With his fall ended at a stroke the eleven hundred years of the Byzantine Empire and the two thousand years of continuity of the Roman Empire. Hagia Sophia, the great church of Justinian, was turned into a mosque, and Constantinople — soon called Istanbul — became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The news shook all of Christendom; for the Greeks, the Tuesday of the fall was marked as an ill-fated day forever.
So began almost four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Tourkokratia, which Greeks remember as a long night. Under the millet system, the Ottoman Empire organised its subjects by religion: Orthodox Christians formed a millet of their own governed by the patriarch of Constantinople, who was at once religious leader and politically responsible for his community before the sultan. The Greeks thus kept their faith and their Church — which became the great guardian of national identity and language during the occupation — but as second-class subjects: they paid special taxes such as the haraç, were forbidden to carry arms or ride horses, saw their churches converted or restricted, and for generations suffered the devşirme, the blood tax by which the Ottomans forcibly recruited Christian boys, converted them to Islam and trained them as janissaries or officials of the sultan.
Not all of Greece fell at once or in the same way. The Venetians kept key strongholds for centuries — Crete until 1669, the Ionian islands to the end — and some communities developed forms of resistance and autonomy. In the mountains survived the klephts, bandit-guerrillas who would become popular heroes, and a prosperous Greek merchant and literate class, the Phanariots of Constantinople, came to hold high office in the Ottoman administration. Through the 18th century, Greek maritime trade flourished, an enlightened intelligentsia emerged and the ideas of the French Revolution and of European nationalism began to filter in. Thinkers such as Rigas Feraios and secret societies such as the Filiki Eteria (the 'Society of Friends', founded in 1814) prepared the ground for what was coming: insurrection.
In the spring of 1821, subjected Greece rose in arms. The revolt, prepared by the Filiki Eteria, broke out in the Peloponnese, on the islands and in mainland Greece, and is symbolically dated 25 March 1821 — today a national holiday — when tradition places the uprising at the monastery of Agia Lavra. It was a brutal, unequal war, fought by chieftains such as Theodoros Kolokotronis, island sailors who set Turkish fleets ablaze with fire ships, and mountain klephts, against the might of the sultan. Both sides committed terrible massacres: the Greeks slaughtered Muslim populations, and the Ottomans answered with atrocious reprisals, such as the massacre on the island of Chios in 1822, where tens of thousands of Greeks were killed or enslaved, a horror the painter Delacroix immortalised and that moved the whole of Europe.
Because Europe was watching. The Greek cause aroused an unprecedented wave of sympathy: philhellenism. For romantic, liberal Europe, raised on the cult of classical antiquity, the Greeks fighting for their freedom were the heirs of Pericles and Leonidas against 'Oriental tyranny'. Hundreds of foreign volunteers — idealists, veterans, adventurers — crossed over to Greece to fight. The most famous of all was the English poet Lord Byron, the greatest literary star of his time, who put his fame, his money and himself at the service of the revolution: he came to Mesolongi to organise and finance the fight and died there of a fever in April 1824. His death turned the Greek cause into a sacred cause for European public opinion.
The decisive turn came when the great powers intervened. In 1827 the combined fleets of Britain, France and Russia destroyed the Turco-Egyptian armada at the battle of Navarino, sealing the fate of the war. In 1830 the London Protocol recognised Greece as an independent state — the first to break away from the Ottoman Empire — though reduced to a small territory in the south. The first ruler, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was assassinated in 1831, and the powers then imposed a monarchy: in 1832 they placed on the throne a seventeen-year-old Bavarian prince, Otto of Wittelsbach, who set the capital at Athens in 1834. The kingdom of Greece was born, a small, poor state under the tutelage of the powers, but free, and with an enormous dream ahead of it.
The small kingdom born in 1830 carried in its heart an outsized dream: the Megali Idea, the 'Great Idea', the project of gathering all the Greeks of the East into a single state that would revive, with its capital at Constantinople, the old Byzantine greatness. For almost a century that irredentist ideal guided Greek politics and led to the country's gradual expansion: the Ionian islands joined in 1864, Thessaly in 1881, and the victorious Balkan wars of 1912–1913 almost doubled the territory by adding Macedonia with Salonica, Epirus, Crete and the Aegean islands. Under the great statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, a Cretan, Greece seemed on the point of crowning its dream.
The chance came after the First World War, with the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. In 1919, with the blessing of the Allies, Greece landed at Smyrna (İzmir), the great Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor, and launched a campaign to annex the region of Ionia, home to more than a million Greeks since antiquity. At first the Greek armies advanced into the interior of Anatolia, but they went in too far and ran into the Turkish nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). In the summer of 1922, the Turkish counter-attack broke the Greek army, which fell back in disarray towards the coast.
The end was a catastrophe: the Mikrasiatiki Katastrofi. In September 1922, Turkish troops entered Smyrna and the city burned in a great fire, while tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians crowded in terror on the quay trying to flee by sea; thousands died. In the following weeks, according to the High Commission of the League of Nations, close to 900,000 refugees from Asia Minor reached a ruined Greece. The disaster brutally ended the Great Idea and three thousand years of Greek presence in Anatolia. In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne enshrined what the war had already imposed: a compulsory population exchange based solely on religion, by which around 1,200,000 Orthodox Christians were moved from Turkey to Greece and between 355,000 and 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. Families torn from lands they had lived in for centuries, people who did not always speak the language of the country they now 'belonged' to, were uprooted at a stroke. Greece, a small and poor country, had to absorb all at once more than a million refugees who changed its demography, its economy, its music (rebetiko was born in the refugee quarters) and its politics forever.
