The history of Greece

Greece occupies the southern tip of the Balkans and some six thousand islands in the Aegean and Ionian seas, and its recorded history is one of the longest in Europe. Bronze Age palace cultures on Crete and the mainland were followed by the city-states of classical Greece, whose politics, philosophy, drama and science shaped much of later European thought. The Greek world was then absorbed in turn by Macedon, Rome, the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, Latin crusader lords, Venice and the Ottoman Empire. A modern Greek state emerged from a war of independence in the 1820s and grew in stages to its present borders, passing through wars, occupation, civil war, dictatorship and, since 1974, a democratic republic within the European Union.

People lived in what is now Greece long before modern humans. A skull from the Apidima cave in the southern Peloponnese has been dated to more than 200,000 years ago, and the Petralona cave in Chalkidiki yielded another archaic human skull. The Franchthi cave in the Argolid was used almost continuously for some 30,000 years, and its layers show hunters and fishers sailing to the island of Melos for obsidian well before farming began.

Agriculture arrived from Anatolia around 7000 BCE as part of the Neolithic Revolution that spread across the eastern Mediterranean. Villages such as Sesklo and Dimini in Thessaly grew cereals, kept sheep and goats and made fine painted pottery. By the early third millennium BCE metalworking had spread, and in the Cyclades a distinctive island culture produced the stylised marble figurines that are its best-known legacy.

On Crete the Minoan civilisation built great palace complexes at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia and Zakros from about 1900 BCE. These were centres of storage, craft production and religious ritual, decorated with frescoes of bull-leaping, processions and sea creatures. The Minoans traded widely across the Aegean and with Egypt and the Levant, and they kept records in a script known as Linear A, which has never been deciphered. The eruption of the Thera volcano on Santorini, in the second millennium BCE, buried the town of Akrotiri under ash.

From around 1600 BCE power shifted to the mainland, where Mycenaean Greece took its name from the fortified citadel of Mycenae. Warrior elites buried in rich shaft graves ruled kingdoms centred on palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos and Thebes, and by the fifteenth century BCE they controlled Knossos as well. Their administrators wrote in Linear B, a script deciphered in 1952 as an early form of Greek, making the Mycenaeans the first Greek speakers known from written records. Around 1200 BCE the palaces were destroyed or abandoned during the wider Late Bronze Age collapse, and writing disappeared from Greece for several centuries.

The centuries after the collapse were poorer, with smaller populations and fewer long-distance contacts, although sites such as Lefkandi on Euboea show that wealth and trade never disappeared entirely. During this time Greek speakers settled the western coast of Asia Minor and many islands. In the eighth century BCE Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, adding letters for vowels, and the epics attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, took shape as written poems recalling a heroic past.

The Archaic period, from about 800 to 480 BCE, saw the rise of the polis, the independent city-state with its own citizens, laws and gods. The poleis shared a language, religion and festivals, including the games at Olympia traditionally dated to 776 BCE and the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, but they were fiercely independent and often at war with one another. Population growth and trade drove a great wave of colonisation from about 750 BCE, planting Greek cities around the Black Sea, in Sicily and southern Italy, and as far west as Marseille. Many cities passed through periods of rule by tyrants. In Sparta a small citizen body of full-time soldiers dominated a large population of enslaved helots, while in Athens the reforms of Solon around 594 BCE and of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE laid the foundations of democracy. The first Greek philosophers, such as Thales of Miletus, began seeking natural explanations for the world in the cities of Ionia.

The classical age of ancient Greece opened with conflict against the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which ruled the Greek cities of Ionia. After an Ionian revolt that Athens had supported, a Persian expedition was defeated at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. Ten years later Xerxes led a far larger invasion. A Spartan-led force held the pass of Thermopylae for several days before being overwhelmed, but the Greek fleet won at Salamis in 480 BCE and a combined army won at Plataea in 479 BCE, ending the Greco-Persian Wars on the mainland.

Athens then led the Delian League, an alliance against Persia that gradually became an Athenian empire. Tribute from the allies helped pay for the Parthenon and the other buildings of the Acropolis, and under Pericles Athenian democracy reached its fullest form, with male citizens voting directly in the assembly and serving on juries chosen by lot. Women, slaves and resident foreigners were excluded. The city was home to the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides.

Rivalry between Athens and Sparta led to the Peloponnesian War from 431 to 404 BCE. Plague struck Athens early in the war, killing Pericles, and a disastrous expedition to Sicily in 415 to 413 BCE cost the city much of its fleet. With Persian money, Sparta built a navy and forced Athens to surrender. Five years later, in 399 BCE, the restored democracy put Socrates to death. His pupil Plato founded the Academy, and Plato's student Aristotle later founded the Lyceum, making Athens the centre of ancient Greek philosophy. Spartan dominance proved brief: Thebes defeated Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BCE, but no single city could hold the leadership for long.

Macedon, a kingdom on the northern edge of the Greek world, was transformed by Philip II, who reorganised its army around the long-speared phalanx. His victory over Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BCE made him master of Greece. After his assassination in 336 BCE his son Alexander the Great led Macedonian and Greek forces into Asia, destroyed the Persian Empire and marched as far as the Indus, creating the Macedonian Empire. He founded many cities, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt.

Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE, and his generals divided his conquests. The Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled Egypt, the Seleucid Empire held much of western Asia, and the Antigonid dynasty ruled Macedon and dominated the Greek mainland, where leagues of cities such as the Achaean and Aetolian leagues tried to keep their independence. In the Hellenistic period Greek became the common language of government and culture from Egypt to Afghanistan. Athens remained a centre of learning, where Epicurus and Zeno of Citium founded new schools of philosophy, while Alexandria's library and scholars such as Euclid made it the leading centre of science.

The Roman Republic was drawn into Greek affairs from the late third century BCE. Rome defeated Macedon at Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE and at Pydna in 168 BCE, abolished the Macedonian monarchy and made Macedonia a province in 146 BCE. In the same year a Roman army crushed the Achaean League and razed Corinth. Athens, which sided with Mithridates of Pontus, was sacked by Sulla in 86 BCE, and Greece was a battleground in Rome's civil wars, ending with Octavian's victory at Actium off the western coast in 31 BCE.

Under the Roman Empire southern Greece became the province of Achaea. Greece was politically subordinate but culturally prestigious: Roman elites studied in Athens, and emperors such as Hadrian lavished buildings on the city. The apostle Paul preached in Thessalonica, Corinth and Athens in the first century CE, and Christianity spread through the Greek-speaking cities. Invasions brought new insecurity: the Heruli sacked Athens in 267 CE, and Goths raided the peninsula in the late fourth century.

In 330 Constantine I dedicated a new capital at Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, today's Istanbul. As the western half of the empire fell, the eastern half survived as what historians call the Byzantine Empire, a Christian, Greek-speaking state whose people still called themselves Romans. Pagan practice was suppressed: the Olympic Games ended in the late fourth century, and in 529 Justinian I barred pagans from teaching, a measure usually linked to the end of the Platonic school in Athens.

From the late sixth century Avars and Slavs raided and settled across much of the Balkan peninsula, and imperial control over inland Greece shrank to fortified towns and the coasts. Over the ninth and tenth centuries Byzantine authority was restored, the Slavic settlers were gradually converted and Hellenised, and new provinces called themes were organised. Arab raiders captured Crete in the 820s, and the island was retaken only in 961. Under emperors such as Basil II, who destroyed the Bulgarian state in the early eleventh century, the empire reached a new height. Thessaloniki, its second city, flourished on trade and was famed for its churches, and the monasteries of Mount Athos were founded in this period.

The empire weakened in the late eleventh century under pressure from the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia and Norman attacks from Italy. Venice gained wide trading privileges in return for naval help. In 1204 the Crusades turned against Byzantium itself, when the army of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople.

The conquerors divided Greek lands among themselves. Frankish lords founded the Principality of Achaea in the Peloponnese and the Duchy of Athens, while the Republic of Venice took Crete, many Aegean islands and key ports. Greek successor states survived in Epirus, at Nicaea in Anatolia and at Trebizond. Nicaea recovered Constantinople in 1261, and Byzantine rule returned to much of the Peloponnese, where the city of Mystras became a late centre of Byzantine learning, but the restored empire was small and weak.

The Ottoman Empire expanded into the Balkans from the mid-fourteenth century. Thessaloniki fell in 1430, and in 1453 Mehmed II took Constantinople in the Fall of Constantinople. Athens followed in 1456 and Mystras in 1460. Venice held on to Crete until 1669 and the Ionian islands until 1797, so that parts of the Greek world experienced Italian rather than Ottoman rule. In 1687, during a Venetian campaign, a shell ignited the Ottoman gunpowder store in the Parthenon and blew out much of the building.

Under the Ottomans Orthodox Christians formed a community whose leader, the Patriarch of Constantinople, answered to the sultan for his flock. Christians paid heavier taxes than Muslims, and in some periods boys were taken from Christian families in the devshirme levy to serve the state. At the same time Greek merchants, ship-owners and the Phanariot families of Constantinople grew wealthy and influential, serving as interpreters and as governors of the Danubian principalities. Greek communities abroad, from Vienna to Odessa, spread the ideas of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution, and the writer Rigas Feraios called for a Balkan rising before his execution in 1798.

In 1814 Greek merchants in Odessa founded the Filiki Eteria, a secret society aiming at revolt. The uprising began in the Danubian principalities and the Peloponnese in March 1821, and 25 March is celebrated as Independence Day. The war was brutal on both sides: Greek rebels massacred Muslim inhabitants of Tripolitsa in 1821, and Ottoman forces killed or enslaved much of the population of Chios in 1822. Volunteers came from across Europe, among them the poet Lord Byron, who died at Missolonghi in 1824.

By 1825 an Egyptian army sent by Muhammad Ali was reconquering the Peloponnese. Britain, France and Russia then intervened, and their combined fleet destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian navies at Navarino in 1827. The London Protocol of 1830 recognised an independent Greek state, though it included only the Peloponnese, central Greece and some islands, with fewer than a million people. Its first head of state, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was assassinated in 1831, and the powers installed a Bavarian prince, Otto, as king in 1832. Athens became the capital in 1834.

