Greece's history: a state that began smaller than its nation

Who lived in the Aegean before Greek was written

The Apidima Cave in Mani holds the oldest known remains of anatomically modern humans found outside Africa, dated to 210,000 years ago. Mesolithic sites, occupied between about 13,000 and 7,000 BC, sit close to the coast, and Franchthi Cave and Theopetra were lived in almost continuously through the Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic alike.

Farming crossed from Anatolia by island-hopping through the Aegean between 7000 and 6500 BC, and the earliest known Neolithic sites in Europe with developed agricultural economies, dated 8500 to 9000 BP, are Greek. The first Greek-speaking tribes reached the mainland in the Neolithic or the early Bronze Age, around 3200 BC.

Minoan Crete, from about 3000 to about 1400 BC, was a mercantile society trading throughout the Mediterranean, and almost nothing it wrote can be read: Linear A and the Cretan hieroglyphs are undeciphered. Even the name is modern, taken from the legendary king Minos and applied after Arthur Evans began excavating Knossos in 1900. The eruption at Thera around 1628 to 1627 BC and earthquakes around 1600 BC damaged the civilisation, and in 1425 BC every Minoan palace except Knossos burned, which let the Mycenaeans expand into Crete.

Mycenaean Greece emerged around 1600 BC and adapted the Minoan script into Linear B, which records an early form of Greek and which Michael Ventris deciphered in 1952. Between about 1100 and 1050 BC the palaces collapsed, cities were sacked, and population and literacy fell. Greek tradition blamed an invasion by the Dorians. The archaeological evidence for one is scant.

How the city-states fought and lost their independence

Writing came back in the 8th century BC, borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet and modified into the Greek one. What it recorded was a country divided into many small self-governing communities, a pattern set by the terrain, in which every island, valley and plain is cut off from its neighbours by sea or by mountain. Colonists carried the arrangement outward to the Black Sea, to southern Italy and to Asia Minor, which is the first point at which the Greek world became larger than Greece.

The Persian Wars of 499 to 449 BC began with the revolt of the Ionian cities under Miletus and drew in the mainland. Darius sent a fleet across the Aegean in 490 BC and lost at Marathon; Xerxes came overland in 480 BC, was held for three days at Thermopylae, burned an evacuated Athens, and lost his fleet at Salamis. Greek land forces beat the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC.

Athens founded the Delian League in 477 BC to carry the war on, and then turned it into something else: members that had supplied ships were compelled to supply money instead, secession was punished, and the treasury was moved from Delos to Athens. Contemporaries came to call it the Athenian Empire. Its war with the Peloponnesian League ran from 431 to 404 BC and ended in the surrender of Athens. Short hegemonies followed, Spartan and then Theban, until Thebes called Philip II of Macedon in against Phocis in 346 BC and Macedon unified the city-states under its own hegemony by 337 BC.

Alexander took power in 336 BC and spent ten years conquering the Persian Empire and much of western Asia and Egypt. His death in 323 BC opened the Hellenistic period, which moved the centre of the Greek world further from Greece: Alexandria and Antioch were its capitals, and the importance of Greece proper within the Greek-speaking world declined sharply. Rome closed the political story in 146 BC.

What Rome and Constantinople did with the Greek world

Macedonia became a Roman province in 146 BC with its capital at Thessalonica, at about the time Lucius Mummius sacked Corinth, and that year conventionally starts Roman rule in Greece. Rome left local administration to the Greeks and made no attempt to abolish the traditional political patterns; the agora in Athens went on being the centre of civic life. Caracalla's Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 AD extended citizenship to every free adult man in the empire, and Greece, already integrated with Rome, was among the societies it favoured in practice.

