Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeastern Europe. It occupies the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, with a population of around 10 million. With nine regions and thousands of islands, it has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean. The Ionian Sea is west of the mainland, Albania northwest, and North Macedonia and Bulgaria north. Turkey is east both by land and the Aegean Sea. The capital, Athens, is the largest Greek city, followed by Thessaloniki and Patras.
Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilisation and the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, theatre, and the Olympic Games. The Ancient Greeks were organised into independent city-states, or poleis (singular polis), that spanned the Mediterranean and Black seas. Philip II of Macedon united most of present-day Greece in the fourth century BC, with his son Alexander the Great conquering much of the known ancient world from the Near East to northwestern India. The subsequent Hellenistic period saw the height of Greek culture and influence in antiquity. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC and became an integral part of the Roman Empire and its continuation, the Byzantine Empire, where Greek culture and language were dominant. The Greek Orthodox Church helped shape modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox world.
After the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Greece and the rest of the Byzantine empire were fragmented into several Latin and Byzantine successor polities, with most Greek lands finally coming under Ottoman control by the mid-15th century. Following a protracted war of independence in 1821, Greece emerged as a modern nation state in 1830. The Kingdom of Greece pursued territorial expansion during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and World War I (1914–1918), until its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. A short-lived republic was established in 1924 but faced civil strife and the challenge of resettling refugees from Turkey, culminating in a royalist dictatorship in 1936. Greece endured military occupation during World War II, the subsequent Greek Civil War, and prolonged political instability, leading to a military dictatorship in 1967. The country began transitioning to democracy in 1974, leading to the current parliamentary republic.
Owing to record economic growth from 1950 to 1973, Greece is a developed country with an advanced high-income economy and a high standard of living. Shipping and tourism are major economic sectors, with Greece being the ninth most-visited country in 2024. Greece is part of multiple international organisations and forums, being the tenth member to join what is today the European Union in 1981.
The country's rich historical legacy is reflected partly by its 21 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The native name of the country in Modern Greek is Ελλάδα (, pronounced [eˈlaða] ). The corresponding form in Ancient Greek and conservative formal Modern Greek (Katharevousa) is Ἑλλάς (Hellas, classical: [hel.lás], modern: [eˈlas]). This is the source of the English alternative name Hellas, which is mostly found in archaic or poetic contexts today. The Greek adjectival form ελληνικός (ellinikos, [eliniˈkos]) is sometimes also translated as Hellenic and is often rendered in this way in the formal names of Greek institutions, as in the official name of the Greek state, the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, [eliniˈci ðimokraˈti.a]).
The English names Greece and Greek are derived, via the Latin Graecia and Graecus, from the name of the Graeci (Γραικοί, Graikoí), one of the first ancient Greek tribes to settle Magna Graecia in southern Italy.
Prehistory and Aegean civilisations
The Apidima Cave in Mani, in southern Greece, has been suggested to contain the oldest remains of early modern humans outside of Africa, dated to 200,000 years ago. However others suggest the remains represent archaic humans. All three stages of the Stone Age are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe, as Greece lies on the route by which farming spread from the Near East to Europe.
Greece is home to the first advanced civilisations in Europe and is often considered the birthplace of Western civilisation. The earliest of them was the Cycladic culture which flourished on the islands of the Aegean Sea, starting around 3200 BC, and produced an abundance of folded-arm and other marble figurines. From c. 3100 BC to 1100 BC, Crete, a major cultural and economic centre, was home to the Minoan civilisation known for its colourful art, religious figurines, and monumental palaces. The Minoans wrote their undeciphered language using scripts known as Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs. On the mainland, the Mycenaean civilisation developed around 1750 BC and lasted until c. 1100 BC. The Mycenaeans possessed an advanced military and built large fortifications. They worshipped many gods and used Linear B to write the earliest attested form of Greek known as Mycenaean Greek.
The collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation ushered in the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. Poetry shaped beliefs to the Olympian gods, but ancient Greek religion had no priestly class or systematic dogmas and encompassed other currents, such as popular cults, like that of Dionysus, mysteries and magic. At this time, many kingdoms and city-states emerged across the Greek peninsula, some of which went on to establish a number of colonies in Asia Minor, the shores of the Black Sea, and southern Italy (also known as Magna Grecia). The Greek city-states reached great prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.
By 500 BC, the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia. Attempts by Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule failed, and Persia invaded the states of mainland Greece in 492 BC, but was forced to withdraw after defeat by Athens at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. In response, a number of Greek city-states formed the Hellenic League in 481 BC, led by Sparta, which was the first recorded union of Greek states since the mythical union of the Trojan War. After the death of Leonidas at the battle of Thermopylae, during the second Persian invasion of Greece, the Achaemenid navy was decisively defeated in 480 BC at Salamis by an allied Greek navy led by Themistocles, and the Achaemenid army was finally defeated at Plataea in 479 BC, marking the eventual withdrawal of the Persians from all their European territories. The Greek victories in the Greco-Persian Wars are a pivotal moment in history, as the 50 years of peace afterwards are known as the Golden Age of Athens, a seminal period that laid many foundations of Western civilisation. Lack of political unity resulted in frequent conflict between Greek states. The most devastating intra-Greek war was the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), which marked the demise of the Athenian Empire and the emergence of Spartan and later Theban hegemony. Weakened by constant wars among them during the 4th century BC, the Greek poleis were subjugated to the rising power of the Argead kingdom of Macedon under king Philip II into an alliance known as the Hellenic League.
After Philip's assassination at Aigai in 336 BC, his son Alexander became king of Macedon, established himself as leader of a Panhellenic campaign against the Persian Empire, and conquered it. Undefeated in battle, he marched to the banks of the Hydaspes, until his untimely death in 323 BC in Babylon. Alexander's empire fragmented, inaugurating the Hellenistic period. After fierce conflict amongst themselves, the generals that succeeded Alexander and their successors founded large personal kingdoms, such as that of the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Iran, Lysimachus in Thrace and Anatolia, Antigonids and Pyrrhus of Epirus in Greece. The newly founded poleis of these kingdoms, such as Alexandria and Antioch, were settled by Greeks as members of a ruling minority. As a result, during the centuries that followed a vernacular form of Greek, known as koine, and Greek culture was spread, while the Greeks adopted Eastern deities and cults. In India, the Indo-Greeks blended Greek and Buddhist religious practices and brought about an artistic renaissance that led to the creation of Greco-Buddhist art. Greek science, technology, and mathematics reached their peak during the Hellenistic period. Aspiring to maintain their autonomy and independence from the Macedonian Greek Antigonid kings and other Hellenistic kingdoms, many poleis of Greece united in koina or sympoliteiai i.e. federations, like the Aetolian and Achaean League, while after the establishment of economic relations with the East, a stratum of wealthy euergetai dominated their internal life.