In October 1940, Mussolini's fascist Italy demanded Greece's surrender; the dictator Ioannis Metaxas answered with a flat 'No' (Ochi), and the country threw back the Italian invasion and even pushed it back through Albania, the first Allied land victory against the Axis. But in April 1941 Nazi Germany came to its ally's aid, invaded Greece and occupied it within weeks. In May, the fearsome battle of Crete sealed the conquest. So began a triple occupation — German, Italian and Bulgarian — that would be one of the most atrocious in Europe.
The winter of 1941–1942 brought the Great Famine. German requisitions, the collapse of the economy and the naval blockade caused a food catastrophe: in the streets of Athens people died of starvation, with carts collecting the bodies each morning. It is estimated that the famine killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Greeks, above all in the harshest winter. Against that background of death, the Holocaust of the Greek Jews was also carried out. The oldest and largest community was that of Salonica (Thessaloniki), the heart of Sephardic Judaism in Europe: descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, they spoke Ladino and had made the city, for centuries, a Sephardic centre of worldwide renown. In March 1943 the German occupiers began their deportation: within a few months, some 46,000 to 49,000 Jews from Salonica — close to 96% of the community — were sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the vast majority were murdered. With them one of the great Jewish cultures of the Mediterranean disappeared forever.
Against the occupation a powerful resistance arose, split between the communist guerrillas (EAM-ELAS) and non-communist groups. When the Germans withdrew in 1944, that split exploded into violence. After a brief and bloody confrontation in Athens (the Dekemvriana of December 1944), the country plunged into open civil war (1946–1949) between the monarchist government, backed first by Britain and then decisively by the United States — it was precisely Greece that triggered the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the first great line of Cold War containment — and the communist Democratic Army, supported by the neighbouring Soviet bloc (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania). It was a ferocious, fratricidal war, with executions, deportations of children and villages razed by both sides. The break between Stalin and Tito in 1948 cut off Yugoslav support for the guerrillas and decided their defeat. In 1949 the government prevailed. The toll of the decade was devastating: some 158,000 dead in the civil war alone, hundreds of thousands exiled and displaced, and a country ruined, impoverished and deeply divided, whose wounds would take generations to close.
The postwar years were about reconstruction and tutelage: a fragile monarchy, a rigid anti-communism and heavy dependence on the United States. On 21 April 1967, a group of army colonels led by Georgios Papadopoulos staged a coup and set up a military dictatorship, the 'Junta of the Colonels' (1967–1974). There followed seven years of repression: censorship, torture of opponents, the dissolution of the parties, the exile of intellectuals and artists. The regime sustained itself with an ultranationalist and religious discourse ('Greece of the Christian Greeks') and with the tacit backing of the West in the middle of the Cold War. Resistance came to a head in November 1973 with the student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic, crushed when a tank brought down the faculty gates, leaving dead whose number is still disputed. Shortly afterwards, an internal coup brought to power the even harder Dimitrios Ioannidis, and it was his foreign adventure that sank the dictatorship: in July 1974 the Junta sponsored a coup in Cyprus to unite the island with Greece, which gave Turkey the pretext to invade Cyprus and occupy its northern third. Unable to respond, the regime collapsed and handed power to civilians.
So began the Metapolitefsi, the transition to democracy, led by the veteran politician Konstantinos Karamanlis. The Communist Party was legalised, and in December 1974 a referendum abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the republic. In 1981 two events marked a new era: Greece joined the European Economic Community (today the European Union), anchoring itself definitively to the West and to Europe, and the left came to power for the first time, with Andreas Papandreou's socialist PASOK. The following decades brought modernisation, European funds, the adoption of the euro in 2001 and the brilliant Athens 2004 Olympic Games.
But beneath the prosperity an enormous debt was building up, partly hidden in the public accounts. In 2010, unable to finance itself, Greece had to be bailed out by the 'troika' — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF — with a first loan of 110 billion euros in exchange for extremely harsh austerity programmes. It was the start of the gravest crisis suffered by a European country in peacetime: successive memoranda, cuts to wages and pensions, tax rises, privatisations, an economy that shrank by around a quarter and unemployment that passed 27%, with more than half of young people out of work. Society erupted in strikes and protests. In July 2015, a radical left government (Syriza), led by Alexis Tsipras, called a referendum in which more than 61% of voters rejected the bailout terms; days later, however, faced with the threat of leaving the euro (the dreaded 'Grexit'), the government signed a third bailout of up to 86 billion with even more severe conditions. Greece formally exited the bailout programmes in August 2018, after almost a decade of sacrifice that left deep social scars. Today, a member of the EU and the eurozone, with an economy that has recovered but is marked by those years, Greece goes on negotiating, as throughout its modern history, its place between East and West, between its ancient greatness and its present challenges.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Inhabited without interruption for more than five thousand years, Athens owes its name to the goddess Athena, who according to myth beat Poseidon for the patronage of the city by offering the olive tree. Its history turns around the Acropolis, the 'high city', the sacred rock that dominates the plain of Attica. It was in Athens that, after the reforms of Solon (594 BC) and Cleisthenes (508 BC), direct democracy was born: the citizens gathered on the Pnyx hill to vote in person on laws and on war, drew lots for offices and could banish by vote anyone they judged dangerous, through ostracism.
After the victory over Persia, under the leadership of Pericles, Athens lived its Golden Age (5th century BC). With the funds of the Delian League the Acropolis the Persians had burned was rebuilt and, between 447 and 432 BC, the Parthenon was raised, the Pentelic marble temple dedicated to Athena, the work of the architects Ictinus and Callicrates and the sculptor Phidias, the absolute peak of classical art. Beside it rose the Propylaea, the temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion with its caryatids. In that same Athens tragedy and comedy flourished in the theatre of Dionysus, and through its streets walked Socrates, Plato — who founded the Academy — and Aristotle — who founded the Lyceum — giving shape to Western philosophy.
That greatness lived alongside severe limits: citizenship was reserved for males born of an Athenian father and mother, while women, resident foreigners (metics) and tens of thousands of slaves were excluded from every political right. Even so, classical Athens left a legacy — democracy, philosophy, theatre, history — that remains one of the foundations of civilisation.