Constantine declared Byzantium the capital in 324 and renamed the city for himself. Over the following centuries Byzantine administration and society became inseparably Greek. From the late 8th century, after two centuries of attacks by Avars, Slavs, Arabs and Bulgars and the iconoclast disputes of 726 to 842, the empire reconquered the Greek peninsula, settling Greeks from Sicily and Asia Minor into it, and by the middle of the 9th century the peninsula was Byzantine again. The twelfth century was prosperous, and Athens, Thessaloniki, Thebes and Corinth grew steadily from the 11th century until the end of the 12th.

In 1204 the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople and Greek territory fragmented into Latin holdings, among them the Principality of Achaea and the Duchy of Athens. The Latin Empire lasted 57 years and Constantinople was retaken by the Empire of Nicaea in 1261. Constantinople fell to the Ottomans on 29 May 1453.

How Greeks lived under Ottoman and Venetian rule

Greek forces held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and by the early 16th century the mainland and most of the Aegean islands were Ottoman. Venice kept a set of port cities, held Crete until 1669 and lost Cyprus in 1571; the Cyclades were vassals from the 1530s and formally annexed in 1579. The Ionian Islands were never Ottoman apart from Kefalonia.

Ottoman administration was uneven. Some cities had governors appointed by the sultan and others, Athens among them, were self-governing municipalities, while mountainous interiors and many islands stayed effectively autonomous for centuries. The millet system sorted the empire's peoples by religion, and one effect was to hold Orthodox Greeks together as a single body. On the plains, Greeks were Christians or crypto-Christians, outwardly Muslim and privately Orthodox, a position some took to avoid heavy taxation.

Two migrations followed the conquest. The intelligentsia went west, where it fed the European Renaissance, and much of the rural population left the plains for the mountains. Armed revolt was intermittent and expensive: Greeks fought at Lepanto in 1571, in the Morean War of 1684 to 1699, and in the Orlov revolt of 1770, which the Ottomans put down with great bloodshed.

The first self-governing Hellenic state since the Middle Ages was not on the mainland at all. It was the Septinsular Republic, created on the Ionian Islands in 1800 during the French Revolutionary Wars with Corfu as its capital, twenty-one years before the revolution began in the Peloponnese.

Where the modern Greek state actually began

The first revolt broke out on 6 March 1821 in the Danubian Principalities and the Ottomans put it down. On 17 March the Maniots declared war, and by October 1821 the Greeks had taken Tripolitsa. Ottoman and Egyptian forces ravaged the islands in 1822 and again in 1824, which turned western European opinion toward the Greek side. By the end of 1825 Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, bought in with the promise of territory, held most of the Peloponnese. On 20 October 1827 a combined British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian armada at Navarino.

Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Septinsular Greek who had served as Russia's foreign minister, was chosen governor by the Third National Assembly at Troezen in 1827 and built the first state institutions. The state was recognised under the London Protocol of 1830. Kapodistrias was assassinated in 1831, and at the London Conference of 1832 Britain, France and Russia installed a Bavarian prince, Otto von Wittelsbach, as king. The capital sat at Aigina from 1828 to 1829 and officially at Nafplion from 1828 to 1834, and Otto moved it to Athens in 1834.

Otto was seventeen when the powers chose him and, being a minor, the country was governed by three Bavarian regents with an army composed of Bavarians. The regency, known as the Bavarokratia, formally ended in 1835, though Bavarian influence and Otto's refusal to grant a constitution both continued, and much of the state's revenue went on servicing the loan the protecting powers had granted at independence. A nearly bloodless military coup in September 1843, the first of many military interventions in Greek politics, forced a constitution, promulgated in 1844, providing virtually universal manhood suffrage. Women were barred from voting until 1952. Otto and his prime minister Ioannis Kolettis then hollowed the document out from the inside, and Otto was driven into exile after a coup in 1862.

Why the Great Idea organised Greek politics

Kolettis coined the phrase during the debates that preceded the 1844 constitution. The Great Idea, Megáli Idéa, envisaged the restoration of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire with its capital again at Constantinople, achieved by gathering into one state every area of Greek settlement in the Middle East. Those areas were extensive: Constantinople itself, the shores of the Sea of Marmara, the coast around Smyrna, central Anatolia where much of the Greek population spoke Turkish and wrote it in the Greek alphabet, and Pontus in the north-east.