The new state was poor and largely rural, and most Greeks still lived outside it. A military revolt in 1843 forced Otto to grant a constitution, and he was deposed in 1862 and replaced by a Danish prince who reigned as George I. Britain handed over the Ionian Islands in 1864, and Thessaly and part of Epirus were added in 1881. National politics were dominated by the Megali Idea, the Great Idea of uniting all Greeks in one state with Constantinople as its capital. A short war with the Ottomans in 1897 ended in defeat.

Under the Cretan-born statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, prime minister from 1910, Greece modernised its army and administration. In the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 it took Thessaloniki, southern Epirus, much of Macedonia, Crete and many of the eastern Aegean islands, nearly doubling its territory. During the First World War Venizelos wanted to join the Allies while King Constantine I favoured neutrality, a quarrel known as the National Schism that split the country into rival governments. Greece finally entered the war on the Allied side in 1917.

The postwar settlement awarded Greece eastern Thrace and the administration of Smyrna on the Anatolian coast. In 1919 Greek troops landed at Smyrna and advanced deep into Anatolia, but Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk drove them back in 1922. Smyrna was burned and many thousands of its Christian inhabitants were killed, and much of the Orthodox population of Anatolia fled. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 fixed the border with Turkey and confirmed a compulsory population exchange in which more than a million Orthodox Christians from Turkey and around 400,000 Muslims from Greece were uprooted. The refugees transformed Greek society, swelling Athens and Thessaloniki and settling the north.

The interwar years were unstable. A republic was proclaimed in 1924, coups and counter-coups followed, and the monarchy was restored in 1935. On 4 August 1936 General Ioannis Metaxas established a dictatorship with the king's backing, banning parties and persecuting communists.

On 28 October 1940 Metaxas rejected an Italian ultimatum from Benito Mussolini, a refusal still commemorated as Ochi Day, and the Greek army pushed the invading Italians back into Albania. In April 1941 Nazi Germany invaded and overran the country, and Crete fell after an airborne assault in May. Greece was divided between German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation. Requisitions and a blockade caused a famine in the winter of 1941 to 1942 that killed tens of thousands in Athens alone. Reprisals against civilians destroyed whole villages. In the Holocaust most of the Jews of Greece were murdered; the large Sephardic community of Thessaloniki, around 50,000 people, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

Resistance grew strong, above all the communist-led EAM and its army ELAS, alongside smaller non-communist groups. After liberation in October 1944, fighting broke out in Athens in December between ELAS and British and government forces. A full civil war followed from 1946 to 1949 between the government, supported first by Britain and then by the United States under the Truman Doctrine, and the communist Democratic Army. The government won in 1949, but the war left tens of thousands dead, many thousands of children removed across the northern borders and a bitter division in society that lasted for decades. Italy ceded the Dodecanese islands to Greece in 1947.

In the Cold War Greece joined NATO in 1952, and with American aid it grew rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s, while large numbers of Greeks emigrated to Germany, Australia and the Americas. Politics remained tense, with leftists under surveillance and a monarchy that intervened in government. On 21 April 1967 a group of colonels led by Georgios Papadopoulos seized power. The junta imprisoned and tortured opponents, and King Constantine II went into exile after a failed counter-coup. In November 1973 a student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic was crushed by tanks. The regime collapsed in July 1974 after it backed a coup in Cyprus, which was followed by a Turkish invasion and the island's division.

Konstantinos Karamanlis returned from exile to lead a civilian government. A referendum in December 1974 abolished the monarchy, and a republican constitution followed in 1975. Greece joined the European Economic Community in 1981, the same year Andreas Papandreou's socialist PASOK won power. PASOK and the conservative New Democracy alternated in government for the next three decades. Greece adopted the euro in 2001 and hosted the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. Relations with Turkey remained strained over the Aegean and Cyprus, and a long dispute with its northern neighbour over the name Macedonia was settled by the Prespa Agreement of 2018, under which the country became North Macedonia.

The global financial crisis exposed Greece's high public debt and deficits, and from 2010 the country received three bailouts from eurozone governments and the International Monetary Fund in return for deep spending cuts, tax rises and reforms. The economy shrank by roughly a quarter, unemployment rose above a quarter of the workforce and there were large protests. The left-wing SYRIZA under Alexis Tsipras won power in 2015 and called a referendum in which voters rejected the creditors' terms, but the government then accepted a third bailout. In the same year hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, many fleeing the Syrian civil war, crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands. The bailout programmes ended in 2018.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis of New Democracy became prime minister in 2019 and won a further term in 2023. Katerina Sakellaropoulou became the first woman to serve as president in 2020. In February 2023 a head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train at Tempi in Thessaly killed 57 people, setting off waves of protest over rail safety and the official investigation that continued into 2025. In 2024 Greece became the first Orthodox Christian majority country to legalise same-sex civil marriage, and in 2025 Konstantinos Tasoulas was sworn in as president. The economy returned to growth after the crisis years, and Greece has repaid some of its bailout loans ahead of schedule.