The territory of ancient Athens was Attica, a mountainous and arid peninsula whose population was unified early on under the city (a process myth attributed to the hero Theseus). Decisive episodes of Greek history were fought on its borders. On the plain of Marathon, on the northeast coast of Attica, the Athenian hoplites defeated the Persian army of Darius in 490 BC; from the legend of the messenger who ran to Athens to announce the victory and dropped dead on arrival came the name of the marathon race.
The strength of Athens, however, came not from the land but from the sea. Its port, Piraeus, fortified and joined to the city by the 'Long Walls', was the base of the fleet that won Salamis and sustained the Athenian maritime empire. Part of its wealth also came from the subsoil of Attica: the silver mines of Laurion, worked by thousands of slaves in atrocious conditions, financed the building of the war fleet on the advice of Themistocles.
Attica also holds other great sanctuaries: the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, looking out over the Aegean, and the sanctuary of the mysteries at Eleusis, one of the most venerated cults of the ancient world. This whole region, the heart of Athenian power, would be laid waste again and again — by the Persians in 480 BC, by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War — and would always be reborn around its city and its port.
With the Roman conquest, Athens ceased to be a political power but kept immense prestige as a cultural capital. The Romans respected it as the cradle of learning, and philhellene emperors such as Hadrian (2nd century) embellished it with new monuments — the arch of Hadrian, the great temple of Olympian Zeus that he completed, a library. For centuries, Roman families sent their sons to study philosophy and rhetoric in Athens, which remained the great university of the ancient world until the emperor Justinian ordered its pagan philosophical schools closed in 529.
Under Byzantium, Athens became a provincial, Christian town. The Parthenon was turned into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the Erechtheion and other temples were Christianised too, which paradoxically helped preserve them. In 1204, after the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, Athens fell under the rule of Latin lords — Franks, Catalans, Florentines — who governed a small duchy and used the Acropolis as a fortress and residence.
When the Ottomans took the city in 1458, five years after the fall of Constantinople, Athens was already a minor and declining town. The Parthenon, now turned into a mosque, would suffer its greatest misfortune in 1687: during a Venetian siege, the Turks had stored gunpowder inside it, and a Venetian cannon shot blew it up, taking off the roof and much of a temple that had stood intact for more than two thousand years. Shortly afterwards, at the start of the 19th century, the British diplomat Lord Elgin removed and took to London much of the Parthenon's sculpture — the 'Elgin Marbles', today in the British Museum — whose return Greece is still demanding.
When the War of Independence broke out, Athens was barely a large village of a few thousand people at the foot of the Acropolis. The city was the scene of hard fighting and sieges between 1821 and 1833. Despite its modesty, the symbolic weight of its classical past was irresistible: in 1834 the new kingdom of Greece moved its capital to Athens, precisely because of what it represented for the philhellene Europe that had sponsored independence. Bavarian and Greek architects laid out a neoclassical city from scratch, with avenues, the University, the Academy and the Royal Palace, at the foot of the sacred rock.
Modern Athens grew abruptly with the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922: hundreds of thousands of refugees from Anatolia settled in whole neighbourhoods on the outskirts — Nea Smyrni, Nea Ionia, Kaisariani — whose names recall the lost cities and which transformed the life, the music and the politics of the capital. During the Axis occupation, Athens was the epicentre of the Great Famine of the winter of 1941–42, with thousands dying of starvation in its streets, and then the scene of the bloody fighting of December 1944 that foreshadowed the civil war.
In the second half of the 20th century, Athens became a megalopolis holding close to a third of the country's population. It was the heart of resistance to the dictatorship of the colonels: in November 1973, the Polytechnic uprising — when a tank brought down the school gates — became the symbol of the struggle for democracy. In 2004 the city hosted the Olympic Games, a symbolic return to the birthplace of the Games, and a few years later it was the central stage of the massive anti-austerity protests during the debt crisis. Today, 21st-century Athens lives alongside its eternal Acropolis: beneath the Parthenon, the city that invented democracy is still the political and cultural pulse of Greece.
Athens is today one of the great open-air museums in the world. The classic route — the Acropolis, the Parthenon and the Propylaea, the ancient Agora where civic life gathered, the Pnyx hill of the Assembly, the theatre of Dionysus, the temple of Olympian Zeus — condenses the birth of Western civilisation. At the foot of the Acropolis, the modern Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009, was conceived largely as an architectural argument: its upper galleries reproduce the exact dimensions of the Parthenon and leave visible the gaps where the missing sculptures should be, the ones Lord Elgin took to London at the start of the 19th century.
That absence is an open wound. The so-called 'Parthenon Marbles' or 'Elgin Marbles' — friezes, metopes and pediments removed from the temple — are kept in the British Museum in London, which has refused for decades to return them. Greece has demanded their restitution since the 19th century, with particular force since the campaign driven in the 1980s by the culture minister Melina Mercouri, and the dispute remains a worldwide symbol of the debate about heritage looted in the colonial era.
Beyond the Acropolis, Athens keeps Byzantine treasures — small medieval churches hidden among the modern buildings, such as Panagia Kapnikarea — the Ottoman and neoclassical quarter of Plaka, and great collections such as the National Archaeological Museum, which holds the gold mask of Mycenae and the Cycladic idols. In a few kilometres the city thus offers a journey through all the layers of Greek history: classical, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern, laid one over another under the same Attic sky.
Crete, the largest island in Greece and one of the largest in the Mediterranean, was the cradle of the first advanced civilisation in Europe: the Minoan. Around 2000 BC, the Cretans raised great palaces — Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros — that were at once administrative, religious, craft and storage centres. They were a maritime power, the thalassocracy that dominated the Aegean, traded with Egypt and the Levant, and developed a refined, luminous art: frescoes of dolphins and crocuses, pottery, goldwork, and two scripts still partly undeciphered, Cretan hieroglyphic and Linear A.