The method was military, an ambitious objective for a state with such limited resources, and also educational: the University of Athens, founded in 1837, drew students from every part of the Greek world. Greek sovereignty was meanwhile thin. Greece hoped to profit from the Crimean War of 1854 to 1856, and a British and French occupation of Piraeus enforced its neutrality instead.

How the borders moved outward

Two of those came by great-power mediation and not by Greek arms. George I, the Danish prince the powers chose after Otto's fall, arrived in 1863 with the Ionian Islands as Britain's gift, and at Berlin in 1878 the powers pressed the Ottoman government to cede Thessaly and part of Epirus, which took effect in 1881. The same settlement placed Cyprus, with its largely Greek population, under British administration while leaving it formally Ottoman.

Attempts made without that backing went badly. Theodoros Deliyannis mobilised in 1885 over a crisis concerning Bulgaria and the powers blockaded Greece. His support for the Cretan insurgents in 1897 produced defeat in the Thirty Days' War with Turkey, compensation payments and an international financial commission installed to oversee repayment of Greek external debt.

Why so many Greeks left instead

Kharilaos Trikoupis, who alternated in power with Deliyannis through the last quarter of the 19th century, argued that expansion required a modernised state first. He built roads and railways, cut the Corinth Canal and re-equipped the armed forces, and the taxes that paid for it made him easy to attack. Military spending and borrowing ended in national bankruptcy in 1893.

The population meanwhile outgrew its low-productivity farms. Density more than doubled from 41 persons per square mile in 1829 to 114 in 1912, and about one-sixth of the entire population emigrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, principally from the Peloponnese to the United States, a quarter of a million of them between 1906 and 1914. Their remittances became a serious item in the balance of payments, and Athens grew from a village of 6,000 people in 1834 to 167,000 in 1907.

What the population exchange settled and cost

Military officers staged a coup at Goudi in 1909 and called in a Cretan politician, Eleftherios Venizelos, who became prime minister in 1910, reorganised the army, took Greece into the Balkan League and led it through the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. By 1913 the country's territory and population had both doubled, with Crete, Epirus, Macedonia and the northern Aegean islands annexed.

The First World War then split it. King Constantine I wanted neutrality and Venizelos wanted the Entente, whose offer of Ottoman territory answered the Great Idea directly. The quarrel became the National Schism, and for a period Greece had two governments: a royalist one in Athens and a Venizelist one established at Thessaloniki in October 1916. The Entente ousted Constantine in June 1917, installed Venizelos and brought Greece into the war.

The reward was Smyrna. Greek troops landed there in May 1919, and the Treaty of Sèvres of August 1920 provided for a plebiscite on the region's future after five years. Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal treated the treaty as a dead letter from the outset. A Greek offensive stalled in 1921, the army was routed in August and September 1922, and Turkish forces retook Smyrna on 9 September. Between 1914 and 1923 an estimated 750,000 to 900,000 Greeks died at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, in what many scholars have termed a genocide.

At Lausanne in 1923 Greece and the new Turkish Republic agreed to exchange populations, and the criterion was religion. The counts differ by source: one gives roughly 1.5 million Orthodox Christians leaving Turkey against about 500,000 Muslims leaving Greece, while Britannica puts the total influx into Greece at some 1.3 million including refugees from Russia and Bulgaria. On either count the newcomers were more than a quarter of the country's previous population. The ecumenical patriarchate and the Greeks of Constantinople stayed, as did those of Imbros and Tenedos, and in return the Muslims of Greek Thrace stayed.

The treaty ended a Greek presence in Asia Minor of some 2,500 years, and with it the Great Idea. Most of the refugees were settled in the territories taken since 1912, and the remaining large estates were broken up into smallholdings for them.

How occupation and civil war divided the country

The Second Hellenic Republic was proclaimed in 1924 after a referendum abolished the monarchy and disestablished in 1935, when King George II returned following a rigged plebiscite. In August 1936 Ioannis Metaxas, with the king's agreement, suspended key articles of the constitution, and parliament did not reconvene for another decade.

Italy delivered an ultimatum on 28 October 1940 and Metaxas rejected it. Greek troops drove the Italians back into Albania, the first Allied victory of the war. Germany invaded in April 1941 and attacked Crete with paratroopers on 20 May; the defenders held for ten days and German losses were heavy enough that no further large-scale air invasion was attempted. Requisitioning of food produced a famine in the winter of 1941 to 1942 in which as many as 100,000 people died, and in 1943 virtually the entire Jewish population was deported to German death camps, most of them to Auschwitz.

Resistance was organised and divided from the start. The Communist Party founded the National Liberation Front, EAM, in September 1941, and its military arm ELAS became the largest resistance organisation; the smaller British-backed EDES fought it in the mountains through the winter of 1943 to 1944 while both fought the occupiers. Christina Goulter's summary of the cost is quoted in the record: between 1941 and 1945 over 8% of the Greek population died, some 2,000 villages and small towns were razed to the ground, and most of the merchant marine lay on the seabed.

The Germans withdrew in October 1944, ELAS seized Athens on 12 October and British troops entered on 14 October; fighting between the two broke out in December, and the Varkiza conference of February 1945 bought a pause. The civil war proper ran from 1946 to 1949, fought as guerrilla warfare in the northern mountains, and ended in the defeat of the Communist forces. Greece received American money through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and joined NATO on 18 February 1952, the year the constitution guaranteed women the vote. Between 1950 and 1973 the Greek economy grew by an average of 7.7% a year.

What Greece joined after the colonels fell

How the junta ended over Cyprus

A group of colonels led by Georgios Papadopoulos seized power in 1967 and suspended civil rights, which isolated Greece from European affairs and froze its approach to the European Communities. The regime abolished the monarchy in 1973, and its suppression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising that year set its own fall in motion; a second coup installed Dimitrios Ioannidis. Ioannidis backed a coup against President Makarios of Cyprus in 1974, Turkey invaded the island on 20 July 1974, and the regime collapsed.

Konstantinos Karamanlis returned from self-exile in Paris on 23 July 1974 to head an interim government, and Greek forces left NATO's integrated military structure in August in protest at the occupation of northern Cyprus. Elections were held on the first anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising, and a referendum confirmed the deposition of King Constantine II by 69% to 31. The republican constitution promulgated in 1975 runs to 120 articles and has been amended four times, most recently by the parliamentary resolution of 25 November 2019.

What the debt crisis changed

Greece rejoined the NATO military structure in 1980 and entered the European Communities on 1 January 1981. It ratified the World Heritage Convention on 17 July of the same year, and 21 Greek properties stood on the World Heritage List as of August 2026. Austerity measures aimed at the euro convergence criteria ran through the 1990s under Costas Simitis and his predecessors, and Greece joined the eurozone in 2001.

From late 2009 investors began to doubt Greece's ability to service a sharply increased government debt. Greek bonds were downgraded to junk status, and on 2 May 2010 the eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund agreed a loan of 110 billion euros conditional on austerity measures. In October 2011 eurozone leaders agreed to write off 50% of the Greek debt held by private creditors. The measures were extremely unpopular and brought demonstrations and civil unrest, and the party system reorganised around them: PASOK and New Democracy had alternated in office since 1974, and at the election of May 2012 SYRIZA became the second largest party. In 2024 the Greek economy was forecast to grow nearly 3%, approaching its size in 2009 before the crisis.

The borders inside which all of that happened have not moved since the Dodecanese were incorporated in 1947.