The most famous of their palaces, Knossos, near present-day Heraklion, was a complex of more than a thousand rooms spread over several floors, with courtyards, monumental staircases, water systems and famous frescoes such as the 'prince of the lilies' or the court ladies. Its convoluted plan and the Minoan cult of the bull — the frescoes show acrobats leaping over bulls — almost certainly gave rise to the Greek myth of the labyrinth built by Daedalus to shut in the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull monster that devoured young Athenians until Theseus killed it. The palace was excavated and partly reconstructed — on much-disputed principles — by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in the early 20th century, who gave this civilisation the name 'Minoan' after the legendary King Minos.
Minoan civilisation entered a crisis from 1600 BC, perhaps affected by the Thera eruption and its tsunamis, and around 1450 BC its palaces suffered destruction and Knossos came under the control of the Mycenaeans, who introduced Linear B — the oldest known form of written Greek. With that, Crete joined the Greek world, which it would never leave, but the memory of that first great European civilisation, with its palaces and its myths, remains one of the great treasures of history.
After centuries of Byzantine rule, Crete passed in 1204 — again after the Fourth Crusade — into the hands of the Republic of Venice, which governed it for more than four and a half centuries as its great Aegean colony, the 'Kingdom of Candia'. The Venetians fortified its cities — the walls of Heraklion (Candia), the harbour and fortress of Chania, that of Rethymno — and left a deep cultural mark. Indeed, under Venetian rule the so-called Cretan Renaissance flourished, a remarkable culture that fused the Byzantine and the Italian: from Venetian Crete came masterpieces of Greek literature such as the poem Erotokritos and, above all, the painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos, born in Crete in 1541, who would take the art of the Byzantine icon to Spain and go down in history as El Greco.
The end of Venetian rule came with the long and bloody Cretan War (1645–1669): the Ottomans conquered the island, and the final siege of Heraklion lasted more than twenty years, one of the longest in history. Under Ottoman rule, Crete was one of the most rebellious regions in the whole empire: through the 19th century the Cretans staged a series of successive uprisings against the Turks, harshly put down, such as the great revolt of 1866 in which the defenders of the monastery of Arkadi blew themselves up with the powder store rather than surrender, an episode that moved Europe.
In 1898, after fresh massacres and intervention by the powers, Crete obtained autonomy as the Cretan State under nominal Ottoman sovereignty, and finally joined Greece in 1913, after the Balkan wars. From Crete came the great Greek politician Eleftherios Venizelos, leader of the island's union with Greece and later several times prime minister, the most important political figure in Greece in the first half of the 20th century. Crete thus gave the nation not only its first civilisation but also its most influential statesman.
In May 1941, after conquering mainland Greece, Nazi Germany launched an unprecedented operation against Crete: the first mainly airborne invasion in history, Operation Merkur ('Mercury'). On 20 May, thousands of German paratroopers and glider-borne troops dropped from the sky onto the island, defended by a garrison of British, New Zealand, Australian and Greek troops under the New Zealand general Bernard Freyberg.
The battle was terrible for both sides. Many German paratroopers were shot down in the air or as soon as they touched ground, and they suffered extremely heavy losses; the Reich's airborne elite was so decimated that Hitler afterwards banned further large operations of this kind. One feature that astonished the Germans was the resistance of the Cretan civilian population itself: farmers, women and old people threw themselves at the invaders with hunting shotguns, sickles and knives, in defence of their land. Even so, the capture of the Maleme airfield allowed the Germans to bring reinforcements by air, and within a few days the balance tipped. The Allies had to evacuate the island, and Crete fell at the end of May.
The occupation was brutal. In reprisal for the resistance, the Germans executed civilians and razed whole villages — such as Kandanos or, later, the Viannos massacre and the destruction of villages such as Anogeia and Kedros. But Crete became one of the great centres of Greek resistance: its guerrillas, helped by British agents, harried the occupiers relentlessly throughout the war, in a feat that included legendary episodes such as the kidnapping of a German general in 1944. The memory of the battle and of the resistance remains, today, a central part of Cretan identity.
At the far southeast of the Aegean, near the coast of Asia Minor, stretches the Dodecanese, a group of islands whose main one is Rhodes. In antiquity, the city of Rhodes was a maritime and commercial power, famous for the Colossus of Rhodes, a giant bronze statue of the god Helios raised in the 3rd century BC that was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, until an earthquake brought it down a few decades later.
But the most visible mark on Rhodes is medieval. In 1309 the island was conquered by the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, a military-religious order born of the Crusades which, driven out of the Holy Land, made Rhodes its sovereign state for more than two centuries. The Knights turned the city of Rhodes into one of the most powerful strongholds in the Mediterranean: they raised colossal walls, the Palace of the Grand Master, the Street of the Knights with the inns of the order's various 'tongues' (nations), hospitals and churches, in an extraordinary Gothic ensemble that survives almost intact and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
From Rhodes, the Knights fought the Turks and the corsairs for generations, withstanding famous sieges. But in 1522, after an epic siege, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the island with an immense army and allowed the surviving Knights to leave; the order would later take refuge in Malta, where it would make history again. Rhodes remained under Ottoman rule for almost four centuries, until 1912. Its walled medieval old town, one of the best preserved in Europe, still carries the visitor back to the age of the Crusades.
The Dodecanese followed a historical path different from the rest of Greece. In 1912, during the Italo-Turkish war, the Kingdom of Italy occupied Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese, taking them from the Ottoman Empire. What was to be a temporary occupation went on for more than three decades: Italy kept the islands and turned them into a colony, the 'Possedimenti italiani dell'Egeo' (Italian Possessions of the Aegean).
During the Italian period, and above all under fascism, the islands were subjected to an intense policy of Italianisation, public works and monumental architecture. In Rhodes and other islands, the Italians built administrative buildings, hotels and avenues in a rationalist and colonial style, restored the monuments of the Knights and tried to impose the Italian language and culture, with mixed success and no little resistance from the Greek population, which kept its identity and its Orthodox faith.
The Second World War brought a complicated ending. After Italy's capitulation in September 1943, German troops occupied the Dodecanese, defeating the Italians and a brief British attempt to take the islands (the failed Dodecanese campaign of 1943). The Germans held the islands until the end of the war and deported the small Jewish communities, such as the thousand-year-old one in Rhodes, practically wiped out at Auschwitz. When the war ended, the Dodecanese passed to British administration and, finally, in 1947–1948, it was formally ceded to Greece and joined the nation. So these islands of the southeastern Aegean, which had been Byzantine, of the Knights, Ottoman and Italian, were incorporated into Greece only in the middle of the 20th century, the last territory to join the modern Greek state.
The Cyclades — a circle (kyklos) of islands around sacred Delos, from which their name comes — were the cradle of one of the first civilisations in Europe. During the early Bronze Age, around 3200–2000 BC, Cycladic culture flourished there, a people of farmers, fishermen and above all sailors who made the most of the islands' position as a stop on the Aegean routes and exploited their resources: the brilliant white marble of Naxos and Paros, the obsidian of Milos — a sharp volcanic glass, much sought after before metalworking — and metals.
Of this culture we know almost nothing in writing, but it left us an unmistakable art: the Cycladic idols, human figures carved in white marble with an astonishing economy of line. Most represent nude female figures with arms crossed over the belly, the face smooth apart from a prominent nose and an almost abstract geometry. They have been found mostly in tombs, and probably had a religious or funerary meaning that escapes us. Their radical modernity fascinated 20th-century artists — Brancusi, Modigliani, Picasso, Henry Moore — who saw in them a forerunner of abstract art.
Cycladic culture was a society of hamlets and small settlements, without the great palaces of Minoan Crete, but connected by sea with Crete, mainland Greece and Asia Minor. In time it came under the influence and then the rule of the Minoans first and the Mycenaeans afterwards, joining the great Bronze Age world of the Aegean. Today its enigmatic idols are one of the emblems of ancient art and are displayed in museums around the world, from the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens to the Louvre.
At the geographical centre of the Cyclades lies Delos, a rocky and today uninhabited islet that was, nonetheless, one of the most sacred places in all of Greece. According to myth, it was there that the goddess Leto, hounded by Hera's jealousy, gave birth to the divine twins Apollo and Artemis: Delos was the birthplace of Apollo, god of light, music and prophecy, and for that reason no other island surpassed it in holiness.
Delos became a great panhellenic sanctuary and the religious centre of the Aegean. In the 5th century BC it was the seat of the Delian League, the alliance Athens led against Persia and whose common treasury was kept on the island before the Athenians moved it to their Acropolis. So sacred was the place that the Athenians decreed a 'purification': they forbade birth and death on Delos, and moved all the tombs to the neighbouring island. In Hellenistic and Roman times, Delos also enjoyed an enormous commercial boom and became one of the largest slave markets in the Mediterranean, with a cosmopolitan population of merchants from all over the ancient world.
Sacked in the 1st century BC and then abandoned, Delos was left a deserted island covered in ruins, which French excavations turned into one of the largest archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: an open-air museum with the sanctuary of Apollo, the famous Terrace of the Lions, mosaics, houses and temples, reached by boat from nearby and worldly Mykonos, in an astonishing contrast between the party of one island and the sacred silence of the other.
No island in the Aegean has a geological history as dramatic as Santorini, ancient Thera. Its present shape — a semicircle of cliffs looking over a great blue bay (the caldera), with a smoking islet at its centre — is the scar of one of the greatest volcanic eruptions in human history. Around 1600 BC (the exact date is debated), the Thera volcano exploded in a colossal eruption that emptied the interior of the island and caused it to collapse into the sea, generating tsunamis that swept the coasts of the Aegean.
Before the catastrophe, Thera was home to a flourishing town in the Minoan orbit: Akrotiri. The eruption buried it under metres of ash, and that same ash preserved it as a Pompeii of the Aegean, with its multi-storey houses, its streets, its water pipes and, above all, its extraordinary frescoes — fishermen, ships, blue monkeys, boys boxing — that are today treasures of Minoan art. The eruption, with its tsunamis and its ash cloud, probably contributed to weakening the Minoan civilisation of neighbouring Crete, and some see in the distant memory of this catastrophe the origin of the myth of Atlantis told by Plato.
After the eruption, Thera was resettled by Dorian Greeks in antiquity, and from it set out the colonists who founded Cyrene in North Africa. In the Middle Ages, the island took its present name, Santorini, from the church of Saint Irene, and came under Venetian rule. Today, its villages of white houses and blue domes perched on the caldera rim — Fira, Oia — and its sunsets over the volcano make Santorini one of the most famous islands in the world, a landscape of overwhelming beauty born, literally, of a catastrophe.
After the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the division of the Byzantine Empire, the Cyclades fell into the hands of Venetian adventurers. In 1207, the Venetian noble Marco Sanudo conquered Naxos and the neighbouring islands and founded the Duchy of Naxos (or Duchy of the Archipelago), a small Latin feudal state that governed much of the Cyclades for more than three centuries, until 1566. In fact, the word 'archipelago' — today a synonym for a group of islands — comes from the name the Venetians gave to this sea, the Aegean (Aigaion Pelagos), strewn with islands.
Under Venetian and Latin rule, the Cyclades filled with castles (the kastra) that still crown the old quarters of Naxos, Paros or Sifnos, and with a Catholic aristocracy that lived — not always harmoniously — alongside the Orthodox Greek population. The Venetians and their successors left an architectural and cultural mark: towers, Catholic churches, Italian surnames that survive on the islands. Naxos, the largest and most fertile of the Cyclades, with its mountains and valleys, was the heart of this small island state.
The islands, scattered and poorly defended, suffered for centuries the scourge of piracy — Barbary corsairs, Ottomans, freebooters of every kind — that plagued the Aegean, forcing the inhabitants to build their villages inland, hidden from view of the sea, or behind walls. The Ottoman Empire gradually absorbed the duchy through the 16th century, though many islands kept privileges and considerable autonomy, and on some the Catholic community survived. When the War of Independence broke out in 1821, the merchant fleet of the Cyclades and neighbouring islands — such as the fire ships of Psara and Hydra — played a decisive part in the fight at sea against the Turks.
For centuries, the Cyclades were poor and arid islands that lived on fishing, subsistence farming, marble, the merchant marine and emigration. Mykonos, for example, was a rocky, windy island whose people earned their living at sea and as sailors; its old fame came above all from being the gateway to sacred Delos. Paros and Naxos were known for their brilliant white marble — Paros marble was one of the most prized in antiquity, used by the great Greek sculptors — and for their farm produce.
Everything changed with the rise of international tourism from the 1950s and 1960s. The traditional architecture of the Cyclades — the cubes whitewashed to a dazzling white, the blue-domed churches, the windmills, the labyrinthine lanes designed to confuse pirates — became the very image of Greece in the global imagination. Mykonos, with its nightlife, its windmills and its 'Little Venice' quarter, turned into a cosmopolitan, internationally fashionable destination; Santorini, into the romantic setting par excellence; Paros and Naxos, into islands that combine beaches, traditional villages and a slower pace.
Behind that postcard image, the Cyclades keep a dense history and a strong identity: their walled medieval villages, their Orthodox and Catholic traditions, their music and their festivals, and a heritage that runs from the Bronze Age idols to the Venetian castles. Islands that were the cradle of one of the first civilisations in Europe and are today one of the most sought-after destinations on the planet, the Cyclades remain, three thousand years later, a crossroads in the middle of the Aegean.
The Ionian Islands — Corfu, Paxos, Lefkada, Ithaca, Kefalonia, Zakynthos and distant Kythira — form an archipelago in the Ionian Sea, off the western coast of Greece and Epirus. Their history sets them radically apart from the rest of the country: they were the only Greek lands that never fell under lasting Ottoman rule. While the rest of Greece endured four centuries of Tourkokratia, the Ionians lived under the wing of the Republic of Venice.
Venice took the islands one by one between the 14th and 18th centuries — Corfu from 1386, the others through the following centuries, until it completed the conquest of Lefkada in 1684 — and kept them until 1797, that is, some four centuries. For Venice, the Ionians were a vital strategic enclave: ports and naval bases guarding the entrance to the Adriatic and protecting the routes to the East. Corfu in particular withstood several great Ottoman sieges — above all that of 1716 — and was never taken, which made the island a bulwark of Christendom and the reason these islands remained outside the Ottoman Empire.
The long Venetian rule left a deep and, in Greece, unique cultural imprint. The Ionian Islands developed an Italian-Greek civilisation: a local aristocracy that spoke Italian and was governed by a 'Golden Book' of noble families, an architecture of palaces, bell towers and churches with a Venetian air, a musical and operatic tradition of Italian influence — from here would come composers and the first Greek national anthem — and a strong Catholic presence alongside the Orthodox majority. The millions of olive trees that cover Corfu today were planted at Venice's encouragement. That Venetian heritage, still visible in every square and every lane, makes the Ionians a corner of Greece unlike any other.
The end of a thousand-year-old Venice dragged the Ionian Islands into a whirlwind of changing flags. In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte dissolved the Republic of Venice by the Treaty of Campo Formio, and the Ionian Islands passed directly to France. The French revolutionaries were welcomed by some with enthusiasm — they planted 'trees of liberty' and burned the nobility's Golden Book — but their rule was brief.
Between 1798 and 1799, a joint Russo-Ottoman fleet drove the French from the islands. From that episode was born, in 1800, a singular state: the Septinsular Republic (that is, 'of the seven islands'), the first autonomous Greek state of the modern era, even if it was under the joint protectorate of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It was a short-lived and turbulent entity, governed by the local aristocracy, but it had enormous symbolic value: for the first time in centuries there was a state of Greeks, with a flag of its own, and in it took their first political steps figures who would later be decisive, such as Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfiot who would become a minister of the Russian tsar and, later, the first head of state of independent Greece.
The Septinsular Republic did not last: in 1807, by the Treaty of Tilsit, the islands returned to France, now the imperial France of Napoleon, which held them until his defeat. In the middle of the Napoleonic wars, the British occupied the islands one by one from 1809, until Napoleon's fall decided their fate. Those dizzying years — Venetians, French, Russians, Ottomans, the French again, the British — left the Ionians with a political and ideological experience that made them, by the 19th century, a focus of Greek nationalism and of liberal ideas.
After Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Paris of 1815 placed the Ionian Islands under a British protectorate, under the name United States of the Ionian Islands. Formally they were a free Greek state, with their own constitution, senate and parliament, but in practice they were governed by a British Lord High Commissioner who held the real power. British rule lasted almost half a century, from 1815 to 1864.
The British left their own mark on the islands: they built roads, aqueducts, bridges, schools and public buildings — the palace of St Michael and St George in Corfu — and introduced English institutions and customs. They founded the Ionian Academy in Corfu, the first Greek-speaking university of modern times. And they left curious legacies too, such as cricket, still played in Corfu, or the local ginger beer. But their government, authoritarian and often deaf to local aspirations, ran up against an ever stronger feeling: the desire of the Ionians to join the independent Greece born in 1830.
The movement for 'enosis' (union) with Greece grew over decades, driven by the 'radical' deputies of the Ionian parliament. Finally, in 1864, Britain agreed to cede the islands: the gesture came as part of British backing for the new king of Greece, George I, a newly enthroned Danish prince. By the Treaty of London of 1864, the Ionian Islands were officially united with the kingdom of Greece, the first great territorial enlargement of the young Greek state. Corfu and its sister islands thus joined the nation, bringing it a European, liberal and cosmopolitan cultural tradition that had matured outside the Ottoman yoke.
Like the rest of Greece, the Ionian Islands were occupied by the Axis in 1941. Being the western zone, they came under Italian control, and garrisons of Mussolini's Italy were installed in Corfu and the other islands. The Italian occupation was hard, though generally less bloody than the German one, and the islands suffered privation and repression. Corfu also had an old and notable Jewish community, of both Romaniote (Greek) and Venetian tradition; after the German occupation, in June 1944 most of its members were deported to Auschwitz, where almost all perished, another chapter of the Holocaust on Greek soil.
The most terrible episode happened in September 1943, on the island of Kefalonia. When Italy capitulated and changed sides, the Italian Acqui division, which garrisoned the island, refused to hand over its weapons to the Germans and, after consulting its soldiers, decided to resist. Italians and Germans fought for days. After the division surrendered, German troops carried out one of the largest massacres of prisoners of war of the conflict: they executed in cold blood thousands of Italian soldiers — estimates speak of between 5,000 and 9,000 dead between the fighting and the executions. The massacre of the Acqui division in Kefalonia became a tragic symbol, made widely known decades later by the novel and the film 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin', set precisely on the island.
After the war, the Ionian Islands returned to Greek life, but another natural catastrophe still awaited them, one that would shape their recent history and their present appearance: the great earthquake of 1953.
In August 1953, the southern Ionian Islands suffered one of the greatest natural disasters in modern Greece. A series of violent earthquakes, whose strongest blow came on 12 August with a magnitude of around 7.2, shook the islands of Kefalonia, Zakynthos and Ithaca. The devastation was almost total: in Kefalonia and Zakynthos the vast majority of buildings collapsed, whole towns were reduced to rubble and fires broke out. Hundreds of people died and tens of thousands were left homeless, which set off a great wave of emigration from the islands.
The earthquake erased much of the Venetian and neoclassical architectural heritage these islands had kept for centuries, precisely because they had not suffered Ottoman occupation. Towns such as Argostoli (Kefalonia) or Zakynthos, which had been jewels of Italian-Greek architecture, had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, in many cases with new, earthquake-resistant buildings that completely changed their appearance. Corfu, further north, escaped the quake and that is why it keeps today, better than any other Ionian island, its Venetian historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Today the Ionian Islands are one of the most popular tourist destinations in Greece, famous for their lush vegetation — very green compared with the arid islands of the Aegean, thanks to the Ionian rains — their spectacular beaches such as Navagio in Zakynthos, their villages with a Venetian flavour and a cultural identity of their own, a mixture of Greek and Italian, felt in their music, their food and their architecture. Islands that were Venetian, French, Russian and British before they were Greek, the Ionians bring Greece a singular European history and an unmistakable character.
On the slopes of Mount Parnassus, above a landscape of mountains and olive groves running down to the Gulf of Corinth, stands Delphi, the most sacred sanctuary of ancient Greece. There, according to myth, two eagles released by Zeus from the ends of the world met, marking the exact centre of the earth: that is why Delphi kept the omphalos, the stone that was the 'navel of the world'. In its temple of Apollo officiated the Pythia, the priestess who, in a trance, pronounced the oracles — often ambiguous — consulted by ordinary farmers as well as by kings and whole cities before founding colonies or going to war.
Delphi was not the territory of any polis: it was a panhellenic sanctuary, common to all Greeks, administered by a league of neighbouring peoples. Its prestige drew fabulous offerings from the richest cities, which competed to raise their 'treasuries' there — small temples holding their donations — along the Sacred Way. Every four years the Pythian Games were held, second in importance only to those of Olympia, with athletic and musical contests in honour of Apollo. The site keeps today the theatre, the stadium, the temple of Apollo and the circular jewel of the Tholos.
The oracle held its influence for more than a thousand years, until the Christian emperor Theodosius closed it at the end of the 4th century, as part of the ban on pagan worship. Delphi was buried and a village grew over its ruins, until the French excavations of the late 19th century brought it back to light. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its museum holds masterpieces such as the bronze Charioteer, one of the treasures of Greek art.
In the western Peloponnese, in a peaceful valley watered by the rivers Alpheios and Kladeos, lies Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games. It was above all a great sanctuary dedicated to Zeus, whose temple housed one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world: the colossal statue of Zeus in gold and ivory, the work of the sculptor Phidias, some twelve metres high, now lost. Beside the temple stood the Heraion, dedicated to Hera, and dozens of altars, treasuries and monuments.
The Olympic Games were held there every four years in honour of Zeus, and tradition set their first edition in 776 BC — the date from which the Greeks counted time in 'Olympiads'. During the Games a sacred truce was proclaimed suspending wars between the poleis so that athletes and spectators could travel in peace. The competitors, who took part naked, ran, wrestled, boxed, competed in the pentathlon and in the spectacular chariot races of the hippodrome; the winners, crowned only with an olive branch, gained eternal glory in their home cities. Married women were forbidden even to watch the Games.
The Games went on for almost 1,200 years, until the emperor Theodosius I abolished them around 393 as a pagan cult. Earthquakes, floods of the Alpheios and abandonment buried Olympia under metres of earth, which preserved it until German excavations in the 19th century rediscovered it. The memory of Olympia inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin to found the modern Olympic Games in 1896, held — not by chance — in Athens. Even today, the Olympic flame of every edition is lit in the ruins of Olympia with a mirror and the rays of the sun, joining the ancient world with the contemporary one.
On the plain of Thessaly, in central Greece, rises one of the most astonishing landscapes in the country: Meteora, a forest of giant grey rock columns shooting vertically out of the ground to hundreds of metres, sculpted by millions of years of erosion. Its name means precisely 'suspended in the air', and on the summits of those inaccessible pinnacles a series of Orthodox monasteries were built from the 14th century, seeming to hang between sky and earth.
The first hermits had settled in the caves of the rocks centuries earlier, seeking isolation and contemplation. But it was in the 14th century, in times of insecurity and Ottoman threat, that the monks began to raise genuine monasteries on the summits, where they were safe from raids and bandits. At its height there were around twenty monasteries; the most important, the Great Meteoron (Metamorphosis), was founded by Saint Athanasios around 1340. For centuries the only access to many of them was by retractable rope ladders and nets hauled up with winches, carrying people and supplies dangling over the void.
Meteora became, alongside Mount Athos, one of the great centres of Greek Orthodox monasticism and of late Byzantine religious art, with churches covered in frescoes. Six of its monasteries are still inhabited today, now reachable by staircases and paths cut into the rock in the 20th century. The complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognised for both its natural and its cultural value, and it remains a place of pilgrimage and monastic life, as well as one of the most spectacular landscapes in Greece.
On the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, on a bay dominated by fortresses, Nafplio (Nauplia) is one of the most beautiful and historically rich towns in Greece. Its strategic position made it a coveted stronghold for centuries: it was Byzantine, and above all Venetian. The Republic of Venice fortified it as one of its great bases in the Aegean, crowning the rock that dominates the town with the imposing Palamidi fortress, a masterpiece of 18th-century military engineering, and garrisoning the islet of Bourtzi, in the middle of the harbour. Nafplio passed from Venetian to Ottoman hands and back through the wars between the two empires.
During the War of Independence, Nafplio was one of the first great strongholds liberated and became the political centre of the revolution. When the Greek state was born, it was chosen as the first capital of modern Greece. There, in 1828, arrived the first head of state, Ioannis Kapodistrias, a diplomat from the Ionian islands who had served at the Russian court and who tried to organise a country devastated by war. In Nafplio, in 1831, Kapodistrias was assassinated on the steps of a church in a family vendetta, a killing that plunged the young state into chaos.
It was also to Nafplio that the first king, Otto of Bavaria, imposed by the powers, came in 1833. But the capital moved to Athens barely a year later, in 1834, because of the symbolic weight of the classical city, and Nafplio was left as an elegant provincial town that kept its Venetian and neoclassical old quarter intact. Today, with its lanes, its balconies and its two fortresses looking out to sea, it is one of the most charming destinations in Greece and a place loaded with memory: here, and not in Athens, the modern Greek state took its first steps.
North of Greece stretches Macedonia, the land that gave the world Philip II and Alexander the Great. In antiquity, the Macedonians were seen by the Greeks of the south as rustic, half-barbarian relatives, but it was their kingdom that, in the 4th century BC, subdued the poleis and launched from there the conquest of Asia. At Vergina (ancient Aigai, the first Macedonian capital) the Macedonian royal tombs were discovered in 1977, among them the one many identify as that of Philip II himself, with dazzling gold grave goods that are today one of the greatest archaeological treasures in Greece.
The great city of the region is Thessaloniki, founded around 315 BC by the general Cassander, who named it after his wife, Alexander's sister. Set at a crossroads of routes between Europe and Asia, on the Roman Via Egnatia, Thessaloniki was for almost two thousand years one of the great metropolises of the Greek and Byzantine world: the 'second city' of the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople. From that period it keeps an extraordinary group of early Christian and Byzantine monuments — the basilica of Saint Demetrius (its patron saint), the Rotunda, Hagia Sophia, the walls — declared a World Heritage Site.
In 1430 Thessaloniki fell into Ottoman hands, and for almost five centuries it was a cosmopolitan city of the empire, home to Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians and above all Jews. It was in Thessaloniki that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the future founder of modern Turkey, was born in 1881. The city was incorporated into Greece in 1912, during the Balkan wars, and since then it has been the great capital of the Greek north. But its most singular and most tragic history is that of its Jewish community, which deserves to be told separately.
For more than four centuries, Thessaloniki — Salonica — was one of the great capitals of the Jewish world, so Sephardic that it came to be called the 'Mother of Israel' and the 'Jerusalem of the Balkans'. Its community formed from 1492–1493, when the Ottoman Empire took in the Jews expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs and from Portugal shortly afterwards. Those Sephardim, who spoke Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), settled in Salonica in such numbers that for centuries they were the majority of the city's population — a unique case in Europe: a great city with a Jewish majority. The port would close on Saturdays, and Ladino was one of the lingua francas of the city.
That thousand-year-old community was almost entirely wiped out in a few months. When Nazi Germany occupied Salonica in 1941, some 50,000 Jews lived there. After a period of humiliation — the 'black Saturday' of July 1942, with thousands of men subjected to forced labour; the destruction of the immense Jewish cemetery, one of the largest in Europe — in February 1943 the occupiers shut the community into ghettos. Between March and August 1943, in nineteen trains, some 46,000 to 49,000 Jews from Salonica — around 96% of the community — were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The vast majority were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival; fewer than 4% survived.
With them one of the richest Jewish cultures of the Mediterranean disappeared forever: its synagogues, its schools, its newspapers in Ladino, its music, a whole world of five centuries erased in a single summer. Salonica, which for generations had been a city with a Jewish majority, was left with practically no Jews. Today a handful of descendants, a Jewish museum and a few monuments — among them a Holocaust memorial in the centre of the city — keep alive the memory of that Sephardic community that was one of the glories of Thessaloniki and one of the greatest losses of European Jewry.